Kaituo Feng

Hanjie Li, Changsheng Li, Kaituo Feng et al.

Graph structured data often possess dynamic characters in nature. Recent years have witnessed the increasing attentions paid to dynamic graph neural networks for modelling graph data. However, almost all existing approaches operate under the assumption that, upon the establishment of a new link, the embeddings of the neighboring nodes should undergo updates to learn temporal dynamics. Nevertheless, these approaches face the following limitation: If the node introduced by a new connection contains noisy information, propagating its knowledge to other nodes becomes unreliable and may even lead to the collapse of the model. In this paper, we propose Ada-DyGNN: a robust knowledge Adaptation framework via reinforcement learning for Dynamic Graph Neural Networks. In contrast to previous approaches, which update the embeddings of the neighbor nodes immediately after adding a new link, Ada-DyGNN adaptively determines which nodes should be updated. Considering that the decision to update the embedding of one neighbor node can significantly impact other neighbor nodes, we conceptualize the node update selection as a sequence decision problem and employ reinforcement learning to address it effectively. By this means, we can adaptively propagate knowledge to other nodes for learning robust node embedding representations. To the best of our knowledge, our approach constitutes the first attempt to explore robust knowledge adaptation via reinforcement learning specifically tailored for dynamic graph neural networks. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that Ada-DyGNN achieves the state-of-the-art performance. In addition, we conduct experiments by introducing different degrees of noise into the dataset, quantitatively and qualitatively illustrating the robustness of Ada-DyGNN.

Kaituo Feng, Changsheng Li, Ye Yuan et al.

Knowledge distillation (KD) has demonstrated its effectiveness to boost the performance of graph neural networks (GNNs), where its goal is to distill knowledge from a deeper teacher GNN into a shallower student GNN. However, it is actually difficult to train a satisfactory teacher GNN due to the well-known over-parametrized and over-smoothing issues, leading to invalid knowledge transfer in practical applications. In this paper, we propose the first Free-direction Knowledge Distillation framework via Reinforcement learning for GNNs, called FreeKD, which is no longer required to provide a deeper well-optimized teacher GNN. The core idea of our work is to collaboratively build two shallower GNNs in an effort to exchange knowledge between them via reinforcement learning in a hierarchical way. As we observe that one typical GNN model often has better and worse performances at different nodes during training, we devise a dynamic and free-direction knowledge transfer strategy that consists of two levels of actions: 1) node-level action determines the directions of knowledge transfer between the corresponding nodes of two networks; and then 2) structure-level action determines which of the local structures generated by the node-level actions to be propagated. In essence, our FreeKD is a general and principled framework which can be naturally compatible with GNNs of different architectures. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate our FreeKD outperforms two base GNNs in a large margin, and shows its efficacy to various GNNs. More surprisingly, our FreeKD has comparable or even better performance than traditional KD algorithms that distill knowledge from a deeper and stronger teacher GNN.

Kaituo Feng, Manyuan Zhang, Shuang Chen et al.

Recent image generation models have shown strong capabilities in generating high-fidelity and photorealistic images. However, they are fundamentally constrained by frozen internal knowledge, thus often failing on real-world scenarios that are knowledge-intensive or require up-to-date information. In this paper, we present Gen-Searcher, as the first attempt to train a search-augmented image generation agent, which performs multi-hop reasoning and search to collect the textual knowledge and reference images needed for grounded generation. To achieve this, we construct a tailored data pipeline and curate two high-quality datasets, Gen-Searcher-SFT-10k and Gen-Searcher-RL-6k, containing diverse search-intensive prompts and corresponding ground-truth synthesis images. We further introduce KnowGen, a comprehensive benchmark that explicitly requires search-grounded external knowledge for image generation and evaluates models from multiple dimensions. Based on these resources, we train Gen-Searcher with SFT followed by agentic reinforcement learning with dual reward feedback, which combines text-based and image-based rewards to provide more stable and informative learning signals for GRPO training. Experiments show that Gen-Searcher brings substantial gains, improving Qwen-Image by around 16 points on KnowGen and 15 points on WISE. We hope this work can serve as an open foundation for search agents in image generation, and we fully open-source our data, models, and code.

Yilei Jiang, Jinyuan Hu, Qianyin Xiao et al.

