arXiv:2605.24652v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Rapid advances in audio-video (AV) generation have enabled high-fidelity synthesis with synchronized sound, particularly for human-related scenarios involving speech and interactions. Yet evaluation for AV generation remains at an early stage, with only a few coarse-grained benchmarks for human-related scenarios and relying on limited preset evaluations with generic multimodal LLMs, leading to inaccurate assessments of model capabilities. To address these issues, we introduce AVBench, a fully automated benchmark tailored for human-centric AV generation. AVBench is built on two key designs for comprehensive and accurate evaluation: (i) Human-centric and fine-grained metrics. AVBench integrates ten evaluation dimensions designed for human-centered real-world scenarios, covering visual quality, audio quality, and multi-level consistency across modalities. These practical metrics capture human-related details that existing benchmarks often overlook. (ii) Specialized evaluators via preference learning. To address the lack of specialized training data, we construct large-scale supervision by transforming real-world videos into diverse training pairs with controlled perturbations. After fine-tuning on this high-quality dataset, the evaluators learn to reliably detect subtle cross-modal inconsistencies. Crucially, instead of producing discrete textual judgment, AVBench derives continuous evaluation scores from the model's prediction confidence on binary decisions. This probabilistic scoring mechanism enables a more reliable assessment than traditional VQA-style evaluation and aligns closely with human judgment. Taken together, AVBench offers automated evaluation for AV generation, demonstrates strong potential for data filtering, and serves as a differentiable reward signal for Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF).

arXiv:2605.24475v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Trusted multi-view classification aims to deliver reliable fusion for accurate predictions and has recently attracted substantial attention in both academia and industry. However, existing TMVC methods typically assume strict alignment across different views during both training and testing phases, which is often impractical in real-world scenarios. This limitation motivates us to revisit TMVC and extend it to a more challenging setting: how to mitigate the impact of view conflict (VC) during both training and inference. To tackle this setting, existing TMVC methods suffer from three critical limitations: underestimated uncertainty, misleading decisions, and overfitting to VC. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel Robust Fuzzy Multi-View Learning (R-FUML) framework grounded in Fuzzy Set Theory. Specifically, R-FUML models network outputs as fuzzy memberships to quantify category credibility and uses an entropy-based method for reliable multi-view fusion. To this end, we present a Robust Multi-view Fusion (RMF) strategy that accounts for both view-specific uncertainty and inter-view conflicts, thereby alleviating the adverse impacts of VC on decision-making. To identify and conquer VC during training, we further design a Robust Learning Against VC (RLVC) framework. RLVC isolates conflicting samples by leveraging neural networks' memory effects and then retrains the model by applying a penalty to these conflicting views. Extensive experiments across eight public datasets demonstrate that R-FUML consistently outperforms 15 state-of-the-art baselines in robustness and uncertainty estimation. The code will be released upon acceptance.

arXiv:2605.25488v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio-driven talking-head generation has achieved remarkable progress with recent models such as AniTalker, FLOAT, and Sonic. Despite their success, most existing approaches rely on a single static reference image to condition the entire video generation process at inference stage. This static conditioning paradigm often creates a mismatch between fixed identity features and dynamically evolving facial motion, leading to identity drift, temporal inconsistency, and degraded perceptual quality. We introduce Test-Time Self-Adaptive Conditioning (TT-SAC), a parameter-free inference framework that enables pretrained talking-head generators to adapt their conditioning representations during inference without retraining, gradient updates, or additional supervision. Instead of treating the reference portrait as immutable, TT-SAC composes the generator with its encoder in a feedback loop: the generator's own outputs are re-encoded to construct a refined conditioning representation that better aligns with the temporal dynamics of the synthesized sequence. A single adaptation step approximates a self-consistent equilibrium of the generative process, stabilizing identity and motion across time. We further provide theoretical analysis showing that test-time conditioning adaptation reduces feature variance and improves generative stability under mild Lipschitz assumptions, while exhibiting a principled bias-variance tradeoff that governs the optimal strength of adaptation. Extensive experiments on state-of-the-art talking-head generators and benchmark datasets demonstrate consistent improvements in lip-sync accuracy, temporal coherence, identity preservation, and perceptual fidelity. TT-SAC offers a model-agnostic and training-free strategy for enhancing generative video models, establishing test-time conditioning adaptation as an effective mechanism for stabilizing audio-driven portrait animation.

