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May 20

PLUME: Latent Reasoning Based Universal Multimodal Embedding

Universal multimodal embedding (UME) maps heterogeneous inputs into a shared retrieval space with a single model. Recent approaches improve UME by generating explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) rationales before extracting embeddings, enabling multimodal large language models to better infer complex query intent. However, explicit CoT incurs substantial inference overhead and can compress rich multimodal evidence into a narrow textual bottleneck. We propose PLUME, a latent reasoning framework that advances UME by replacing verbalized CoT with a short autoregressive rollout of continuous latent states. To support diverse multimodal queries, PLUME further introduces a semantic-anchor-guided transition adapter that steers latent rollout along different reasoning trajectories under the same fixed computation budget. To stabilize training, PLUME adopts a progressive explicit-to-latent curriculum that uses verbalized reasoning only as a temporary training scaffold and gradually transfers this behavior into hidden-state computation, eliminating explicit CoT at inference. On the 78-task MMEB-v2 benchmark, PLUME outperforms strong explicit-CoT UME baselines while reducing reasoning from hundreds of generated tokens to fewer than 10 latent steps, delivering over 30x faster inference. PLUME is especially well suited to retrieval settings where relevant evidence is dense, structurally complex, and difficult to organize through verbalized intermediate rationales, such as video and visual document retrieval. These results show that structured latent computation can preserve the benefits of intermediate reasoning without the overhead of explicit rationale generation, providing a stronger and more efficient paradigm for practical retrieval systems.

Bottlenecked Transformers: Periodic KV Cache Consolidation for Generalised Reasoning

Transformer LLMs have been shown to exhibit strong reasoning ability that scales with inference-time compute, most prominently through token-space "thinking" chains of thought. A growing line of work pushes extra computation into the model's latent space, which we term Auxiliary Latent-Space Computation (ALSC). Existing ALSC methods largely fall into three buckets: (i) token-mediated latent rollouts, (ii) residual/activation steering, and (iii) memory (KV) compression. An underexplored alternative is memory consolidation/reconsolidation, two processes in the brain that are responsible for stabilising newly formed memory traces, and, upon recall, transiently rendering established traces plastic such they can integrate new contextual information before restabilising. In Transformer LLMs, this can be seen as analogous to performing in-place rewrites of new KV segments, and rewrites of recalled past segments. In this work, we give a theoretical justification as to why memory (re)consolidation via KV cache rewrites is beneficial for improved reasoning. We do this through the lens of Information Bottleneck (IB) theory, which posits that model generalisation emerges from an optimal balance between input information compression and retention of predictive information in latent representations. We then introduce the Bottlenecked Transformer, which augments a backbone LLM with a Cache Processor, an auxiliary Transformer that performs periodic, non-causal, in-place KV rewrites at newline-delimited reasoning step boundaries. The Processor consolidates recently written KV entries and reconsolidates a small, top-k attention-selected set of prior entries. We evaluate our Bottlenecked Transformer architecture on math reasoning benchmarks. Our model sees consistent performance gains over vanilla Transformers and pause-token augmented baselines, with gains of up to +6.6pp for selected tasks/backbones.

  • 4 authors
·
May 22, 2025

GIRL: Generative Imagination Reinforcement Learning via Information-Theoretic Hallucination Control

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) improves sample efficiency by optimizing policies inside imagined rollouts, but long-horizon planning degrades when model errors compound and imagined trajectories drift off the training manifold. We introduce GIRL (Generative Imagination Reinforcement Learning), a latent world-model framework that addresses this failure mode with two key components. First, a cross-modal grounding signal derived from a frozen foundation model (DINOv2) anchors the latent transition prior to a semantically consistent embedding space, penalizing inconsistent or implausible predictions. Second, an uncertainty-adaptive trust-region bottleneck interprets the KL regularizer as the Lagrange multiplier of a constrained optimization problem, restricting imagination drift within a learned region calibrated by Expected Information Gain and a Relative Performance Loss signal. We re-derive a value-gap bound using the Performance Difference Lemma and Integral Probability Metrics, yielding a bound that remains informative as the discount factor approaches one and connects the objective to real-environment regret. Experiments across three benchmark suites, including DeepMind Control, Adroit Hand Manipulation, and Meta-World with visual distractors, show that GIRL reduces latent rollout drift by 38 to 61 percent across tasks relative to DreamerV3, improves asymptotic return, and requires fewer environment interactions on long-horizon tasks. GIRL also outperforms TD-MPC2 on sparse-reward and high-contact settings under standard evaluation metrics. A distilled-prior variant reduces inference overhead and improves computational efficiency relative to the full model.

  • 1 authors
·
Apr 7

Sword: Style-Robust World Models as Simulators via Dynamic Latent Bootstrapping for VLA Policy Post-Training

The integration of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models with World Models has gained increasing attention. One representative approach treats learned World Models as generative simulators, enabling policy optimization entirely within "imagination." However, when deployed as simulators for specific environments such as the LIBERO benchmark, existing World Models often suffer from poor generalization and long-horizon error accumulation. During closed-loop rollouts, these models are highly sensitive to initial-state perturbations; minor changes in color, illumination, and other visual factors can trigger cascading hallucinations, leading to severe blurriness or overexposure. Moreover, long-horizon error accumulation further degrades the quality and fidelity of predicted future states. These issues limit the reliability of World Models as simulators. To mitigate these problems, we propose Sword, a robust World Model framework. Our method introduces Structure-Guided Style Augmentation to disentangle the visual textures of interactive environments from task-relevant dynamics, thereby improving generalization. We further propose Dynamic Latent Bootstrapping, which maintains consistency between training and inference while keeping memory consumption low. Extensive experiments on the LIBERO benchmark show that our method significantly outperforms the baseline WoVR in terms of generalization, generation quality, robustness, fidelity, and the success rate of reinforcement-learning post-training for VLA models.

  • 8 authors
·
May 7

Being-H0.7: A Latent World-Action Model from Egocentric Videos

Visual-Language-Action models (VLAs) have advanced generalist robot control by mapping multimodal observations and language instructions directly to actions, but sparse action supervision often encourages shortcut mappings rather than representations of dynamics, contact, and task progress. Recent world-action models introduce future prediction through video rollouts, yet pixel-space prediction is a costly and indirect substrate for control, as it may model visual details irrelevant to action generation and introduces substantial training or inference overhead. We present Being-H0.7, a latent world-action model that brings future-aware reasoning into VLA-style policies without generating future frames. Being-H0.7 inserts learnable latent queries between perception and action as a compact reasoning interface, and trains them with a future-informed dual-branch design: a deployable prior branch infers latent states from the current context, while a training-only posterior branch replaces the queries with embeddings from future observations. Jointly aligning the two branches at the latent reasoning space leads the prior branch to reason future-aware, action-useful structure from current observations alone. At inference, Being-H0.7 discards the posterior branch and performs no visual rollout. Experiments across six simulation benchmarks and diverse real-world tasks show that Being-H0.7 achieves state-of-the-art or comparable performance, combining the predictive benefits of world models with the efficiency and deployability of direct VLA policies.

  • 9 authors
·
Apr 29

PRISM: Streaming Human Motion Generation with Per-Joint Latent Decomposition

Text-to-motion generation has advanced rapidly, yet two challenges persist. First, existing motion autoencoders compress each frame into a single monolithic latent vector, entangling trajectory and per-joint rotations in an unstructured representation that downstream generators struggle to model faithfully. Second, text-to-motion, pose-conditioned generation, and long-horizon sequential synthesis typically require separate models or task-specific mechanisms, with autoregressive approaches suffering from severe error accumulation over extended rollouts. We present PRISM, addressing each challenge with a dedicated contribution. (1) A joint-factorized motion latent space: each body joint occupies its own token, forming a structured 2D grid (time joints) compressed by a causal VAE with forward-kinematics supervision. This simple change to the latent space -- without modifying the generator -- substantially improves generation quality, revealing that latent space design has been an underestimated bottleneck. (2) Noise-free condition injection: each latent token carries its own timestep embedding, allowing conditioning frames to be injected as clean tokens (timestep0) while the remaining tokens are denoised. This unifies text-to-motion and pose-conditioned generation in a single model, and directly enables autoregressive segment chaining for streaming synthesis. Self-forcing training further suppresses drift in long rollouts. With these two components, we train a single motion generation foundation model that seamlessly handles text-to-motion, pose-conditioned generation, autoregressive sequential generation, and narrative motion composition, achieving state-of-the-art on HumanML3D, MotionHub, BABEL, and a 50-scenario user study.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 9

Latent-Space Contrastive Reinforcement Learning for Stable and Efficient LLM Reasoning

While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional performance in surface-level text generation, their nature in handling complex multi-step reasoning tasks often remains one of ``statistical fitting'' rather than systematic logical deduction. Traditional Reinforcement Learning (RL) attempts to mitigate this by introducing a ``think-before-speak'' paradigm. However, applying RL directly in high-dimensional, discrete token spaces faces three inherent challenges: sample-inefficient rollouts, high gradient estimation variance, and the risk of catastrophic forgetting. To fundamentally address these structural bottlenecks, we propose DeepLatent Reasoning (DLR), a latent-space bidirectional contrastive reinforcement learning framework. This framework shifts the trial-and-error cost from expensive token-level full sequence generation to the continuous latent manifold. Specifically, we introduce a lightweight assistant model to efficiently sample K reasoning chain encodings within the latent space. These encodings are filtered via a dual reward mechanism based on correctness and formatting; only high-value latent trajectories are fed into a frozen main model for single-pass decoding. To maximize reasoning diversity while maintaining coherence, we design a contrastive learning objective to enable directed exploration within the latent space. Since the main model parameters remain frozen during optimization, this method mathematically eliminates catastrophic forgetting. Experiments demonstrate that under comparable GPU computational budgets, DLR achieves more stable training convergence, supports longer-horizon reasoning chains, and facilitates the sustainable accumulation of reasoning capabilities, providing a viable path toward reliable and scalable reinforcement learning for LLMs.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 23