Game development sits at the intersection of creative design and intricate software engineering, demanding the joint orchestration of game engines, real-time loops, and tightly coupled state across many files. While Large Language Models (LLMs) and code agents now solve isolated programming tasks with ease, they consistently stumble when asked to produce a fully playable game from a high-level design, collapsing under cross-file inconsistencies, broken scene wiring, and logical incoherence. We bridge this gap with OpenGame, the first open-source agentic framework explicitly designed for end-to-end web game creation. At its core lies Game Skill, a reusable, evolving capability composed of a Template Skill that grows a library of project skeletons from experience and a Debug Skill that maintains a living protocol of verified fixes - together enabling the agent to scaffold stable architectures and systematically repair integration errors rather than patch isolated syntax bugs. Powering this framework is GameCoder-27B, a code LLM specialized for game engine mastery through a three-stage pipeline of continual pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, and execution-grounded reinforcement learning. Since verifying interactive playability is fundamentally harder than checking static code, we further introduce OpenGame-Bench, an evaluation pipeline that scores agentic game generation along Build Health, Visual Usability, and Intent Alignment via headless browser execution and VLM judging. Across 150 diverse game prompts, OpenGame establishes a new state-of-the-art. We hope OpenGame pushes code agents beyond discrete software engineering problems and toward building complex, interactive real-world applications. Our framework will be fully open-sourced.

Chaoyang Wang, Kaituo Feng, Dongyang Chen et al.

Recent advances have shown that multimodal large language models (MLLMs) benefit from multimodal interleaved chain-of-thought (CoT) with vision tool interactions. However, existing open-source models often exhibit blind tool-use reasoning patterns, invoking vision tools even when they are unnecessary, which significantly increases inference overhead and degrades model performance. To this end, we propose AdaTooler-V, an MLLM that performs adaptive tool-use by determining whether a visual problem truly requires tools. First, we introduce AT-GRPO, a reinforcement learning algorithm that adaptively adjusts reward scales based on the Tool Benefit Score of each sample, encouraging the model to invoke tools only when they provide genuine improvements. Moreover, we construct two datasets to support training: AdaTooler-V-CoT-100k for SFT cold start and AdaTooler-V-300k for RL with verifiable rewards across single-image, multi-image, and video data. Experiments across twelve benchmarks demonstrate the strong reasoning capability of AdaTooler-V, outperforming existing methods in diverse visual reasoning tasks. Notably, AdaTooler-V-7B achieves an accuracy of 89.8\% on the high-resolution benchmark V*, surpassing the commercial proprietary model GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro. All code, models, and data are released.

Kaituo Feng, Changsheng Li, Xiaolu Zhang et al.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) for temporal graphs have recently attracted increasing attentions, where a common assumption is that the class set for nodes is closed. However, in real-world scenarios, it often faces the open set problem with the dynamically increased class set as the time passes by. This will bring two big challenges to the existing dynamic GNN methods: (i) How to dynamically propagate appropriate information in an open temporal graph, where new class nodes are often linked to old class nodes. This case will lead to a sharp contradiction. This is because typical GNNs are prone to make the embeddings of connected nodes become similar, while we expect the embeddings of these two interactive nodes to be distinguishable since they belong to different classes. (ii) How to avoid catastrophic knowledge forgetting over old classes when learning new classes occurred in temporal graphs. In this paper, we propose a general and principled learning approach for open temporal graphs, called OTGNet, with the goal of addressing the above two challenges. We assume the knowledge of a node can be disentangled into class-relevant and class-agnostic one, and thus explore a new message passing mechanism by extending the information bottleneck principle to only propagate class-agnostic knowledge between nodes of different classes, avoiding aggregating conflictive information. Moreover, we devise a strategy to select both important and diverse triad sub-graph structures for effective class-incremental learning. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets of different domains demonstrate the superiority of our method, compared to the baselines.

Bokang Yang, Xinyi Sun, Kaituo Feng et al.

Visual perception connects high-level semantic understanding to pixel-level perception, but most existing settings assume that the decisive evidence for identifying a target is already in the image or frozen model knowledge. We study a more practical yet harder open-world case where a visible object must first be resolved from external facts, recent events, long-tail entities, or multi-hop relations before it can be localized. We formalize this challenge as Perception Deep Research and introduce WebEye, an object-anchored benchmark with verifiable evidence, knowledge-intensive queries, precise box/mask annotations, and three task views: Search-based Grounding, Search-based Segmentation, and Search-based VQA. WebEyes contains 120 images, 473 annotated object instances, 645 unique QA pairs, and 1,927 task samples. We further propose Pixel-Searcher, an agentic search-to-pixel workflow that resolves hidden target identities and binds them to boxes, masks, or grounded answers. Experiments show that Pixel-Searcher achieves the strongest open-source performance across all three task views, while failures mainly arise from evidence acquisition, identity resolution, and visual instance binding.