arXiv:2605.26111v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Subject-driven image generation aims to synthesize new images that preserve the identity of the given subject while following textual instructions. Existing approaches often encode text and reference images separately. This limits cross-modal reasoning abilities and causes copy-paste artifacts. Recent frameworks that connect multimodal models and diffusion models improve instruction following, but largely overlook identity preservation. To address these limitations, we condition diffusion models on Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) that jointly encode text and reference images, and augment it with VAE-based identity conditioning. A novel Dual Layer Aggregation (DLA) module is designed to aggregate multi-level MLLM features for optimal conditioning, and a multi-stage denoising strategy is applied to progressively balance the semantic information from MLLM and fine-detail identity from VAE during inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach harmonizes multimodal understanding with identity preservation, mitigates copy-paste issues, and achieves superior performance regarding human preference on subject-driven image generation. Our project website is available at https://zsh2000.github.io/squeeze-mllm-subject-gen/.

arXiv:2209.11572v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As an increasingly popular task in multimedia information retrieval, video moment retrieval (VMR) aims to localize the target moment from an untrimmed video according to a given language query. Most previous methods depend heavily on numerous manual annotations (i.e., moment boundaries), which are extremely expensive to acquire in practice. In addition, due to the domain gap between different datasets, directly applying these pre-trained models to an unseen domain leads to a significant performance drop. In this paper, we focus on a novel task: cross-domain VMR, where fully-annotated datasets are available in one domain (``source domain''), but the domain of interest (``target domain'') only contains unannotated datasets. As far as we know, we present the first study on cross-domain VMR. To address this new task, we propose a novel Multi-Modal Cross-Domain Alignment (MMCDA) network to transfer the annotation knowledge from the source domain to the target domain. However, due to the domain discrepancy between the source and target domains and the semantic gap between videos and queries, directly applying trained models to the target domain generally leads to a performance drop. To solve this problem, we develop three novel modules: (i) a domain alignment module is designed to align the feature distributions between different domains of each modality; (ii) a cross-modal alignment module aims to map both video and query features into a joint embedding space and to align the feature distributions between different modalities in the target domain; (iii) a specific alignment module tries to obtain the fine-grained similarity between a specific frame and the given query for optimal localization. By jointly training these three modules, our MMCDA can learn domain-invariant and semantic-aligned cross-modal representations.

arXiv:2303.07863v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Given an untrimmed video, temporal sentence grounding (TSG) aims to locate a target moment semantically according to a sentence query. Although previous respectable works have made decent success, they only focus on high-level visual features extracted from the consecutive decoded frames and fail to handle the compressed videos for query modelling, suffering from insufficient representation capability and significant computational complexity during training and testing. In this paper, we pose a new setting, compressed-domain TSG, which directly utilizes compressed videos rather than fully-decompressed frames as the visual input. To handle the raw video bit-stream input, we propose a novel Three-branch Compressed-domain Spatial-temporal Fusion (TCSF) framework, which extracts and aggregates three kinds of low-level visual features (I-frame, motion vector and residual features) for effective and efficient grounding. Particularly, instead of encoding the whole decoded frames like previous works, we capture the appearance representation by only learning the I-frame feature to reduce delay or latency. Besides, we explore the motion information not only by learning the motion vector feature, but also by exploring the relations of neighboring frames via the residual feature. In this way, a three-branch spatial-temporal attention layer with an adaptive motion-appearance fusion module is further designed to extract and aggregate both appearance and motion information for the final grounding. Experiments on three challenging datasets shows that our TCSF achieves better performance than other state-of-the-art methods with lower complexity.

arXiv:2508.11872v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Traditional syllabi often function as static reference documents rather than engaging introductions to a course. In practical teaching, we observe that few students thoroughly read or fully comprehend the information provided in traditional, text-based course syllabi, which can leave essential information underused. This paper reframes syllabus communication as a design problem and documents an AI-assisted workflow for transforming a traditional syllabus into a musical, video-based, and avatar-enhanced learning artifact. The paper traces the process of lyrical adaptation, music generation, video composition, avatar synthesis, and optional browser-based interaction. And the paper contributes a reproducible workflow and a concrete example of syllabus reauthoring. The discussion in this paper positions the singing syllabus as a supplement to, not a replacement for, the formal written syllabus and identifies future directions for empirical evaluation. The complete implementation described in this paper is publicly available at https://github.com/xinxingwu-uk/SSVA