Latent-GRPO: Group Relative Policy Optimization for Latent Reasoning

Latent reasoning offers a more efficient alternative to explicit reasoning by compressing intermediate reasoning into continuous representations and substantially shortening reasoning chains. However, existing latent reasoning methods mainly focus on supervised learning, and reinforcement learning in latent space remains highly unstable. We study this problem through the lens of Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), and show that directly adapting GRPO to latent reasoning is fundamentally non-trivial: latent reasoning changes both the probability density and the sampling mechanism, causing three coupled bottlenecks: absence of intrinsic latent manifolds, where unconstrained exploration pushes rollouts off the valid latent manifold; exploration-optimization misalignment, where trajectory-level rewards can induce incorrect token-level updates; and latent mixture non-closure, where jointly reinforcing multiple correct latent paths can produce an invalid averaged state. To address them, we propose Latent-GRPO, which combines invalid-sample advantage masking, one-sided noise sampling, and optimal correct-path first-token selection. Across four low-difficulty benchmarks (e.g., GSM8K-Aug) and four high-difficulty benchmarks (e.g., AIME), Latent-GRPO improves over its latent initialization by 7.86 Pass@1 points on low-difficulty tasks and surpasses explicit GRPO by 4.27 points on high-difficulty tasks while using 3--4times shorter reasoning chains. It also achieves stronger pass@k performance under Gumbel sampling. These results establish Latent-GRPO as an effective approach for stable and efficient latent reasoning.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 29

ThinkJEPA: Empowering Latent World Models with Large Vision-Language Reasoning Model

Recent progress in latent world models (e.g., V-JEPA2) has shown promising capability in forecasting future world states from video observations. Nevertheless, dense prediction from a short observation window limits temporal context and can bias predictors toward local, low-level extrapolation, making it difficult to capture long-horizon semantics and reducing downstream utility. Vision--language models (VLMs), in contrast, provide strong semantic grounding and general knowledge by reasoning over uniformly sampled frames, but they are not ideal as standalone dense predictors due to compute-driven sparse sampling, a language-output bottleneck that compresses fine-grained interaction states into text-oriented representations, and a data-regime mismatch when adapting to small action-conditioned datasets. We propose a VLM-guided JEPA-style latent world modeling framework that combines dense-frame dynamics modeling with long-horizon semantic guidance via a dual-temporal pathway: a dense JEPA branch for fine-grained motion and interaction cues, and a uniformly sampled VLM thinker branch with a larger temporal stride for knowledge-rich guidance. To transfer the VLM's progressive reasoning signals effectively, we introduce a hierarchical pyramid representation extraction module that aggregates multi-layer VLM representations into guidance features compatible with latent prediction. Experiments on hand-manipulation trajectory prediction show that our method outperforms both a strong VLM-only baseline and a JEPA-predictor baseline, and yields more robust long-horizon rollout behavior.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 23 2

DriveWorld-VLA: Unified Latent-Space World Modeling with Vision-Language-Action for Autonomous Driving

End-to-end (E2E) autonomous driving has recently attracted increasing interest in unifying Vision-Language-Action (VLA) with World Models to enhance decision-making and forward-looking imagination. However, existing methods fail to effectively unify future scene evolution and action planning within a single architecture due to inadequate sharing of latent states, limiting the impact of visual imagination on action decisions. To address this limitation, we propose DriveWorld-VLA, a novel framework that unifies world modeling and planning within a latent space by tightly integrating VLA and world models at the representation level, which enables the VLA planner to benefit directly from holistic scene-evolution modeling and reducing reliance on dense annotated supervision. Additionally, DriveWorld-VLA incorporates the latent states of the world model as core decision-making states for the VLA planner, facilitating the planner to assess how candidate actions impact future scene evolution. By conducting world modeling entirely in the latent space, DriveWorld-VLA supports controllable, action-conditioned imagination at the feature level, avoiding expensive pixel-level rollouts. Extensive open-loop and closed-loop evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of DriveWorld-VLA, which achieves state-of-the-art performance with 91.3 PDMS on NAVSIMv1, 86.8 EPDMS on NAVSIMv2, and 0.16 3-second average collision rate on nuScenes. Code and models will be released in https://github.com/liulin815/DriveWorld-VLA.git.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 5

Infinity-RoPE: Action-Controllable Infinite Video Generation Emerges From Autoregressive Self-Rollout

Current autoregressive video diffusion models are constrained by three core bottlenecks: (i) the finite temporal horizon imposed by the base model's 3D Rotary Positional Embedding (3D-RoPE), (ii) slow prompt responsiveness in maintaining fine-grained action control during long-form rollouts, and (iii) the inability to realize discontinuous cinematic transitions within a single generation stream. We introduce infty-RoPE, a unified inference-time framework that addresses all three limitations through three interconnected components: Block-Relativistic RoPE, KV Flush, and RoPE Cut. Block-Relativistic RoPE reformulates temporal encoding as a moving local reference frame, where each newly generated latent block is rotated relative to the base model's maximum frame horizon while earlier blocks are rotated backward to preserve relative temporal geometry. This relativistic formulation eliminates fixed temporal positions, enabling continuous video generation far beyond the base positional limits. To obtain fine-grained action control without re-encoding, KV Flush renews the KV cache by retaining only two latent frames, the global sink and the last generated latent frame, thereby ensuring immediate prompt responsiveness. Finally, RoPE Cut introduces controlled discontinuities in temporal RoPE coordinates, enabling multi-cut scene transitions within a single continuous rollout. Together, these components establish infty-RoPE as a training-free foundation for infinite-horizon, controllable, and cinematic video diffusion. Comprehensive experiments show that infty-RoPE consistently surpasses previous autoregressive models in overall VBench scores.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 25, 2025 2

Generate, Filter, Control, Replay: A Comprehensive Survey of Rollout Strategies for LLM Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a central post-training tool for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). In these systems, the rollout, the trajectory sampled from a prompt to termination, including intermediate reasoning steps and optional tool or environment interactions, determines the data the optimizer learns from, yet rollout design is often underreported. This survey provides an optimizer-agnostic view of rollout strategies for RL-based post-training of reasoning LLMs. We formalize rollout pipelines with unified notation and introduce Generate-Filter-Control-Replay (GFCR), a lifecycle taxonomy that decomposes rollout pipelines into four modular stages: Generate proposes candidate trajectories and topologies; Filter constructs intermediate signals via verifiers, judges, critics; Control allocates compute and makes continuation/branching/stopping decisions under budgets; and Replay retains and reuses artifacts across rollouts without weight updates, including self-evolving curricula that autonomously generate new training tasks. We complement GFCR with a criterion taxonomy of reliability, coverage, and cost sensitivity that characterizes rollout trade-offs. Using this framework, we synthesize methods spanning RL with verifiable rewards, process supervision, judge-based gating, guided and tree/segment rollouts, adaptive compute allocation, early-exit and partial rollouts, throughput optimization, and replay/recomposition for self-improvement. We ground the framework with case studies in math, code/SQL, multimodal reasoning, tool-using agents, and agentic skill benchmarks that evaluate skill induction, reuse, and cross-task transfer. Finally, we provide a diagnostic index that maps common rollout pathologies to GFCR modules and mitigation levers, alongside open challenges for building reproducible, compute-efficient, and trustworthy rollout pipelines.

McAuley-Lab McAuley-Lab
·
Apr 7 3

ECHO: Entropy-Confidence Hybrid Optimization for Test-Time Reinforcement Learning

Test-time reinforcement learning generates multiple candidate answers via repeated rollouts and performs online updates using pseudo-labels constructed by majority voting. To reduce overhead and improve exploration, prior work introduces tree structured rollouts, which share reasoning prefixes and branch at key nodes to improve sampling efficiency. However, this paradigm still faces two challenges: (1) high entropy branching can trigger rollout collapse, where the branching budget concentrates on a few trajectories with consecutive high-entropy segments, rapidly reducing the number of effective branches; (2) early pseudo-labels are noisy and biased, which can induce self-reinforcing overfitting, causing the policy to sharpen prematurely and suppress exploration. To address these issues, we propose Entropy Confidence Hybrid Group Relative Policy Optimization (ECHO). During rollout, ECHO jointly leverages local entropy and group level confidence to adaptively control branch width, and further introduces online confidence-based pruning to terminate persistently low confidence branches, avoiding high entropy traps and mitigating collapse. During policy updates, ECHO employs confidence adaptive clipping and an entropy confidence hybrid advantage shaping approach to enhance training robustness and mitigate early stage bias. Experiments demonstrate that ECHO achieves consistent gains on multiple mathematical and visual reasoning benchmarks, and generalizes more effectively under a limited rollout budget.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 1