Kaituo Feng, Kaixiong Gong, Bohao Li et al.

Inspired by DeepSeek-R1's success in eliciting reasoning abilities through rule-based reinforcement learning (RL), we introduce Video-R1 as the first attempt to systematically explore the R1 paradigm for incentivizing video reasoning within multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, directly applying RL training with the GRPO algorithm to video reasoning presents two primary challenges: (i) a lack of temporal modeling for video reasoning, and (ii) the scarcity of high-quality video-reasoning data. To address these issues, we first propose the T-GRPO algorithm, which encourages models to utilize temporal information in videos for reasoning. Additionally, instead of relying solely on video data, we incorporate high-quality image-reasoning data into the training process. We have constructed two datasets: Video-R1-CoT-165k for SFT cold start and Video-R1-260k for RL training, both comprising image and video data. Experimental results demonstrate that Video-R1 achieves significant improvements on video reasoning benchmarks such as VideoMMMU and VSI-Bench, as well as on general video benchmarks including MVBench and TempCompass, etc. Notably, Video-R1-7B attains a 37.1% accuracy on video spatial reasoning benchmark VSI-bench, surpassing the commercial proprietary model GPT-4o. All code, models, and data are released in: https://github.com/tulerfeng/Video-R1.

Kaituo Feng, Yikun Miao, Changsheng Li et al.

Knowledge distillation (KD) has shown to be effective to boost the performance of graph neural networks (GNNs), where the typical objective is to distill knowledge from a deeper teacher GNN into a shallower student GNN. However, it is often quite challenging to train a satisfactory deeper GNN due to the well-known over-parametrized and over-smoothing issues, leading to invalid knowledge transfer in practical applications. In this paper, we propose the first Free-direction Knowledge Distillation framework via reinforcement learning for GNNs, called FreeKD, which is no longer required to provide a deeper well-optimized teacher GNN. Our core idea is to collaboratively learn two shallower GNNs to exchange knowledge between them. As we observe that one typical GNN model often exhibits better and worse performances at different nodes during training, we devise a dynamic and free-direction knowledge transfer strategy that involves two levels of actions: 1) node-level action determines the directions of knowledge transfer between the corresponding nodes of two networks; and then 2) structure-level action determines which of the local structures generated by the node-level actions to be propagated. Additionally, considering that different augmented graphs can potentially capture distinct perspectives of the graph data, we propose FreeKD-Prompt that learns undistorted and diverse augmentations based on prompt learning for exchanging varied knowledge. Furthermore, instead of confining knowledge exchange within two GNNs, we develop FreeKD++ to enable free-direction knowledge transfer among multiple GNNs. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate our approaches outperform the base GNNs in a large margin. More surprisingly, our FreeKD has comparable or even better performance than traditional KD algorithms that distill knowledge from a deeper and stronger teacher GNN.

Shuang Chen, Kaituo Feng, Hangting Chen et al.

Deep search has become a crucial capability for frontier multimodal agents, enabling models to solve complex questions through active search, evidence verification, and multi-step reasoning. Despite rapid progress, top-tier multimodal search agents remain difficult to reproduce, largely due to the absence of open high-quality training data, transparent trajectory synthesis pipelines, or detailed training recipes. To this end, we introduce OpenSearch-VL, a fully open-source recipe for training frontier multimodal deep search agents with agentic reinforcement learning. First, we curated a dedicated pipeline to construct high-quality training data through Wikipedia path sampling, fuzzy entity rewriting, and source-anchor visual grounding, which jointly reduce shortcuts and one-step retrieval collapse. Based on this pipeline, we curate two training datasets, SearchVL-SFT-36k for SFT and SearchVL-RL-8k for RL. Besides, we design a diverse tool environment that unifies text search, image search, OCR, cropping, sharpening, super-resolution, and perspective correction, enabling agents to combine active perception with external knowledge acquisition. Finally, we propose a multi-turn fatal-aware GRPO training algorithm that handles cascading tool failures by masking post-failure tokens while preserving useful pre-failure reasoning through one-sided advantage clamping. Built on this recipe, OpenSearch-VL delivers substantial performance gains, with over 10-point average improvements across seven benchmarks, and achieves results comparable to proprietary commercial models on several tasks. We will release all data, code, and models to support open research on multimodal deep search agents.