arXiv:2605.18916v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We investigate Counterfactual Video Foley Generation, which aims to adopt a sound-source identity that contradicts the visual evidence while remaining temporally synchronized to a silent video. Existing Video&Text-to-Audio (VT2A) models struggle with this, often remaining anchored to the visually implied sound source when video and text contents disagree. We present ConterFlow, an inference-time dual-phase sampling scheme for pretrained flow-matching VT2A models. Phase 1 builds a video-derived temporal structure while suppressing the visually implied source; Phase 2 drops video conditioning to focus entirely on shaping audio timbre toward the target prompt. ConterFlow substantially improves counterfactual Video Foley generation compared to naive negative prompting and state-of-the-art baselines. To evaluate replacement quality, we propose a metric leveraging a text-audio co-embedding space to measure both target-prompt evidence and residual visually implied source leakage. Video demonstrations and code are available at https://gyubin-lee.github.io/counterflow-demo/

arXiv:2604.03679v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) excel at complex reasoning, yet their efficiency is limited by the surging cognitive overhead of long thought traces. In this paper, we propose LightThinker, a method that enables LLMs to dynamically compress intermediate thoughts into compact semantic representations. However, static compression often struggles with complex reasoning where the irreversible loss of intermediate details can lead to logical bottlenecks. To address this, we evolve the framework into LightThinker++, introducing Explicit Adaptive Memory Management. This paradigm shifts to behavioral-level management by incorporating explicit memory primitives, supported by a specialized trajectory synthesis pipeline to train purposeful memory scheduling. Extensive experiments demonstrate the framework's versatility across three dimensions. (1) LightThinker reduces peak token usage by 70% and inference time by 26% with minimal accuracy loss. (2) In standard reasoning, LightThinker++ slashes peak token usage by 69.9% while yielding a +2.42% accuracy gain under the same context budget for maximum performance. (3) Most notably, in long-horizon agentic tasks, it maintains a stable footprint beyond 80 rounds (a 60%-70% reduction), achieving an average performance gain of 14.8% across different complex scenarios. Overall, our work provides a scalable direction for sustaining deep LLM reasoning over extended horizons with minimal overhead.

arXiv:2604.04229v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning aligned multimodal embeddings from weakly paired, label-free corpora is challenging: pipelines often provide only pre-extracted features, clips contain multiple events, and spurious co-occurrences. We propose HSC-MAE (Hierarchical Semantic Correlation-Aware Masked Autoencoder), a dual-path teacher-student framework that enforces semantic consistency across three complementary levels of representation - from coarse to fine: (i) global-level canonical-geometry correlation via DCCA, which aligns audio and visual embeddings within a shared modality-invariant subspace; (ii) local-level neighborhood-semantics correlation via teacher-mined soft top-k affinities, which preserves multi-positive relational structure among semantically similar instances; and (iii) sample-level conditional-sufficiency correlation via masked autoencoding, which ensures individual embeddings retain discriminative semantic content under partial observation. Concretely, a student MAE path is trained with masked feature reconstruction and affinity-weighted soft top-k InfoNCE; an EMA teacher operating on unmasked inputs via the CCA path supplies stable canonical geometry and soft positives. Learnable multi-task weights reconcile competing objectives, and an optional distillation loss transfers teacher geometry into the student. Experiments on AVE and VEGAS demonstrate substantial mAP improvements over strong unsupervised baselines, validating that HSC-MAE yields robust and well-structured audio-visual representations.

arXiv:2604.04875v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Video mashup creation represents a complex video editing paradigm that recomposes existing footage to craft engaging audio-visual experiences, demanding intricate orchestration across semantic, visual, and auditory dimensions and multiple levels. However, existing automated editing frameworks often overlook the cross-level multimodal orchestration to achieve professional-grade fluidity, resulting in disjointed sequences with abrupt visual transitions and musical misalignment. To address this, we formulate video mashup creation as a Multimodal Coherency Satisfaction Problem (MMCSP) and propose the DIRECT framework. Simulating a professional production pipeline, our hierarchical multi-agent framework decomposes the challenge into three cascade levels: the Screenwriter for source-aware global structural anchoring, the Director for instantiating adaptive editing intent and guidance, and the Editor for intent-guided shot sequence editing with fine-grained optimization. We further introduce Mashup-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark with tailored metrics for visual continuity and auditory alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DIRECT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both objective metrics and human subjective evaluation. Project page and code: https://github.com/AK-DREAM/DIRECT

