Xianwei Zhuang

Qiuyue Wang, Mingsheng Li, Jian Guan et al.

Embodied intelligence is often studied through specialized models for individual tasks such as manipulation or navigation, resulting in fragmented capabilities and limited generalization across tasks, environments, and robot embodiments. In this work, we study whether heterogeneous embodied decision-making problems can be unified within a single vision-language-action model. We present Qwen-VLA, a unified embodied foundation model that extends Qwen's vision-language modeling stack from perception, understanding, and reasoning to continuous action and trajectory generation through a DiT-based action decoder. Qwen-VLA is trained with a large-scale joint pretraining recipe over diverse data sources, including robotics manipulation trajectories, human egocentric demonstrations, synthetic simulation data, vision-and-language navigation data, trajectory-centric supervision, and auxiliary vision-language data. To support multiple robot platforms, we introduce embodiment-aware prompt conditioning, where robot-specific textual descriptions specify the current embodiment and control convention. We further cast manipulation, navigation, and trajectory prediction into a unified action-and-trajectory prediction framework, enabling transferable visual grounding, spatial reasoning, and continuous action generation across robot morphologies, task families, and environments. Experiments on manipulation, navigation, and trajectory-centric benchmarks show consistent multi-task performance and out-of-distribution generalization under variations in scene layout, background, lighting, object configuration, and robot embodiment. Qwen-VLA-Instruct achieves 97.9% on LIBERO, 73.7% on Simpler-WidowX, 86.1%/87.2% on RoboTwin-Easy/Hard, 69.0% OSR on R2R, 59.6% SR on RxR, 76.9% average OOD success in real-world ALOHA experiments, and 26.6% zero-shot success on DOMINO dynamic manipulation.

Yuhuan Yang, Xianwei Zhuang, Yuxuan Cai et al.

Recent approaches for segmentation have leveraged pretrained generative models as feature extractors, treating segmentation as a downstream adaptation task via indirect feature retrieval. This implicit use suffers from a fundamental misalignment in representation. It also depends heavily on indirect feature extraction pipelines, which complicate the workflow and limit adaptation. In this paper, we argue that instead of indirect adaptation, segmentation tasks should be trained directly in a generative manner. We identify a key obstacle to this unified formulation: VAE latents of binary masks are sharply distributed, noise robust, and linearly separable, distinct from natural image latents. To bridge this gap, we introduce timesteps sampling strategy for binary masks that emphasizes extreme noise levels for segmentation and moderate noise for image generation, enabling harmonious joint training. We present GenMask, a DiT trains to generate black-and-white segmentation masks as well as colorful images in RGB space under the original generative objective. GenMask preserves the original DiT architecture while removing the need of feature extraction pipelines tailored for segmentation tasks. Empirically, GenMask attains state-of-the-art performance on referring and reasoning segmentation benchmarks and ablations quantify the contribution of each component.

Xianwei Zhuang, Yuxin Xie, Yufan Deng et al.

In this work, we present VARGPT-v1.1, an advanced unified visual autoregressive model that builds upon our previous framework VARGPT. The model preserves the dual paradigm of next-token prediction for visual understanding and next-scale generation for image synthesis. Specifically, VARGPT-v1.1 integrates: (1) a novel training strategy combining iterative visual instruction tuning with reinforcement learning through Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), (2) an expanded training corpus containing 8.3M visual-generative instruction pairs, (3) an upgraded language model backbone using Qwen2, (4) enhanced image generation resolution, and (5) emergent image editing capabilities without architectural modifications. These advancements enable VARGPT-v1.1 to achieve state-of-the-art performance in multimodal understanding and text-to-image instruction-following tasks, demonstrating significant improvements in both comprehension and generation metrics. Notably, through visual instruction tuning, the model acquires image editing functionality while maintaining architectural consistency with its predecessor, revealing the potential for unified visual understanding, generation, and editing. Our findings suggest that well-designed unified visual autoregressive models can effectively adopt flexible training strategies from large language models (LLMs), exhibiting promising scalability. The codebase and model weights are publicly available at https://github.com/VARGPT-family/VARGPT-v1.1.

Yuguo Yin, Yuxin Xie, Wenyuan Yang et al.