Shiye Wang, Kaituo Feng, Changsheng Li et al.

Typical Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNets) depend heavily on large amounts of image data and resort to an iterative optimization algorithm (e.g., SGD or Adam) to learn network parameters, which makes training very time- and resource-intensive. In this paper, we propose a new training paradigm and formulate the parameter learning of ConvNets into a prediction task: given a ConvNet architecture, we observe there exist correlations between image datasets and their corresponding optimal network parameters, and explore if we can learn a hyper-mapping between them to capture the relations, such that we can directly predict the parameters of the network for an image dataset never seen during the training phase. To do this, we put forward a new hypernetwork based model, called PudNet, which intends to learn a mapping between datasets and their corresponding network parameters, and then predicts parameters for unseen data with only a single forward propagation. Moreover, our model benefits from a series of adaptive hyper recurrent units sharing weights to capture the dependencies of parameters among different network layers. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method achieves good efficacy for unseen image datasets on two kinds of settings: Intra-dataset prediction and Inter-dataset prediction. Our PudNet can also well scale up to large-scale datasets, e.g., ImageNet-1K. It takes 8967 GPU seconds to train ResNet-18 on the ImageNet-1K using GC from scratch and obtain a top-5 accuracy of 44.65%. However, our PudNet costs only 3.89 GPU seconds to predict the network parameters of ResNet-18 achieving comparable performance (44.92%), more than 2,300 times faster than the traditional training paradigm.

Dian Zheng, Manyuan Zhang, Hongyu Li et al.

Currently, enhancing Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) with image understanding, generation, and editing capabilities mainly relies on mixed multi-task training. Due to inherent task conflicts, such strategy requires complex multi-stage pipelines, massive data mixing, and balancing tricks, merely resulting in a performance trade-off rather than true mutual reinforcement. To break this paradigm, we propose Uni-Edit, an intelligent image editing task that serves as the first general task for UMM tuning. Unlike complex mixed pipelines, Uni-Edit improves performance across all three abilities at once using only one task, one training stage, and one dataset. Specifically, we first identify image editing as an inherently ideal general task, as it naturally demands both visual understanding and generation. However, existing editing data relies on simplistic instructions that severely underutilize a model's understanding capacity. To address this, we introduce the first automated and scalable data synthesis pipeline for intelligent editing, transforming diverse VQA data into complex and effective editing instructions with embedded questions and nested logic. This yields Uni-Edit-148k, pairing diverse reasoning-intensive instructions with high-quality edited images. Extensive experiments on BAGEL and Janus-Pro demonstrate that tuning solely on Uni-Edit achieves comprehensive enhancements across all three capabilities without any auxiliary operations.

Kaixiong Gong, Kaituo Feng, Bohao Li et al.

Recently, multimodal large language models (MLLMs), such as GPT-4o, Gemini 1.5 Pro, and Reka Core, have expanded their capabilities to include vision and audio modalities. While these models demonstrate impressive performance across a wide range of audio-visual applications, our proposed DeafTest reveals that MLLMs often struggle with simple tasks humans find trivial: 1) determining which of two sounds is louder, and 2) determining which of two sounds has a higher pitch. Motivated by these observations, we introduce AV-Odyssey Bench, a comprehensive audio-visual benchmark designed to assess whether those MLLMs can truly understand the audio-visual information. This benchmark encompasses 4,555 carefully crafted problems, each incorporating text, visual, and audio components. To successfully infer answers, models must effectively leverage clues from both visual and audio inputs. To ensure precise and objective evaluation of MLLM responses, we have structured the questions as multiple-choice, eliminating the need for human evaluation or LLM-assisted assessment. We benchmark a series of closed-source and open-source models and summarize the observations. By revealing the limitations of current models, we aim to provide useful insight for future dataset collection and model development.

Kaixuan Fan, Kaituo Feng, Haoming Lyu et al.