arXiv:2410.21169v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Document parsing (DP) transforms unstructured or semi-structured documents into structured, machine-readable representations, enabling downstream applications such as knowledge base construction and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). This survey provides a comprehensive and timely review of document parsing research. We propose a systematic taxonomy that organizes existing approaches into modular pipeline-based systems and unified models driven by Vision-Language Models (VLMs). We provide a detailed review of key components in pipeline systems, including layout analysis and the recognition of heterogeneous content such as text, tables, mathematical expressions, and visual elements, and then systematically track the evolution of specialized VLMs for document parsing. Additionally, we summarize widely adopted evaluation metrics and high-quality benchmarks that establish current standards for parsing quality. Finally, we discuss key open challenges, including robustness to complex layouts, reliability of VLM-based parsing, and inference efficiency, and outline directions for building more accurate and scalable document intelligence systems.

arXiv:2604.01654v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in video generation have made AI-synthesized content increasingly difficult to distinguish from real footage. We propose a physics-based authentication signature that real cameras produce naturally, but that generative models cannot faithfully reproduce. Our approach exploits the Moir\'e effect: the interference fringes formed when a camera views a compact two-layer grating structure. We derive the Moir\'e motion invariant, showing that fringe phase and grating image displacement are linearly coupled by optical geometry, independent of viewing distance and grating structure. A verifier extracts both signals from video and tests their correlation. We validate the invariant on both real-captured and AI-generated videos from multiple state-of-the-art generators, and find that real and AI-generated videos produce significantly different correlation signatures, suggesting a robust means of differentiating them. Our work demonstrates that deterministic optical phenomena can serve as physically grounded, verifiable signatures against AI-generated video.

arXiv:2603.28774v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This demo introduces Focus360, a system designed to enhance user engagement in 360{\deg} VR videos by guiding attention to key elements within the scene. Using natural language descriptions, the system identifies important elements and applies a combination of visual effects to guide attention seamlessly. At the demonstration venue, participants can experience a 360{\deg} Safari Tour, showcasing the system's ability to improve user focus while maintaining an immersive experience.

arXiv:2603.29520v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Encrypted traffic classification is a critical task for network security. While deep learning has advanced this field, the occlusion of payload semantics by encryption severely challenges standard modeling approaches. Most existing frameworks rely on static and homogeneous pipelines that apply uniform parameter sharing and static fusion strategies across all inputs. This one-size-fits-all static design is inherently flawed: by forcing structured headers and randomized payloads into a unified processing pipeline, it inevitably entangles the raw protocol signals with stochastic encryption noise, thereby degrading the fine-grained discriminative features. In this paper, we propose TrafficMoE, a framework that breaks through the bottleneck of static modeling by establishing a Disentangle-Filter-Aggregate (DFA) paradigm. Specifically, to resolve the structural between-components conflict, the architecture disentangles headers and payloads using dual-branch sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE), enabling modality-specific modeling. To mitigate the impact of stochastic noise, an uncertainty-aware filtering mechanism is introduced to quantify reliability and selectively suppress high-variance representations. Finally, to overcome the limitations of static fusion, a routing-guided strategy aggregates cross-modality features dynamically, that adaptively weighs contributions based on traffic context. With this DFA paradigm, TrafficMoE maximizes representational efficiency by focusing solely on the most discriminative traffic features. Extensive experiments on six datasets demonstrate TrafficMoE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, validating the necessity of heterogeneity-aware modeling in encrypted traffic analysis. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/Posuly/TrafficMoE_main.

arXiv:2603.29537v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Network traffic classification using self-supervised pre-training models based on Masked Autoencoders (MAE) has demonstrated a huge potential. However, existing methods are confined to isolated byte-level reconstruction of individual flows, lacking adequate perception of the multi-granularity contextual relationship in traffic. To address this limitation, we propose Mean MAE (MMAE), a teacher-student MAE paradigm with flow mixing strategy for building encrypted traffic pre-training model. MMAE employs a self-distillation mechanism for teacher-student interaction, where the teacher provides unmasked flow-level semantic supervision to advance the student from local byte reconstruction to multi-granularity comprehension. To break the information bottleneck in individual flows, we introduce a dynamic Flow Mixing (FlowMix) strategy to replace traditional random masking mechanism. By constructing challenging cross-flow mixed samples with interferences, it compels the model to learn discriminative representations from distorted tokens. Furthermore, we design a Packet-importance aware Mask Predictor (PMP) equipped with an attention bias mechanism that leverages packet-level side-channel statistics to dynamically mask tokens with high semantic density. Numerous experiments on a number of datasets covering encrypted applications, malware, and attack traffic demonstrate that MMAE achieves state-of-the-art performance. The code is available at https://github.com/lx6c78/MMAE