Improved Training Technique for Latent Consistency Models

Consistency models are a new family of generative models capable of producing high-quality samples in either a single step or multiple steps. Recently, consistency models have demonstrated impressive performance, achieving results on par with diffusion models in the pixel space. However, the success of scaling consistency training to large-scale datasets, particularly for text-to-image and video generation tasks, is determined by performance in the latent space. In this work, we analyze the statistical differences between pixel and latent spaces, discovering that latent data often contains highly impulsive outliers, which significantly degrade the performance of iCT in the latent space. To address this, we replace Pseudo-Huber losses with Cauchy losses, effectively mitigating the impact of outliers. Additionally, we introduce a diffusion loss at early timesteps and employ optimal transport (OT) coupling to further enhance performance. Lastly, we introduce the adaptive scaling-c scheduler to manage the robust training process and adopt Non-scaling LayerNorm in the architecture to better capture the statistics of the features and reduce outlier impact. With these strategies, we successfully train latent consistency models capable of high-quality sampling with one or two steps, significantly narrowing the performance gap between latent consistency and diffusion models. The implementation is released here: https://github.com/quandao10/sLCT/

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 3, 2025 2

Scaling Test-Time Compute for Agentic Coding

Test-time scaling has become a powerful way to improve large language models. However, existing methods are best suited to short, bounded outputs that can be directly compared, ranked or refined. Long-horizon coding agents violate this premise: each attempt produces an extended trajectory of actions, observations, errors, and partial progress taken by the agent. In this setting, the main challenge is no longer generating more attempts, but representing prior experience in a form that can be effectively selected from and reused. We propose a test-time scaling framework for agentic coding based on compact representations of rollout trajectories. Our framework converts each rollout into a structured summary that preserves its salient hypotheses, progress, and failure modes while discarding low-signal trace details. This representation enables two complementary forms of inference-time scaling. For parallel scaling, we introduce Recursive Tournament Voting (RTV), which recursively narrows a population of rollout summaries through small-group comparisons. For sequential scaling, we adapt Parallel-Distill-Refine (PDR) to the agentic setting by conditioning new rollouts on summaries distilled from prior attempts. Our method consistently improves the performance of frontier coding agents across SWE-Bench Verified and Terminal-Bench v2.0. For example, by using our method Claude-4.5-Opus improves from 70.9% to 77.6% on SWE-Bench Verified (mini-SWE-agent) and 46.9% to 59.1% on Terminal-Bench v2.0 (Terminus 1). Our results suggest that test-time scaling for long-horizon agents is fundamentally a problem of representation, selection, and reuse.

facebook AI at Meta
·
Apr 15 2

TD-JEPA: Latent-predictive Representations for Zero-Shot Reinforcement Learning

Latent prediction--where agents learn by predicting their own latents--has emerged as a powerful paradigm for training general representations in machine learning. In reinforcement learning (RL), this approach has been explored to define auxiliary losses for a variety of settings, including reward-based and unsupervised RL, behavior cloning, and world modeling. While existing methods are typically limited to single-task learning, one-step prediction, or on-policy trajectory data, we show that temporal difference (TD) learning enables learning representations predictive of long-term latent dynamics across multiple policies from offline, reward-free transitions. Building on this, we introduce TD-JEPA, which leverages TD-based latent-predictive representations into unsupervised RL. TD-JEPA trains explicit state and task encoders, a policy-conditioned multi-step predictor, and a set of parameterized policies directly in latent space. This enables zero-shot optimization of any reward function at test time. Theoretically, we show that an idealized variant of TD-JEPA avoids collapse with proper initialization, and learns encoders that capture a low-rank factorization of long-term policy dynamics, while the predictor recovers their successor features in latent space. Empirically, TD-JEPA matches or outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on locomotion, navigation, and manipulation tasks across 13 datasets in ExoRL and OGBench, especially in the challenging setting of zero-shot RL from pixels.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 1, 2025

Vista: A Generalizable Driving World Model with High Fidelity and Versatile Controllability

World models can foresee the outcomes of different actions, which is of paramount importance for autonomous driving. Nevertheless, existing driving world models still have limitations in generalization to unseen environments, prediction fidelity of critical details, and action controllability for flexible application. In this paper, we present Vista, a generalizable driving world model with high fidelity and versatile controllability. Based on a systematic diagnosis of existing methods, we introduce several key ingredients to address these limitations. To accurately predict real-world dynamics at high resolution, we propose two novel losses to promote the learning of moving instances and structural information. We also devise an effective latent replacement approach to inject historical frames as priors for coherent long-horizon rollouts. For action controllability, we incorporate a versatile set of controls from high-level intentions (command, goal point) to low-level maneuvers (trajectory, angle, and speed) through an efficient learning strategy. After large-scale training, the capabilities of Vista can seamlessly generalize to different scenarios. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets show that Vista outperforms the most advanced general-purpose video generator in over 70% of comparisons and surpasses the best-performing driving world model by 55% in FID and 27% in FVD. Moreover, for the first time, we utilize the capacity of Vista itself to establish a generalizable reward for real-world action evaluation without accessing the ground truth actions.

  • 8 authors
·
May 27, 2024 1

StAR: Segment Anything Reasoner

As AI systems are being integrated more rapidly into diverse and complex real-world environments, the ability to perform holistic reasoning over an implicit query and an image to localize a target is becoming increasingly important. However, recent reasoning segmentation methods fail to sufficiently elicit the visual reasoning capabilities of the base mode. In this work, we present Segment Anything Reasoner (StAR), a comprehensive framework that refines the design space from multiple perspectives-including parameter-tuning scheme, reward functions, learning strategies and answer format-and achieves substantial improvements over recent baselines. In addition, for the first time, we successfully introduce parallel test-time scaling to the segmentation task, pushing the performance boundary even further. To extend the scope and depth of reasoning covered by existing benchmark, we also construct the ReasonSeg-X, which compactly defines reasoning types and includes samples that require deeper reasoning. Leveraging this dataset, we train StAR with a rollout-expanded selective-tuning approach to activate the base model's latent reasoning capabilities, and establish a rigorous benchmark for systematic, fine-grained evaluation of advanced methods. With only 5k training samples, StAR achieves significant gains over its base counterparts across extensive benchmarks, demonstrating that our method effectively brings dormant reasoning competence to the surface.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 15

Physically Native World Models: A Hamiltonian Perspective on Generative World Modeling

World models have recently re-emerged as a central paradigm for embodied intelligence, robotics, autonomous driving, and model-based reinforcement learning. However, current world model research is often dominated by three partially separated routes: 2D video-generative models that emphasize visual future synthesis, 3D scene-centric models that emphasize spatial reconstruction, and JEPA-like latent models that emphasize abstract predictive representations. While each route has made important progress, they still struggle to provide physically reliable, action-controllable, and long-horizon stable predictions for embodied decision making. In this paper, we argue that the bottleneck of world models is no longer only whether they can generate realistic futures, but whether those futures are physically meaningful and useful for action. We propose Hamiltonian World Models as a physically grounded perspective on world modeling. The key idea is to encode observations into a structured latent phase space, evolve the latent state through Hamiltonian-inspired dynamics with control, dissipation, and residual terms, decode the predicted trajectory into future observations, and use the resulting rollouts for planning. We discuss how Hamiltonian structure may improve interpretability, data efficiency, and long-horizon stability, while also noting practical challenges in real-world robotic scenes involving friction, contact, non-conservative forces, and deformable objects.

  • 2 authors
·
Apr 30

RoboForge: Physically Optimized Text-guided Whole-Body Locomotion for Humanoids

While generative models have become effective at producing human-like motions from text, transferring these motions to humanoid robots for physical execution remains challenging. Existing pipelines are often limited by retargeting, where kinematic quality is undermined by physical infeasibility, contact-transition errors, and the high cost of real-world dynamical data. We present a unified latent-driven framework that bridges natural language and whole-body humanoid locomotion through a retarget-free, physics-optimized pipeline. Rather than treating generation and control as separate stages, our key insight is to couple them bidirectionally under physical constraints.We introduce a Physical Plausibility Optimization (PP-Opt) module as the coupling interface. In the forward direction, PP-Opt refines a teacher-student distillation policy with a plausibility-centric reward to suppress artifacts such as floating, skating, and penetration. In the backward direction, it converts reward-optimized simulation rollouts into high-quality explicit motion data, which is used to fine-tune the motion generator toward a more physically plausible latent distribution. This bidirectional design forms a self-improving cycle: the generator learns a physically grounded latent space, while the controller learns to execute latent-conditioned behaviors with dynamical integrity.Extensive experiments on the Unitree G1 humanoid show that our bidirectional optimization improves tracking accuracy and success rates. Across IsaacLab and MuJoCo, the implicit latent-driven pipeline consistently outperforms conventional explicit retargeting baselines in both precision and stability. By coupling diffusion-based motion generation with physical plausibility optimization, our framework provides a practical path toward deployable text-guided humanoid intelligence.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 18

UniGRPO: Unified Policy Optimization for Reasoning-Driven Visual Generation

Unified models capable of interleaved generation have emerged as a promising paradigm, with the community increasingly converging on autoregressive modeling for text and flow matching for image generation. To advance this direction, we propose a unified reinforcement learning framework tailored for interleaved generation. We validate our approach on its fundamental unit: a single round of reasoning-driven image generation, where the model first expands the user prompt through reasoning, followed by image synthesis. Formulating this multimodal generation process as a Markov Decision Process with sparse terminal rewards, we introduce UniGRPO to jointly optimize text and image generation policies using GRPO. Adopting a minimalist methodology to avoid over-design, we leverage established training recipes for both modalities by seamlessly integrating standard GRPO for reasoning and FlowGRPO for visual synthesis. To ensure scalability to multi-round interleaved generation, we introduce two critical modifications to the original FlowGRPO: (1) eliminating classifier-free guidance to maintain linear, unbranched rollouts, which is essential for scaling to complex scenarios involving multi-turn interactions and multi-condition generation (e.g., editing); and (2) replacing the standard latent KL penalty with an MSE penalty directly on the velocity fields, providing a more robust and direct regularization signal to mitigate reward hacking effectively. Our experiments demonstrate that this unified training recipe significantly enhances image generation quality through reasoning, providing a robust and scalable baseline for the future post-training of fully interleaved models.