Recent advances have shown success in eliciting strong reasoning abilities in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) through rule-based reinforcement learning (RL) with outcome rewards. However, this paradigm typically lacks supervision over the thinking process leading to the final outcome.As a result, the model may learn sub-optimal reasoning strategies, which can hinder its generalization ability. In light of this, we propose SophiaVL-R1, as an attempt to add reward signals for the thinking process in this paradigm. To achieve this, we first train a thinking reward model that evaluates the quality of the entire thinking process. Given that the thinking reward may be unreliable for certain samples due to reward hacking, we propose the Trust-GRPO method, which assigns a trustworthiness weight to the thinking reward during training. This weight is computed based on the thinking reward comparison of responses leading to correct answers versus incorrect answers, helping to mitigate the impact of potentially unreliable thinking rewards. Moreover, we design an annealing training strategy that gradually reduces the thinking reward over time, allowing the model to rely more on the accurate rule-based outcome reward in later training stages. Experiments show that our SophiaVL-R1 surpasses a series of reasoning MLLMs on various benchmarks (e.g., MathVisita, MMMU), demonstrating strong reasoning and generalization capabilities. Notably, our SophiaVL-R1-7B even outperforms LLaVA-OneVision-72B on most benchmarks, despite the latter having 10 times more parameters. All code, models, and datasets are made publicly available at https://github.com/kxfan2002/SophiaVL-R1.

Kaixuan Fan, Kaituo Feng, Manyuan Zhang et al.

Agentic Reinforcement Learning (Agentic RL) has achieved notable success in enabling agents to perform complex reasoning and tool use. However, most methods still relies on sparse outcome-based reward for training. Such feedback fails to differentiate intermediate reasoning quality, leading to suboptimal training results. In this paper, we introduce Agent Reasoning Reward Model (Agent-RRM), a multi-faceted reward model that produces structured feedback for agentic trajectories, including (1) an explicit reasoning trace , (2) a focused critique that provides refinement guidance by highlighting reasoning flaws, and (3) an overall score that evaluates process performance. Leveraging these signals, we systematically investigate three integration strategies: Reagent-C (text-augmented refinement), Reagent-R (reward-augmented guidance), and Reagent-U (unified feedback integration). Extensive evaluations across 12 diverse benchmarks demonstrate that Reagent-U yields substantial performance leaps, achieving 43.7% on GAIA and 46.2% on WebWalkerQA, validating the effectiveness of our reasoning reward model and training schemes. Code, models, and datasets are all released to facilitate future research.

Kaituo Feng, Manyuan Zhang, Hongyu Li et al.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently achieved remarkable success in eliciting visual reasoning within Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, existing approaches typically train separate models for different tasks and treat image and video reasoning as disjoint domains. This results in limited scalability toward a multimodal reasoning generalist, which restricts practical versatility and hinders potential knowledge sharing across tasks and modalities. To this end, we propose OneThinker, an all-in-one reasoning model that unifies image and video understanding across diverse fundamental visual tasks, including question answering, captioning, spatial and temporal grounding, tracking, and segmentation. To achieve this, we construct the OneThinker-600k training corpus covering all these tasks and employ commercial models for CoT annotation, resulting in OneThinker-SFT-340k for SFT cold start. Furthermore, we propose EMA-GRPO to handle reward heterogeneity in multi-task RL by tracking task-wise moving averages of reward standard deviations for balanced optimization. Extensive experiments on diverse visual benchmarks show that OneThinker delivers strong performance on 31 benchmarks, across 10 fundamental visual understanding tasks. Moreover, it exhibits effective knowledge transfer between certain tasks and preliminary zero-shot generalization ability, marking a step toward a unified multimodal reasoning generalist. All code, model, and data are released.

Zhen Fang, Wenxuan Huang, Yu Zeng et al.