arXiv:2511.22715v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in jointly understanding text, images, and videos, often evaluated via Visual Question Answering (VQA). However, even state-of-the-art MLLMs struggle with domain-specific or knowledge-intensive queries, where relevant information is underrepresented in pre-training data. Knowledge-based VQA (KB-VQA) addresses this by retrieving external documents to condition answer generation, but current retrieval-augmented approaches suffer from low precision, noisy passages, and limited reasoning. To address this, we propose ReAG, a novel Reasoning-Augmented Multimodal RAG approach that combines coarse- and fine-grained retrieval with a critic model that filters irrelevant passages, ensuring high-quality additional context. The model follows a multi-stage training strategy leveraging reinforcement learning to enhance reasoning over retrieved content, while supervised fine-tuning serves only as a cold start. Extensive experiments on Encyclopedic-VQA and InfoSeek demonstrate that ReAG significantly outperforms prior methods, improving answer accuracy and providing interpretable reasoning grounded in retrieved evidence.

arXiv:2603.22466v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Always-on sensing is essential for next-generation edge/wearable AI systems, yet continuous high-fidelity RGB video capture remains prohibitively expensive for resource-constrained mobile and edge platforms. We present a new paradigm for efficient streaming video understanding: grayscale-always, color-on-demand. Through preliminary studies, we discover that color is not always necessary. Sparse RGB frames suffice for comparable performance when temporal structure is preserved via continuous grayscale streams. Building on this insight, we propose ColorTrigger, an online training-free trigger that selectively activates color capture based on windowed grayscale affinity analysis. Designed for real-time edge deployment, ColorTrigger uses lightweight quadratic programming to detect chromatic redundancy causally, coupled with credit-budgeted control and dynamic token routing to jointly reduce sensing and inference costs. On streaming video understanding benchmarks, ColorTrigger achieves 91.6% of full-color baseline performance while using only 8.1% RGB frames, demonstrating substantial color redundancy in natural videos and enabling practical always-on video sensing on resource-constrained devices.

arXiv:2603.22492v2 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inference-time scaling has emerged as an effective way to improve generative models at test time by using a verifier to score and select candidate outputs. A common choice is to employ Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) as verifiers, which can improve performance but introduce substantial inference-time cost. Indeed, diffusion pipelines operate in an autoencoder latent space to reduce computation, yet MLLM verifiers still require decoding candidates to pixel space and re-encoding them into the visual embedding space, leading to redundant and costly operations. In this work, we propose Verifier on Hidden States (VHS), a verifier that operates directly on intermediate hidden representations of Diffusion Transformer (DiT) single-step generators. VHS analyzes generator features without decoding to pixel space, thereby reducing the per-candidate verification cost while improving or matching the performance of MLLM-based competitors. We show that, under tiny inference budgets with only a small number of candidates per prompt, VHS enables more efficient inference-time scaling reducing joint generation-and-verification time by 63.3%, compute FLOPs by 51% and VRAM usage by 14.5% with respect to a standard MLLM verifier, achieving a +2.7% improvement on GenEval at the same inference-time budget.

arXiv:2603.13099v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce **CRYSTAL** (*__C__lear __R__easoning via __Y__ielded __S__teps, __T__raceability and __L__ogic*), a diagnostic benchmark with 6,372 instances that evaluates multimodal reasoning through verifiable intermediate steps. We propose two complementary metrics: *Match F1*, which scores step-level precision and recall via semantic similarity matching, and *Ordered Match F1*, which further penalizes disordered reasoning chains. References are constructed through a Delphi-inspired pipeline where four independent MLLMs generate trajectories, aggregated via semantic clustering and validated through human quality gates. Evaluation of 20 MLLMs, including commercial frontier systems not used during benchmark construction, reveals systematic failures invisible to accuracy: universal cherry-picking (precision far exceeds recall), non-monotonic scaling trade-offs, and disordered reasoning where no competitive model preserves more than 60% of matched steps in correct order. Beyond evaluation, we propose the **Causal Process Reward (CPR)**, a multiplicative reward that couples answer correctness with step-level alignment, and **CPR-Curriculum**, which progressively increases reasoning difficulty during training. CPR-Curriculum achieves +32% Match F1 via GRPO where additive reward strategies fail, improving reasoning without manual step annotation.