EchoTorrent: Towards Swift, Sustained, and Streaming Multi-Modal Video Generation

Recent multi-modal video generation models have achieved high visual quality, but their prohibitive latency and limited temporal stability hinder real-time deployment. Streaming inference exacerbates these issues, leading to pronounced multimodal degradation, such as spatial blurring, temporal drift, and lip desynchronization, which creates an unresolved efficiency-performance trade-off. To this end, we propose EchoTorrent, a novel schema with a fourfold design: (1) Multi-Teacher Training fine-tunes a pre-trained model on distinct preference domains to obtain specialized domain experts, which sequentially transfer domain-specific knowledge to a student model; (2) Adaptive CFG Calibration (ACC-DMD), which calibrates the audio CFG augmentation errors in DMD via a phased spatiotemporal schedule, eliminating redundant CFG computations and enabling single-pass inference per step; (3) Hybrid Long Tail Forcing, which enforces alignment exclusively on tail frames during long-horizon self-rollout training via a causal-bidirectional hybrid architecture, effectively mitigates spatiotemporal degradation in streaming mode while enhancing fidelity to reference frames; and (4) VAE Decoder Refiner through pixel-domain optimization of the VAE decoder to recover high-frequency details while circumventing latent-space ambiguities. Extensive experiments and analysis demonstrate that EchoTorrent achieves few-pass autoregressive generation with substantially extended temporal consistency, identity preservation, and audio-lip synchronization.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 14 1

FP4 Explore, BF16 Train: Diffusion Reinforcement Learning via Efficient Rollout Scaling

Reinforcement-Learning-based post-training has recently emerged as a promising paradigm for aligning text-to-image diffusion models with human preferences. In recent studies, increasing the rollout group size yields pronounced performance improvements, indicating substantial room for further alignment gains. However, scaling rollouts on large-scale foundational diffusion models (e.g., FLUX.1-12B) imposes a heavy computational burden. To alleviate this bottleneck, we explore the integration of FP4 quantization into Diffusion RL rollouts. Yet, we identify that naive quantized pipelines inherently introduce risks of performance degradation. To overcome this dilemma between efficiency and training integrity, we propose Sol-RL (Speed-of-light RL), a novel FP4-empowered Two-stage Reinforcement Learning framework. First, we utilize high-throughput NVFP4 rollouts to generate a massive candidate pool and extract a highly contrastive subset. Second, we regenerate these selected samples in BF16 precision and optimize the policy exclusively on them. By decoupling candidate exploration from policy optimization, Sol-RL integrates the algorithmic mechanisms of rollout scaling with the system-level throughput gains of NVFP4. This synergistic algorithm-hardware design effectively accelerates the rollout phase while reserving high-fidelity samples for optimization. We empirically demonstrate that our framework maintains the training integrity of BF16 precision pipeline while fully exploiting the throughput gains enabled by FP4 arithmetic. Extensive experiments across SANA, FLUX.1, and SD3.5-L substantiate that our approach delivers superior alignment performance across multiple metrics while accelerating training convergence by up to 4.64times, unlocking the power of massive rollout scaling at a fraction of the cost.

nvidia NVIDIA
·
Apr 7 1

Efficient Multi-turn RL for GUI Agents via Decoupled Training and Adaptive Data Curation

Vision-language model (VLM) based GUI agents show promise for automating complex desktop and mobile tasks, but face significant challenges in applying reinforcement learning (RL): (1) slow multi-turn interactions with GUI environments for policy rollout, and (2) insufficient high-quality agent-environment interactions for policy learning. To address these challenges, we propose DART, a Decoupled Agentic RL Training framework for GUI agents, which coordinates heterogeneous modules in a highly decoupled manner. DART separates the training system into four asynchronous modules: environment cluster, rollout service, data manager, and trainer. This design enables non-blocking communication, asynchronous training, rollout-wise trajectory sampling, and per-worker model synchronization, significantly improving the system efficiency: 1.6*GPU utilization for rollout, 1.9* training throughput, and 5.5* environment utilization. To facilitate effective learning from abundant samples, we introduce an adaptive data curation scheme: (1) pre-collecting successful trajectories for challenging tasks to supplement sparse success in online sampling; (2) dynamically adjusting rollout numbers and trajectory lengths based on task difficulty; (3) training selectively on high-entropy steps to prioritize critical decisions; (4) stabilizing learning via truncated importance sampling for policy mismatch between policy rollout and updating. On the OSWorld benchmark, DART-GUI-7B achieves a 42.13% task success rate, a 14.61% absolute gain over the base model, and 7.34% higher than open-source SOTA. We will fully open-source our training framework, data, and model checkpoints via computer-use-agents.github.io/dart-gui, which we believe is a timely contribution to the open-source community of agentic RL training.

Transparent Image Layer Diffusion using Latent Transparency

We present LayerDiffusion, an approach enabling large-scale pretrained latent diffusion models to generate transparent images. The method allows generation of single transparent images or of multiple transparent layers. The method learns a "latent transparency" that encodes alpha channel transparency into the latent manifold of a pretrained latent diffusion model. It preserves the production-ready quality of the large diffusion model by regulating the added transparency as a latent offset with minimal changes to the original latent distribution of the pretrained model. In this way, any latent diffusion model can be converted into a transparent image generator by finetuning it with the adjusted latent space. We train the model with 1M transparent image layer pairs collected using a human-in-the-loop collection scheme. We show that latent transparency can be applied to different open source image generators, or be adapted to various conditional control systems to achieve applications like foreground/background-conditioned layer generation, joint layer generation, structural control of layer contents, etc. A user study finds that in most cases (97%) users prefer our natively generated transparent content over previous ad-hoc solutions such as generating and then matting. Users also report the quality of our generated transparent images is comparable to real commercial transparent assets like Adobe Stock.

  • 2 authors
·
Feb 26, 2024

APRIL: Active Partial Rollouts in Reinforcement Learning to Tame Long-tail Generation

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a cornerstone in advancing large-scale pre-trained language models (LLMs). Successive generations, including GPT-o series, DeepSeek-R1, Kimi-K1.5, Grok 4, and GLM-4.5, have relied on large-scale RL training to enhance reasoning and coding capabilities. To meet the community's growing RL needs, numerous RL frameworks have been proposed. However, RL training remains computationally expensive, with rollout generation accounting for more than 90% of total runtime. In addition, its efficiency is often constrained by the long-tail distribution of rollout response lengths, where a few lengthy responses stall entire batches, leaving GPUs idle and underutilized. As model and rollout sizes continue to grow, this bottleneck increasingly limits scalability. To address this challenge, we propose Active Partial Rollouts in Reinforcement Learning (APRIL), which mitigates long-tail inefficiency. In the rollout phase, APRIL over-provisions rollout requests, terminates once the target number of responses is reached, and recycles incomplete responses for continuation in future steps. This strategy ensures that no rollouts are discarded while substantially reducing GPU idle time. Experiments show that APRIL improves rollout throughput by 22.5% on average (at most 44%) across commonly used RL algorithms (GRPO, DAPO, GSPO), accelerates convergence, and achieves 2.1% on average(at most 8%) higher final accuracy across tasks. Moreover, APRIL is both framework and hardware agnostic, already integrated into the slime RL framework, and deployable on NVIDIA and AMD GPUs alike. Taken together, this work unifies system-level and algorithmic considerations in proposing APRIL, with the aim of advancing RL training efficiency and inspiring further optimizations in RL systems. Our codebase is available at https://github.com/RLsys-Foundation/APRIL

  • 18 authors
·
Sep 22, 2025

XRPO: Pushing the limits of GRPO with Targeted Exploration and Exploitation

Reinforcement learning algorithms such as GRPO have driven recent advances in large language model (LLM) reasoning. While scaling the number of rollouts stabilizes training, existing approaches suffer from limited exploration on challenging prompts and leave informative feedback signals underexploited, due to context-independent rollout allocation across prompts (e.g., generating 16 rollouts per prompt) and relying heavily on sparse rewards. This paper presents XRPO(eXplore - eXploit GRPO), a unified framework that recasts policy optimization through the principled lens of rollout exploration-exploitation. To enhance exploration, XRPO introduces a mathematically grounded rollout allocator that adaptively prioritizes prompts with higher potential for uncertainty reduction. It further addresses stagnation on zero-reward prompts through an in-context seeding strategy that injects curated exemplars, steering the model into more difficult reasoning trajectories. To strengthen exploitation, XRPO develops a group-relative, novelty-aware advantage sharpening mechanism that leverages sequence likelihoods to amplify low-probability yet correct responses, thereby extending the policy's reach beyond sparse rewards. Experiments across diverse math and coding benchmarks on both reasoning and non-reasoning models demonstrate that XRPO outperforms existing advances (e.g., GRPO and GSPO) up to 4% pass@1 and 6% cons@32, while accelerating training convergence by up to 2.7X.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 8, 2025

Seek in the Dark: Reasoning via Test-Time Instance-Level Policy Gradient in Latent Space

Reasoning ability, a core component of human intelligence, continues to pose a significant challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs) in the pursuit of AGI. Although model performance has improved under the training scaling law, significant challenges remain, particularly with respect to training algorithms, such as catastrophic forgetting, and the limited availability of novel training data. As an alternative, test-time scaling enhances reasoning performance by increasing test-time computation without parameter updating. Unlike prior methods in this paradigm focused on token space, we propose leveraging latent space for more effective reasoning and better adherence to the test-time scaling law. We introduce LatentSeek, a novel framework that enhances LLM reasoning through Test-Time Instance-level Adaptation (TTIA) within the model's latent space. Specifically, LatentSeek leverages policy gradient to iteratively update latent representations, guided by self-generated reward signals. LatentSeek is evaluated on a range of reasoning benchmarks, including GSM8K, MATH-500, and AIME2024, across multiple LLM architectures. Results show that LatentSeek consistently outperforms strong baselines, such as Chain-of-Thought prompting and fine-tuning-based methods. Furthermore, our analysis demonstrates that LatentSeek is highly efficient, typically converging within a few iterations for problems of average complexity, while also benefiting from additional iterations, thereby highlighting the potential of test-time scaling in the latent space. These findings position LatentSeek as a lightweight, scalable, and effective solution for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of LLMs.