Existing Flow Matching (FM) text-to-image models suffer from two critical bottlenecks under multi-task alignment: the reward sparsity induced by scalar-valued rewards, and the gradient interference arising from jointly optimizing heterogeneous objectives, which together give rise to a 'seesaw effect' of competing metrics and pervasive reward hacking. Inspired by the success of On-Policy Distillation (OPD) in the large language model community, we propose Flow-OPD, the first unified post-training framework that integrates on-policy distillation into Flow Matching models. Flow-OPD adopts a two-stage alignment strategy: it first cultivates domain-specialized teacher models via single-reward GRPO fine-tuning, allowing each expert to reach its performance ceiling in isolation; it then establishes a robust initial policy through a Flow-based Cold-Start scheme and seamlessly consolidates heterogeneous expertise into a single student via a three-step orchestration of on-policy sampling, task-routing labeling, and dense trajectory-level supervision. We further introduce Manifold Anchor Regularization (MAR), which leverages a task-agnostic teacher to provide full-data supervision that anchors generation to a high-quality manifold, effectively mitigating the aesthetic degradation commonly observed in purely RL-driven alignment. Built upon Stable Diffusion 3.5 Medium, Flow-OPD raises the GenEval score from 63 to 92 and the OCR accuracy from 59 to 94, yielding an overall improvement of roughly 10 points over vanilla GRPO, while preserving image fidelity and human-preference alignment and exhibiting an emergent 'teacher-surpassing' effect. These results establish Flow-OPD as a scalable alignment paradigm for building generalist text-to-image models.

Xinlei Yu, Zhangquan Chen, Yongbo He et al.

Latent space is rapidly emerging as a native substrate for language-based models. While modern systems are still commonly understood through explicit token-level generation, an increasing body of work shows that many critical internal processes are more naturally carried out in continuous latent space than in human-readable verbal traces. This shift is driven by the structural limitations of explicit-space computation, including linguistic redundancy, discretization bottlenecks, sequential inefficiency, and semantic loss. This survey aims to provide a unified and up-to-date landscape of latent space in language-based models. We organize the survey into five sequential perspectives: Foundation, Evolution, Mechanism, Ability, and Outlook. We begin by delineating the scope of latent space, distinguishing it from explicit or verbal space and from the latent spaces commonly studied in generative visual models. We then trace the field's evolution from early exploratory efforts to the current large-scale expansion. To organize the technical landscape, we examine existing work through the complementary lenses of mechanism and ability. From the perspective of Mechanism, we identify four major lines of development: Architecture, Representation, Computation, and Optimization. From the perspective of Ability, we show how latent space supports a broad capability spectrum spanning Reasoning, Planning, Modeling, Perception, Memory, Collaboration, and Embodiment. Beyond consolidation, we discuss the key open challenges, and outline promising directions for future research. We hope this survey serves not only as a reference for existing work, but also as a foundation for understanding latent space as a general computational and systems paradigm for next-generation intelligence.

Junfei Wu, Jian Guan, Kaituo Feng et al.

As textual reasoning with large language models (LLMs) has advanced significantly, there has been growing interest in enhancing the multimodal reasoning capabilities of large vision-language models (LVLMs). However, existing methods primarily approach multimodal reasoning in a straightforward, text-centric manner, where both reasoning and answer derivation are conducted purely through text, with the only difference being the presence of multimodal input. As a result, these methods often encounter fundamental limitations in spatial reasoning tasks that demand precise geometric understanding and continuous spatial tracking-capabilities that humans achieve through mental visualization and manipulation. To address the limitations, we propose drawing to reason in space, a novel paradigm that enables LVLMs to reason through elementary drawing operations in the visual space. By equipping models with basic drawing operations, including annotating bounding boxes and drawing auxiliary lines, we empower them to express and analyze spatial relationships through direct visual manipulation, meanwhile avoiding the performance ceiling imposed by specialized perception tools in previous tool-integrated reasoning approaches. To cultivate this capability, we develop a three-stage training framework: cold-start training with synthetic data to establish basic drawing abilities, reflective rejection sampling to enhance self-reflection behaviors, and reinforcement learning to directly optimize for target rewards. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model, named VILASR, consistently outperforms existing methods across diverse spatial reasoning benchmarks, involving maze navigation, static spatial reasoning, video-based reasoning, and multi-view-based reasoning tasks, with an average improvement of 18.4%.

Xiaoying Zhang, Hao Sun, Yipeng Zhang et al.

Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) with numerical feedback, such as scalar rewards, have significantly enhanced the complex reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Despite this success, we identify three key challenges encountered by RL with solely numerical feedback: performance plateaus, limited effectiveness of spontaneous self-reflection, and persistent failures. We then demonstrate that RL-finetuned models, even after exhibiting performance plateaus, can generate correct refinements on persistently failed problems by leveraging natural language feedback in the form of critiques. Building on this insight, we propose Critique-GRPO, an online RL framework that integrates both natural language and numerical feedback for effective policy optimization. Critique-GRPO enables LLMs to learn from initial responses and critique-guided self-refinements simultaneously while maintaining exploration. Additionally, we employ a shaping function to amplify learning from correct, especially unfamiliar, refinements and penalize incorrect ones. Extensive experiments with Qwen2.5-7B-Base, Qwen2.5-Math-7B-Base, and Qwen3-8B demonstrate that Critique-GRPO consistently outperforms supervised learning and RL-based fine-tuning methods across eight challenging mathematical, STEM, and general reasoning tasks. Specifically, Critique-GRPO improves average pass@1 scores across all compared methods by approximately +4.4% on Qwen2.5-7B-Base and +3.8% on Qwen3-8B. Notably, Critique-GRPO enables effective self-improvement through self-critiquing, achieving significant gains over GRPO, e.g., +16.7% pass@1 improvement on AIME 2024.

Kaituo Feng, Changsheng Li, Dongchun Ren et al.

End-to-end motion planning models equipped with deep neural networks have shown great potential for enabling full autonomous driving. However, the oversized neural networks render them impractical for deployment on resource-constrained systems, which unavoidably requires more computational time and resources during reference.To handle this, knowledge distillation offers a promising approach that compresses models by enabling a smaller student model to learn from a larger teacher model. Nevertheless, how to apply knowledge distillation to compress motion planners has not been explored so far. In this paper, we propose PlanKD, the first knowledge distillation framework tailored for compressing end-to-end motion planners. First, considering that driving scenes are inherently complex, often containing planning-irrelevant or even noisy information, transferring such information is not beneficial for the student planner. Thus, we design an information bottleneck based strategy to only distill planning-relevant information, rather than transfer all information indiscriminately. Second, different waypoints in an output planned trajectory may hold varying degrees of importance for motion planning, where a slight deviation in certain crucial waypoints might lead to a collision. Therefore, we devise a safety-aware waypoint-attentive distillation module that assigns adaptive weights to different waypoints based on the importance, to encourage the student to accurately mimic more crucial waypoints, thereby improving overall safety. Experiments demonstrate that our PlanKD can boost the performance of smaller planners by a large margin, and significantly reduce their reference time.

Shuang Chen, Quanxin Shou, Hangting Chen et al.

Unified multimodal models provide a natural and promising architecture for understanding diverse and complex real-world knowledge while generating high-quality images. However, they still rely primarily on frozen parametric knowledge, which makes them struggle with real-world image generation involving long-tail and knowledge-intensive concepts. Inspired by the broad success of agents on real-world tasks, we explore agentic modeling to address this limitation. Specifically, we present Unify-Agent, a unified multimodal agent for world-grounded image synthesis, which reframes image generation as an agentic pipeline consisting of prompt understanding, multimodal evidence searching, grounded recaptioning, and final synthesis. To train our model, we construct a tailored multimodal data pipeline and curate 143K high-quality agent trajectories for world-grounded image synthesis, enabling effective supervision over the full agentic generation process. We further introduce FactIP, a benchmark covering 12 categories of culturally significant and long-tail factual concepts that explicitly requires external knowledge grounding. Extensive experiments show that our proposed Unify-Agent substantially improves over its base unified model across diverse benchmarks and real world generation tasks, while approaching the world knowledge capabilities of the strongest closed-source models. As an early exploration of agent-based modeling for world-grounded image synthesis, our work highlights the value of tightly coupling reasoning, searching, and generation for reliable open-world agentic image synthesis.

Jiakang Yuan, Tianshuo Peng, Yilei Jiang et al.

Logical reasoning is a fundamental aspect of human intelligence and an essential capability for multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Despite the significant advancement in multimodal reasoning, existing benchmarks fail to comprehensively evaluate their reasoning abilities due to the lack of explicit categorization for logical reasoning types and an unclear understanding of reasoning. To address these issues, we introduce MME-Reasoning, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the reasoning ability of MLLMs, which covers all three types of reasoning (i.e., inductive, deductive, and abductive) in its questions. We carefully curate the data to ensure that each question effectively evaluates reasoning ability rather than perceptual skills or knowledge breadth, and extend the evaluation protocols to cover the evaluation of diverse questions. Our evaluation reveals substantial limitations of state-of-the-art MLLMs when subjected to holistic assessments of logical reasoning capabilities. Even the most advanced MLLMs show limited performance in comprehensive logical reasoning, with notable performance imbalances across reasoning types. In addition, we conducted an in-depth analysis of approaches such as ``thinking mode'' and Rule-based RL, which are commonly believed to enhance reasoning abilities. These findings highlight the critical limitations and performance imbalances of current MLLMs in diverse logical reasoning scenarios, providing comprehensive and systematic insights into the understanding and evaluation of reasoning capabilities.