  • 11 authors
·
May 19, 2025 4

Rollout-Training Co-Design for Efficient LLM-Based Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Despite algorithm-level innovations for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), the underlying networked infrastructure for large-scale MARL training remains underexplored. Existing training frameworks primarily optimize for single-agent scenarios and fail to address the unique system-level challenges of MARL, including rollout-training synchronization barriers, rollout load imbalance, and training resource underutilization. To bridge this gap, we propose FlexMARL, the first end-to-end training framework that holistically optimizes rollout, training, and their orchestration for large-scale LLM-based MARL. Specifically, FlexMARL introduces the joint orchestrator to manage data flow under the rollout-training disaggregated architecture. Building upon the experience store, a novel micro-batch driven asynchronous pipeline eliminates the synchronization barriers while providing strong consistency guarantees. Rollout engine adopts a parallel sampling scheme combined with hierarchical load balancing, which adapts to skewed inter/intra-agent request patterns. Training engine achieves on-demand hardware binding through agent-centric resource allocation. The training states of different agents are swapped via unified and location-agnostic communication. Empirical results on a large-scale production cluster demonstrate that FlexMARL achieves up to 7.3x speedup and improves hardware utilization by up to 5.6x compared to existing frameworks.

  • 16 authors
·
Feb 9

ART-VITON: Measurement-Guided Latent Diffusion for Artifact-Free Virtual Try-On

Virtual try-on (VITON) aims to generate realistic images of a person wearing a target garment, requiring precise garment alignment in try-on regions and faithful preservation of identity and background in non-try-on regions. While latent diffusion models (LDMs) have advanced alignment and detail synthesis, preserving non-try-on regions remains challenging. A common post-hoc strategy directly replaces these regions with original content, but abrupt transitions often produce boundary artifacts. To overcome this, we reformulate VITON as a linear inverse problem and adopt trajectory-aligned solvers that progressively enforce measurement consistency, reducing abrupt changes in non-try-on regions. However, existing solvers still suffer from semantic drift during generation, leading to artifacts. We propose ART-VITON, a measurement-guided diffusion framework that ensures measurement adherence while maintaining artifact-free synthesis. Our method integrates residual prior-based initialization to mitigate training-inference mismatch and artifact-free measurement-guided sampling that combines data consistency, frequency-level correction, and periodic standard denoising. Experiments on VITON-HD, DressCode, and SHHQ-1.0 demonstrate that ART-VITON effectively preserves identity and background, eliminates boundary artifacts, and consistently improves visual fidelity and robustness over state-of-the-art baselines.

  • 2 authors
·
Sep 30, 2025

Sharing is Caring: Efficient LM Post-Training with Collective RL Experience Sharing

Post-training language models (LMs) with reinforcement learning (RL) can enhance their complex reasoning capabilities without supervised fine-tuning, as demonstrated by DeepSeek-R1-Zero. However, effectively utilizing RL for LMs requires significant parallelization to scale-up inference, which introduces non-trivial technical challenges (e.g. latency, memory, and reliability) alongside ever-growing financial costs. We present Swarm sAmpling Policy Optimization (SAPO), a fully decentralized and asynchronous RL post-training algorithm. SAPO is designed for decentralized networks of heterogenous compute nodes, where each node manages its own policy model(s) while "sharing" rollouts with others in the network; no explicit assumptions about latency, model homogeneity, or hardware are required and nodes can operate in silo if desired. As a result, the algorithm avoids common bottlenecks in scaling RL post-training while also allowing (and even encouraging) new possibilities. By sampling rollouts "shared" across the network, it enables "Aha moments" to propagate, thereby bootstrapping the learning process. In this paper we show SAPO achieved cumulative reward gains of up to 94% in controlled experiments. We also share insights from tests on a network with thousands of nodes contributed by Gensyn community members running the algorithm on diverse hardware and models during an open-source demo.

Gensyn Gensyn
·
Sep 10, 2025 56

Recycling Failures: Salvaging Exploration in RLVR via Fine-Grained Off-Policy Guidance

Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing the complex reasoning capabilities of Large Reasoning Models. However, standard outcome-based supervision suffers from a critical limitation that penalizes trajectories that are largely correct but fail due to several missteps as heavily as completely erroneous ones. This coarse feedback signal causes the model to discard valuable largely correct rollouts, leading to a degradation in rollout diversity that prematurely narrows the exploration space. Process Reward Models have demonstrated efficacy in providing reliable step-wise verification for test-time scaling, naively integrating these signals into RLVR as dense rewards proves ineffective.Prior methods attempt to introduce off-policy guided whole-trajectory replacement that often outside the policy model's distribution, but still fail to utilize the largely correct rollouts generated by the model itself and thus do not effectively mitigate the narrowing of the exploration space. To address these issues, we propose SCOPE (Step-wise Correction for On-Policy Exploration), a novel framework that utilizes Process Reward Models to pinpoint the first erroneous step in suboptimal rollouts and applies fine-grained, step-wise off-policy rectification. By applying precise refinement on partially correct rollout, our method effectively salvages partially correct trajectories and increases diversity score by 13.5%, thereby sustaining a broad exploration space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach establishes new state-of-the-art results, achieving an average accuracy of 46.6% on math reasoning and exhibiting robust generalization with 53.4% accuracy on out-of-distribution reasoning tasks.

  • 9 authors
·
Feb 27

Smooth Diffusion: Crafting Smooth Latent Spaces in Diffusion Models

Recently, diffusion models have made remarkable progress in text-to-image (T2I) generation, synthesizing images with high fidelity and diverse contents. Despite this advancement, latent space smoothness within diffusion models remains largely unexplored. Smooth latent spaces ensure that a perturbation on an input latent corresponds to a steady change in the output image. This property proves beneficial in downstream tasks, including image interpolation, inversion, and editing. In this work, we expose the non-smoothness of diffusion latent spaces by observing noticeable visual fluctuations resulting from minor latent variations. To tackle this issue, we propose Smooth Diffusion, a new category of diffusion models that can be simultaneously high-performing and smooth. Specifically, we introduce Step-wise Variation Regularization to enforce the proportion between the variations of an arbitrary input latent and that of the output image is a constant at any diffusion training step. In addition, we devise an interpolation standard deviation (ISTD) metric to effectively assess the latent space smoothness of a diffusion model. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that Smooth Diffusion stands out as a more desirable solution not only in T2I generation but also across various downstream tasks. Smooth Diffusion is implemented as a plug-and-play Smooth-LoRA to work with various community models. Code is available at https://github.com/SHI-Labs/Smooth-Diffusion.

  • 9 authors
·
Dec 7, 2023

BroRL: Scaling Reinforcement Learning via Broadened Exploration

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a key ingredient for unlocking complex reasoning capabilities in large language models. Recent work ProRL has shown promise in scaling RL by increasing the number of training steps. However, performance plateaus after thousands of steps, with clear diminishing returns from allocating more computation to additional training. In this work, we investigate a complementary paradigm for scaling RL, BroR-Lincreasing the number of rollouts per example to hundreds to exhaustively Broaden exploration, which yields continuous performance gains beyond the saturation point observed in ProRL when scaling the number of training steps. Our approach is motivated by a mass balance equation analysis allowing us to characterize the rate of change in probability mass for correct and incorrect tokens during the reinforcement process. We show that under a one-step RL assumption, sampled rollout tokens always contribute to correct-mass expansion, while unsampled tokens outside rollouts may lead to gains or losses depending on their distribution and the net reward balance. Importantly, as the number of rollouts per example N increases, the effect of unsampled terms diminishes, ensuring overall correct-mass expansion. To validate our theoretical analysis, we conduct simulations under more relaxed conditions and find that a sufficiently large rollout size N-corresponding to ample exploration-guarantees an increase in the probability mass of all correct tokens. Empirically, BroRL revives models saturated after 3K ProRL training steps and demonstrates robust, continuous improvement, achieving state-of-the-art results for the 1.5B model across diverse benchmarks.

nvidia NVIDIA
·
Oct 1, 2025 2

ADHint: Adaptive Hints with Difficulty Priors for Reinforcement Learning

To combine the advantages of Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL), recent methods have integrated ''hints'' into post-training, which are prefix segments of complete reasoning trajectories, aiming for powerful knowledge expansion and reasoning generalization. However, existing hint-based RL methods typically ignore difficulty when scheduling hint ratios and estimating relative advantages, leading to unstable learning and excessive imitation of off-policy hints. In this work, we propose ADHint, which treats difficulty as a key factor in both hint-ratio schedule and relative-advantage estimation to achieve a better trade-off between exploration and imitation. Specifically, we propose Adaptive Hint with Sample Difficulty Prior, which evaluates each sample's difficulty under the policy model and accordingly schedules an appropriate hint ratio to guide its rollouts. We also introduce Consistency-based Gradient Modulation and Selective Masking for Hint Preservation to modulate token-level gradients within hints, preventing biased and destructive updates. Additionally, we propose Advantage Estimation with Rollout Difficulty Posterior, which leverages the relative difficulty of rollouts with and without hints to estimate their respective advantages, thereby achieving more balanced updates. Extensive experiments across diverse modalities, model scales, and domains demonstrate that ADHint delivers superior reasoning ability and out-of-distribution generalization, consistently surpassing existing methods in both pass@1 and avg@8. Our code and dataset will be made publicly available upon paper acceptance.

  • 8 authors
·
Dec 15, 2025

The Edge-of-Reach Problem in Offline Model-Based Reinforcement Learning

Offline reinforcement learning aims to train agents from pre-collected datasets. However, this comes with the added challenge of estimating the value of behaviors not covered in the dataset. Model-based methods offer a potential solution by training an approximate dynamics model, which then allows collection of additional synthetic data via rollouts in this model. The prevailing theory treats this approach as online RL in an approximate dynamics model, and any remaining performance gap is therefore understood as being due to dynamics model errors. In this paper, we analyze this assumption and investigate how popular algorithms perform as the learned dynamics model is improved. In contrast to both intuition and theory, if the learned dynamics model is replaced by the true error-free dynamics, existing model-based methods completely fail. This reveals a key oversight: The theoretical foundations assume sampling of full horizon rollouts in the learned dynamics model; however, in practice, the number of model-rollout steps is aggressively reduced to prevent accumulating errors. We show that this truncation of rollouts results in a set of edge-of-reach states at which we are effectively ``bootstrapping from the void.'' This triggers pathological value overestimation and complete performance collapse. We term this the edge-of-reach problem. Based on this new insight, we fill important gaps in existing theory, and reveal how prior model-based methods are primarily addressing the edge-of-reach problem, rather than model-inaccuracy as claimed. Finally, we propose Reach-Aware Value Learning (RAVL), a simple and robust method that directly addresses the edge-of-reach problem and hence - unlike existing methods - does not fail as the dynamics model is improved. Code open-sourced at: github.com/anyasims/edge-of-reach.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 19, 2024

Policy-Guided Diffusion

In many real-world settings, agents must learn from an offline dataset gathered by some prior behavior policy. Such a setting naturally leads to distribution shift between the behavior policy and the target policy being trained - requiring policy conservatism to avoid instability and overestimation bias. Autoregressive world models offer a different solution to this by generating synthetic, on-policy experience. However, in practice, model rollouts must be severely truncated to avoid compounding error. As an alternative, we propose policy-guided diffusion. Our method uses diffusion models to generate entire trajectories under the behavior distribution, applying guidance from the target policy to move synthetic experience further on-policy. We show that policy-guided diffusion models a regularized form of the target distribution that balances action likelihood under both the target and behavior policies, leading to plausible trajectories with high target policy probability, while retaining a lower dynamics error than an offline world model baseline. Using synthetic experience from policy-guided diffusion as a drop-in substitute for real data, we demonstrate significant improvements in performance across a range of standard offline reinforcement learning algorithms and environments. Our approach provides an effective alternative to autoregressive offline world models, opening the door to the controllable generation of synthetic training data.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 9, 2024

Reward Guided Latent Consistency Distillation

Latent Consistency Distillation (LCD) has emerged as a promising paradigm for efficient text-to-image synthesis. By distilling a latent consistency model (LCM) from a pre-trained teacher latent diffusion model (LDM), LCD facilitates the generation of high-fidelity images within merely 2 to 4 inference steps. However, the LCM's efficient inference is obtained at the cost of the sample quality. In this paper, we propose compensating the quality loss by aligning LCM's output with human preference during training. Specifically, we introduce Reward Guided LCD (RG-LCD), which integrates feedback from a reward model (RM) into the LCD process by augmenting the original LCD loss with the objective of maximizing the reward associated with LCM's single-step generation. As validated through human evaluation, when trained with the feedback of a good RM, the 2-step generations from our RG-LCM are favored by humans over the 50-step DDIM samples from the teacher LDM, representing a 25 times inference acceleration without quality loss. As directly optimizing towards differentiable RMs can suffer from over-optimization, we overcome this difficulty by proposing the use of a latent proxy RM (LRM). This novel component serves as an intermediary, connecting our LCM with the RM. Empirically, we demonstrate that incorporating the LRM into our RG-LCD successfully avoids high-frequency noise in the generated images, contributing to both improved FID on MS-COCO and a higher HPSv2.1 score on HPSv2's test set, surpassing those achieved by the baseline LCM.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 16, 2024

Long-Horizon Model-Based Offline Reinforcement Learning Without Conservatism

Popular offline reinforcement learning (RL) methods rely on conservatism, either by penalizing out-of-dataset actions or by restricting rollout horizons. In this work, we question the universality of this principle and instead revisit a complementary one: a Bayesian perspective. Rather than enforcing conservatism, the Bayesian approach tackles epistemic uncertainty in offline data by modeling a posterior distribution over plausible world models and training a history-dependent agent to maximize expected rewards, enabling test-time generalization. We first illustrate, in a bandit setting, that Bayesianism excels on low-quality datasets where conservatism fails. We then scale this principle to realistic tasks and show that long-horizon planning is critical for reducing value overestimation once conservatism is removed. To make this feasible, we introduce key design choices for performing and learning from long-horizon rollouts while controlling compounding errors. These yield our algorithm, NEUBAY, grounded in the neutral Bayesian principle. On D4RL and NeoRL benchmarks, NEUBAY generally matches or surpasses leading conservative algorithms, achieving new state-of-the-art on 7 datasets. Notably, it succeeds with rollout horizons of several hundred steps, contrary to dominant practice. Finally, we characterize datasets by quality and coverage, showing when NEUBAY is preferable to conservative methods. Together, we argue NEUBAY lays the foundation for a new practical direction in offline and model-based RL.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 3, 2025

LaDI-VTON: Latent Diffusion Textual-Inversion Enhanced Virtual Try-On

The rapidly evolving fields of e-commerce and metaverse continue to seek innovative approaches to enhance the consumer experience. At the same time, recent advancements in the development of diffusion models have enabled generative networks to create remarkably realistic images. In this context, image-based virtual try-on, which consists in generating a novel image of a target model wearing a given in-shop garment, has yet to capitalize on the potential of these powerful generative solutions. This work introduces LaDI-VTON, the first Latent Diffusion textual Inversion-enhanced model for the Virtual Try-ON task. The proposed architecture relies on a latent diffusion model extended with a novel additional autoencoder module that exploits learnable skip connections to enhance the generation process preserving the model's characteristics. To effectively maintain the texture and details of the in-shop garment, we propose a textual inversion component that can map the visual features of the garment to the CLIP token embedding space and thus generate a set of pseudo-word token embeddings capable of conditioning the generation process. Experimental results on Dress Code and VITON-HD datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms the competitors by a consistent margin, achieving a significant milestone for the task. Source code and trained models are publicly available at: https://github.com/miccunifi/ladi-vton.

  • 6 authors
·
May 22, 2023

Latent-NeRF for Shape-Guided Generation of 3D Shapes and Textures

Text-guided image generation has progressed rapidly in recent years, inspiring major breakthroughs in text-guided shape generation. Recently, it has been shown that using score distillation, one can successfully text-guide a NeRF model to generate a 3D object. We adapt the score distillation to the publicly available, and computationally efficient, Latent Diffusion Models, which apply the entire diffusion process in a compact latent space of a pretrained autoencoder. As NeRFs operate in image space, a naive solution for guiding them with latent score distillation would require encoding to the latent space at each guidance step. Instead, we propose to bring the NeRF to the latent space, resulting in a Latent-NeRF. Analyzing our Latent-NeRF, we show that while Text-to-3D models can generate impressive results, they are inherently unconstrained and may lack the ability to guide or enforce a specific 3D structure. To assist and direct the 3D generation, we propose to guide our Latent-NeRF using a Sketch-Shape: an abstract geometry that defines the coarse structure of the desired object. Then, we present means to integrate such a constraint directly into a Latent-NeRF. This unique combination of text and shape guidance allows for increased control over the generation process. We also show that latent score distillation can be successfully applied directly on 3D meshes. This allows for generating high-quality textures on a given geometry. Our experiments validate the power of our different forms of guidance and the efficiency of using latent rendering. Implementation is available at https://github.com/eladrich/latent-nerf