Hongyu Li, Manyuan Zhang, Dian Zheng et al.

Instruction-based image editing has emerged as a prominent research area, which, benefiting from image generation foundation models, have achieved high aesthetic quality, making instruction-following capability the primary challenge. Existing approaches improve instruction adherence via supervised or reinforcement learning, yet single-turn success rates remain limited due to inherent stochasticity and a lack of deliberation. In this work, we propose a deliberative editing framework to 'think' while they edit, which simulates the human cognitive loop by iteratively executing a Think-while-Edit cycle: Critiquing results and Refining instructions , followed by Repeating the generation until satisfactory. Specifically, we train a single MLLM, EditThinker, to act as the reasoning engine of this framework, which jointly produce the critique score, reasoning process, and refined instructions. We employ reinforcement learning to align the EditThinker's thinking with its editing, thereby generating more targeted instruction improvements. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate that our approach significantly improves the instruction-following capability of any image editing model by a large margin. We will release our data construction framework, datasets, and models to benefit the community.

Dian Zheng, Manyuan Zhang, Hongyu Li et al.

Unified multimodal models for image generation and understanding represent a significant step toward AGI and have attracted widespread attention from researchers. The main challenge of this task lies in the difficulty in establishing an optimal training paradigm due to inherent conflicting targets in understanding and generation tasks. To alleviate these conflicts and pursue higher performance, many researchers adopt varying degrees of model decoupling (e.g., Double image encoders, MOE/MOT architecture, or frozen MLLM). However, excessive model decoupling can lead to the loss of interleave generation ability, undermining the original intent of unified models. In this work, we aim to explore how to mitigate task conflicts without resorting to model decoupling. Firstly, we analyze why decoupling alleviates conflicts by studying the cross-modal attention behavior of models. We observe that model decoupling essentially drives models toward task-specific multimodal interaction patterns, as seen in Qwen-VL and HunyuanImage, and that the more thorough the decoupling, the more consistent the behavior becomes. Motivated by this observation, we propose Attention Interaction Alignment (AIA) loss, which explicitly learns Task-Specific multimodal interaction patterns during training. To demonstrate the generalizability of our AIA loss, we apply it to Emu3 and Janus-Pro during SFT and post-training stage respectively. Without bells and whistles, AIA not only refines cross-modal attention patterns, but also boosts both generation and understanding performance.

Peiwen Sun, Shiqiang Lang, Dongming Wu et al.

With the current surge in spatial reasoning explorations, researchers have made significant progress in understanding indoor scenes, but still struggle with diverse applications such as robotics and autonomous driving. This paper aims to advance all-scale spatial reasoning across diverse scenarios by tackling two key challenges: 1) the heavy reliance on indoor 3D scans and labor-intensive manual annotations for dataset curation; 2) the absence of effective all-scale scene modeling, which often leads to overfitting to individual scenes. In this paper, we introduce a holistic solution that integrates a structured spatial reasoning knowledge system, scale-aware modeling, and a progressive training paradigm, as the first attempt to broaden the all-scale spatial intelligence of MLLMs to the best of our knowledge. Using a task-specific, specialist-driven automated pipeline, we curate over 38K video scenes across 5 spatial scales to create SpaceVista-1M, a dataset comprising approximately 1M spatial QA pairs spanning 19 diverse task types. While specialist models can inject useful domain knowledge, they are not reliable for evaluation. We then build an all-scale benchmark with precise annotations by manually recording, retrieving, and assembling video-based data. However, naive training with SpaceVista-1M often yields suboptimal results due to the potential knowledge conflict. Accordingly, we introduce SpaceVista-7B, a spatial reasoning model that accepts dense inputs beyond semantics and uses scale as an anchor for scale-aware experts and progressive rewards. Finally, extensive evaluations across 5 benchmarks, including our SpaceVista-Bench, demonstrate competitive performance, showcasing strong generalization across all scales and scenarios. Our dataset, model, and benchmark will be released on https://peiwensun2000.github.io/mm2km .