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 14, 2022

HyperAlign: Hypernetwork for Efficient Test-Time Alignment of Diffusion Models

Diffusion models achieve state-of-the-art performance but often fail to generate outputs that align with human preferences and intentions, resulting in images with poor aesthetic quality and semantic inconsistencies. Existing alignment methods present a difficult trade-off: fine-tuning approaches suffer from loss of diversity with reward over-optimization, while test-time scaling methods introduce significant computational overhead and tend to under-optimize. To address these limitations, we propose HyperAlign, a novel framework that trains a hypernetwork for efficient and effective test-time alignment. Instead of modifying latent states, HyperAlign dynamically generates low-rank adaptation weights to modulate the diffusion model's generation operators. This allows the denoising trajectory to be adaptively adjusted based on input latents, timesteps and prompts for reward-conditioned alignment. We introduce multiple variants of HyperAlign that differ in how frequently the hypernetwork is applied, balancing between performance and efficiency. Furthermore, we optimize the hypernetwork using a reward score objective regularized with preference data to reduce reward hacking. We evaluate HyperAlign on multiple extended generative paradigms, including Stable Diffusion and FLUX. It significantly outperforms existing fine-tuning and test-time scaling baselines in enhancing semantic consistency and visual appeal.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 22 2

UI-S1: Advancing GUI Automation via Semi-online Reinforcement Learning

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents have demonstrated remarkable progress in automating complex user interface interactions through reinforcement learning. However, current approaches face a fundamental dilemma: offline RL enables stable training on pre-collected trajectories, but struggles with multi-step task execution for lack of trajectory-level reward signals; online RL captures these signals through environment interaction, but suffers from sparse rewards and prohibitive deployment costs. To address it, we present Semi-online Reinforcement Learning, a novel paradigm that simulates online RL on offline trajectories. During each rollout process, we preserve the original model output within the multi-turn dialogue, where a Patch Module adaptively recovers the divergence between rollout and expert trajectories. To capture long-term training signals, Semi-online RL introduces discounted future returns into the reward computation and optimizes the policy with weighted step-level and episode-level advantages. We further introduce Semi-Online Performance (SOP), a metric that aligns better with true online performance, serving as a practical and effective proxy for real-world evaluation. Experiments show that ours Semi-online RL achieves SOTA performance among 7B models across four dynamic benchmarks, with significant gains over the base model (e.g., +12.0% on AndroidWorld, +23.8% on AITW), demonstrating significant progress in bridging the gap between offline training efficiency and online multi-turn reasoning. The code is available at https://github.com/X-PLUG/MobileAgent/tree/main/UI-S1.

  • 11 authors
·
Sep 14, 2025 3

Taming Sampling Perturbations with Variance Expansion Loss for Latent Diffusion Models

Latent diffusion models have emerged as the dominant framework for high-fidelity and efficient image generation, owing to their ability to learn diffusion processes in compact latent spaces. However, while previous research has focused primarily on reconstruction accuracy and semantic alignment of the latent space, we observe that another critical factor, robustness to sampling perturbations, also plays a crucial role in determining generation quality. Through empirical and theoretical analyses, we show that the commonly used β-VAE-based tokenizers in latent diffusion models, tend to produce overly compact latent manifolds that are highly sensitive to stochastic perturbations during diffusion sampling, leading to visual degradation. To address this issue, we propose a simple yet effective solution that constructs a latent space robust to sampling perturbations while maintaining strong reconstruction fidelity. This is achieved by introducing a Variance Expansion loss that counteracts variance collapse and leverages the adversarial interplay between reconstruction and variance expansion to achieve an adaptive balance that preserves reconstruction accuracy while improving robustness to stochastic sampling. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach consistently enhances generation quality across different latent diffusion architectures, confirming that robustness in latent space is a key missing ingredient for stable and faithful diffusion sampling.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 21

VADE: Variance-Aware Dynamic Sampling via Online Sample-Level Difficulty Estimation for Multimodal RL

Group-based policy optimization methods like GRPO and GSPO have become standard for training multimodal models, leveraging group-wise rollouts and relative advantage estimation. However, they suffer from a critical gradient vanishing problem when all responses within a group receive identical rewards, causing advantage estimates to collapse and training signals to diminish. Existing attempts to mitigate this issue fall into two paradigms: filtering-based and sampling-based methods. Filtering-based methods first generate rollouts broadly and then retroactively filter out uninformative groups, leading to substantial computational overhead. Sampling-based methods proactively select effective samples before rollout but rely on static criteria or prior dataset knowledge, lacking real-time adaptability. To address these issues, we propose VADE, a Variance-Aware Dynamic sampling framework via online sample-level difficulty Estimation. Our framework integrates three key components: online sample-level difficulty estimation using Beta distributions, a Thompson sampler that maximizes information gain through the estimated correctness probability, and a two-scale prior decay mechanism that maintains robust estimation under policy evolution. This three components design enables VADE to dynamically select the most informative samples, thereby amplifying training signals while eliminating extra rollout costs. Extensive experiments on multimodal reasoning benchmarks show that VADE consistently outperforms strong baselines in both performance and sample efficiency, while achieving a dramatic reduction in computational overhead. More importantly, our framework can serves as a plug-and-play component to be seamlessly integrated into existing group-based RL algorithms. Code and models are available at https://VADE-RL.github.io.

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 24, 2025

Lookahead Tree-Based Rollouts for Enhanced Trajectory-Level Exploration in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), particularly with algorithms like Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), has proven highly effective in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models. However, a critical bottleneck in current pipelines lies in the limited diversity of sampled trajectories during group rollouts. Homogeneous trajectories and their associated rewards would diminish the return signals for policy updates, thereby hindering effective policy learning. This lack of diversity stems primarily from token-level stochastic sampling, where local variations are likely to collapse into near-identical reasoning paths. To address this limitation, we propose Lookahead Tree-Based Rollouts (LATR), a novel rollout strategy designed to explicitly promotes trajectory-level diversity by enforcing branching into different candidate tokens likely to yield distinct continuations. Specifically, LATR iteratively operates in three stages: (1) branching at high-uncertainty generation steps, (2) performing lookahead simulation for each new branch, and (3) pruning branches that exhibits prolonged similarity during simulation. Compared with stochastic Sampling, LATR accelerates policy learning by 131% on average and improves final pass@1 performance by 4.2% on both GRPO and Dynamic sAmpling Policy Optimization (DAPO) algorithms across different reasoning tasks. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/starreeze/latr.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 28, 2025

One-Token Rollout: Guiding Supervised Fine-Tuning of LLMs with Policy Gradient

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is the predominant method for adapting large language models (LLMs), yet it often struggles with generalization compared to reinforcement learning (RL). In this work, we posit that this performance disparity stems not just from the loss function, but from a more fundamental difference: SFT learns from a fixed, pre-collected dataset, whereas RL utilizes on-policy data sampled from the current policy. Building on this hypothesis, we introduce one-token rollout (OTR), a novel fine-tuning algorithm that guides SFT with the policy gradient method. OTR reframes the autoregressive learning process by treating each token generation as a single-step reinforcement learning trajectory. At each step, it performs a Monte Carlo ``rollout'' by sampling multiple candidate tokens from the current policy's distribution. The ground-truth token from the supervised data is then used to provide a reward signal to these samples. Guided by policy gradient, our algorithm repurposes static, off-policy supervised data into a dynamic, on-policy signal at the token level, capturing the generalization benefits of on-policy learning while bypassing the costly overhead of full sentence generation. Through extensive experiments on a diverse suite of challenging benchmarks spanning mathematical reasoning, code generation, and general domain reasoning, we demonstrate that OTR consistently outperforms standard SFT. Our findings establish OTR as a powerful and practical alternative for fine-tuning LLMs and provide compelling evidence that the on-policy nature of data is a critical driver of generalization, offering a promising new direction for fine-tuning LLMs.

  • 5 authors
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Sep 30, 2025 4

ReflectDrive-2: Reinforcement-Learning-Aligned Self-Editing for Discrete Diffusion Driving

We introduce ReflectDrive-2, a masked discrete diffusion planner with separate action expert for autonomous driving that represents plans as discrete trajectory tokens and generates them through parallel masked decoding. This discrete token space enables in-place trajectory revision: AutoEdit rewrites selected tokens using the same model, without requiring an auxiliary refinement network. To train this capability, we use a two-stage procedure. First, we construct structure-aware perturbations of expert trajectories along longitudinal progress and lateral heading directions and supervise the model to recover the original expert trajectory. We then fine-tune the full decision--draft--reflect rollout with reinforcement learning (RL), assigning terminal driving reward to the final post-edit trajectory and propagating policy-gradient credit through full-rollout transitions. Full-rollout RL proves crucial for coupling drafting and editing: under supervised training alone, inference-time AutoEdit improves PDMS by at most 0.3, whereas RL increases its gain to 1.9. We also co-design an efficient reflective decoding stack for the decision--draft--reflect pipeline, combining shared-prefix KV reuse, Alternating Step Decode, and fused on-device unmasking. On NAVSIM, ReflectDrive-2 achieves 91.0 PDMS with camera-only input and 94.8 PDMS in a best-of-6 oracle setting, while running at 31.8 ms average latency on NVIDIA Thor.

  • 10 authors
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May 5 3

Latent Collaboration in Multi-Agent Systems

Multi-agent systems (MAS) extend large language models (LLMs) from independent single-model reasoning to coordinative system-level intelligence. While existing LLM agents depend on text-based mediation for reasoning and communication, we take a step forward by enabling models to collaborate directly within the continuous latent space. We introduce LatentMAS, an end-to-end training-free framework that enables pure latent collaboration among LLM agents. In LatentMAS, each agent first performs auto-regressive latent thoughts generation through last-layer hidden embeddings. A shared latent working memory then preserves and transfers each agent's internal representations, ensuring lossless information exchange. We provide theoretical analyses establishing that LatentMAS attains higher expressiveness and lossless information preservation with substantially lower complexity than vanilla text-based MAS. In addition, empirical evaluations across 9 comprehensive benchmarks spanning math and science reasoning, commonsense understanding, and code generation show that LatentMAS consistently outperforms strong single-model and text-based MAS baselines, achieving up to 14.6% higher accuracy, reducing output token usage by 70.8%-83.7%, and providing 4x-4.3x faster end-to-end inference. These results demonstrate that our new latent collaboration framework enhances system-level reasoning quality while offering substantial efficiency gains without any additional training. Code and data are fully open-sourced at https://github.com/Gen-Verse/LatentMAS.

Gen-Verse Gen-Verse
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Nov 25, 2025 13

End-to-End Training for Unified Tokenization and Latent Denoising

Latent diffusion models (LDMs) enable high-fidelity synthesis by operating in learned latent spaces. However, training state-of-the-art LDMs requires complex staging: a tokenizer must be trained first, before the diffusion model can be trained in the frozen latent space. We propose UNITE - an autoencoder architecture for unified tokenization and latent diffusion. UNITE consists of a Generative Encoder that serves as both image tokenizer and latent generator via weight sharing. Our key insight is that tokenization and generation can be viewed as the same latent inference problem under different conditioning regimes: tokenization infers latents from fully observed images, whereas generation infers them from noise together with text or class conditioning. Motivated by this, we introduce a single-stage training procedure that jointly optimizes both tasks via two forward passes through the same Generative Encoder. The shared parameters enable gradients to jointly shape the latent space, encouraging a "common latent language". Across image and molecule modalities, UNITE achieves near state of the art performance without adversarial losses or pretrained encoders (e.g., DINO), reaching FID 2.12 and 1.73 for Base and Large models on ImageNet 256 x 256. We further analyze the Generative Encoder through the lenses of representation alignment and compression. These results show that single stage joint training of tokenization & generation from scratch is feasible.

  • 8 authors
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Mar 23

Test-Time Scaling in Diffusion LLMs via Hidden Semi-Autoregressive Experts

Diffusion-based large language models (dLLMs) are trained flexibly to model extreme dependence in the data distribution; however, how to best utilize this information at inference time remains an open problem. In this work, we uncover an interesting property of these models: dLLMs trained on textual data implicitly learn a mixture of semi-autoregressive experts, where different generation orders reveal different specialized behaviors. We show that committing to any single, fixed inference time schedule, a common practice, collapses performance by failing to leverage this latent ensemble. To address this, we introduce HEX (Hidden semiautoregressive EXperts for test-time scaling), a training-free inference method that ensembles across heterogeneous block schedules. By doing a majority vote over diverse block-sized generation paths, HEX robustly avoids failure modes associated with any single fixed schedule. On reasoning benchmarks such as GSM8K, it boosts accuracy by up to 3.56X (from 24.72% to 88.10%), outperforming top-K margin inference and specialized fine-tuned methods like GRPO, without additional training. HEX even yields significant gains on MATH benchmark from 16.40% to 40.00%, scientific reasoning on ARC-C from 54.18% to 87.80%, and TruthfulQA from 28.36% to 57.46%. Our results establish a new paradigm for test-time scaling in diffusion-based LLMs (dLLMs), revealing that the sequence in which masking is performed plays a critical role in determining performance during inference.

Depth-Breadth Synergy in RLVR: Unlocking LLM Reasoning Gains with Adaptive Exploration

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for unlocking reasoning capabilities in large language models, yet its full potential is hindered by two under-explored dimensions: Depth-the hardest problem a model can sample; Breadth-the number of instances consumed in a single iteration. We dissect the popular GRPO algorithm and reveal a systematic bias: the cumulative-advantage disproportionately weights samples with medium accuracy, while down-weighting the low-accuracy instances that are crucial for pushing reasoning boundaries. To rectify the depth neglect, we introduce Difficulty Adaptive Rollout Sampling (DARS), which re-weights hard problems through targeted multi-stage rollouts, thereby increasing the number of positive rollouts for hard problems. Empirically, naively enlarging rollout size only accelerates convergence and even hurts Pass@K. Our DARS, in contrast, delivers consistent Pass@K gains without extra inference cost at convergence. Just as we adaptively expanded the depth of exploration, we now ask whether aggressively scaling the breadth of training data can further amplify reasoning gains. To this end, we intensely scale batch size and replace PPO's mini-batch iterations with full-batch updates over multiple epochs. Increasing breadth significantly enhances Pass@1 performance. Large-breadth training sustains high token-level entropy, indicating continued exploration and reduced gradient noise. We further present DARS-B, which augments DARS with large breadth, and demonstrate simultaneous gains in Pass@K and Pass@1. The results confirm that breadth and adaptive exploration across depth operate as orthogonal dimensions in RLVR, which are key to unleashing the reasoning power of RLVR.

  • 8 authors
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Aug 19, 2025

A Survey on Latent Reasoning

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities, especially when guided by explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning that verbalizes intermediate steps. While CoT improves both interpretability and accuracy, its dependence on natural language reasoning limits the model's expressive bandwidth. Latent reasoning tackles this bottleneck by performing multi-step inference entirely in the model's continuous hidden state, eliminating token-level supervision. To advance latent reasoning research, this survey provides a comprehensive overview of the emerging field of latent reasoning. We begin by examining the foundational role of neural network layers as the computational substrate for reasoning, highlighting how hierarchical representations support complex transformations. Next, we explore diverse latent reasoning methodologies, including activation-based recurrence, hidden state propagation, and fine-tuning strategies that compress or internalize explicit reasoning traces. Finally, we discuss advanced paradigms such as infinite-depth latent reasoning via masked diffusion models, which enable globally consistent and reversible reasoning processes. By unifying these perspectives, we aim to clarify the conceptual landscape of latent reasoning and chart future directions for research at the frontier of LLM cognition. An associated GitHub repository collecting the latest papers and repos is available at: https://github.com/multimodal-art-projection/LatentCoT-Horizon/.

  • 33 authors
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Jul 8, 2025 3

Efficient Video Diffusion Models via Content-Frame Motion-Latent Decomposition

Video diffusion models have recently made great progress in generation quality, but are still limited by the high memory and computational requirements. This is because current video diffusion models often attempt to process high-dimensional videos directly. To tackle this issue, we propose content-motion latent diffusion model (CMD), a novel efficient extension of pretrained image diffusion models for video generation. Specifically, we propose an autoencoder that succinctly encodes a video as a combination of a content frame (like an image) and a low-dimensional motion latent representation. The former represents the common content, and the latter represents the underlying motion in the video, respectively. We generate the content frame by fine-tuning a pretrained image diffusion model, and we generate the motion latent representation by training a new lightweight diffusion model. A key innovation here is the design of a compact latent space that can directly utilizes a pretrained image diffusion model, which has not been done in previous latent video diffusion models. This leads to considerably better quality generation and reduced computational costs. For instance, CMD can sample a video 7.7times faster than prior approaches by generating a video of 512times1024 resolution and length 16 in 3.1 seconds. Moreover, CMD achieves an FVD score of 212.7 on WebVid-10M, 27.3% better than the previous state-of-the-art of 292.4.

  • 6 authors
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Mar 21, 2024 1

NoiseGate: Learning Per-Latent Timestep Schedules as Information Gating in World Action Models

World Action Models (WAMs) are an emerging family of policies that tie robot action generation to future-observation modeling. In this work, we focus on the joint video--action modeling paradigm, where actions and imagined future observations are co-generated along a shared denoising or flow trajectory, so that perception, prediction, and control are coupled within one generative process. Existing WAMs typically realize this paradigm with a Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT), where video and action tokens interact through shared self-attention. This architecture can in principle assign a separate timestep t_f to each predicted latent frame, yet current systems collapse this degree of freedom onto a single shared scalar t. Under the noise-as-masking view of Diffusion Forcing, this shared schedule imposes the unjustified prior that every predicted latent is equally reliable for action generation. We instead view the per-latent schedule as a learnable information-gating policy: by changing a latent frame's noise level, the policy modulates the reliability of its Key/Value contribution to the action tokens. We propose NoiseGate, which combines independent per-latent timestep sampling during backbone training, a lightweight Gating Policy Network that emits per-latent time increments during denoising, and task-reward optimization that trains the schedule policy without hand-crafted shape priors. Built on a joint video--action MoT backbone, NoiseGate delivers consistent gains on diverse RoboTwin random-scene manipulation tasks.

  • 11 authors
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May 7

Nudging Beyond the Comfort Zone: Efficient Strategy-Guided Exploration for RLVR

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a scalable paradigm for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models. However, its effectiveness is fundamentally limited by exploration: the policy can only improve on trajectories it has already sampled. While increasing the number of rollouts alleviates this issue, such brute-force scaling is computationally expensive, and existing approaches that modify the optimization objective provide limited control over what is explored. In this work, we propose NudgeRL, a framework for structured and diversity-driven exploration in RLVR. Our approach introduces Strategy Nudging, which conditions each rollout on lightweight, strategy-level contexts to induce diverse reasoning trajectories without relying on expensive oracle supervision. To effectively learn from such structured exploration, we further propose a unified objective, which decomposes the reward signal into inter- and intra-context components and incorporates a distillation objective to transfer discovered behaviors back to the base policy. Empirically, NudgeRL outperforms standard GRPO with up to 8 times larger rollout budgets, while outperforming oracle-guided RL baseline on average across five challenging math benchmarks. These results demonstrate that structured, context-driven exploration can serve as an efficient and scalable alternative to both brute-force rollout scaling and feasibility-oriented methods based on privileged information. Our code is available at https://github.com/tally0818/NudgeRL.

kaist-ai KAIST AI
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May 14 1