Multilingual audio-text retrieval (ML-ATR) is a challenging task that aims to retrieve audio clips or multilingual texts from databases. However, existing ML-ATR schemes suffer from inconsistencies for instance similarity matching across languages. We theoretically analyze the inconsistency in terms of both multilingual modal alignment direction error and weight error, and propose the theoretical weight error upper bound for quantifying the inconsistency. Based on the analysis of the weight error upper bound, we find that the inconsistency problem stems from the data distribution error caused by random sampling of languages. We propose a consistent ML-ATR scheme using 1-to-k contrastive learning and audio-English co-anchor contrastive learning, aiming to mitigate the negative impact of data distribution error on recall and consistency in ML-ATR. Experimental results on the translated AudioCaps and Clotho datasets show that our scheme achieves state-of-the-art performance on recall and consistency metrics for eight mainstream languages, including English. Our code will be available at https://github.com/ATRI-ACL/ATRI-ACL.

Xianwei Zhuang, Zhihong Zhu, Yuxin Xie et al.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) may produce outputs that are unfaithful to reality, also known as visual hallucinations (VH), which significantly impedes their real-world usage. To alleviate VH, various decoding strategies have been proposed to enhance visual information. However, many of these methods may require secondary decoding and rollback, which significantly reduces inference speed. In this work, we propose an efficient plug-and-play decoding algorithm via Visual-Aware Sparsification (VASparse) from the perspective of token sparsity for mitigating VH. VASparse is inspired by empirical observations: (1) the sparse activation of attention in LVLMs, and (2) visual-agnostic tokens sparsification exacerbates VH. Based on these insights, we propose a novel token sparsification strategy that balances efficiency and trustworthiness. Specifically, VASparse implements a visual-aware token selection strategy during decoding to reduce redundant tokens while preserving visual context effectively. Additionally, we innovatively introduce a sparse-based visual contrastive decoding method to recalibrate the distribution of hallucinated outputs without the time overhead associated with secondary decoding. Subsequently, VASparse recalibrates attention scores to penalize attention sinking of LVLMs towards text tokens. Extensive experiments across four popular benchmarks confirm the effectiveness of VASparse in mitigating VH across different LVLM families without requiring additional training or post-processing. Impressively, VASparse achieves state-of-the-art performance for mitigating VH while maintaining competitive decoding speed. Code is available at https://github.com/mengchuang123/VASparse-github.

Xianwei Zhuang, Yuxin Xie, Yufan Deng et al.

We present VARGPT, a novel multimodal large language model (MLLM) that unifies visual understanding and generation within a single autoregressive framework. VARGPT employs a next-token prediction paradigm for visual understanding and a next-scale prediction paradigm for visual autoregressive generation. VARGPT innovatively extends the LLaVA architecture, achieving efficient scale-wise autoregressive visual generation within MLLMs while seamlessly accommodating mixed-modal input and output within a single model framework. Our VARGPT undergoes a three-stage unified training process on specially curated datasets, comprising a pre-training phase and two mixed visual instruction-tuning phases. The unified training strategy are designed to achieve alignment between visual and textual features, enhance instruction following for both understanding and generation, and improve visual generation quality, respectively. Despite its LLAVA-based architecture for multimodel understanding, VARGPT significantly outperforms LLaVA-1.5 across various vision-centric benchmarks, such as visual question-answering and reasoning tasks. Notably, VARGPT naturally supports capabilities in autoregressive visual generation and instruction-to-image synthesis, showcasing its versatility in both visual understanding and generation tasks. Project page is at: \url{https://vargpt-1.github.io/}

Jinghan Ru, Yuxin Xie, Xianwei Zhuang et al.

Web-scale pre-training datasets are the cornerstone of LLMs' success. However, text data curated from the Internet inevitably contains random noise caused by decoding errors or unregulated web content. In contrast to previous works that focus on low quality or synthetic data, our study \textbf{provides the first systematic investigation of such random noise through a cohesive ``What-Why-How'' framework.} Surprisingly, we observed that the resulting increase in the loss of next-token prediction (NTP) was significantly lower than the proportion of random noise even when the model was scaled up to 2.7B. We provide a theoretical justification for this phenomenon, which also elucidates the success of multilingual models and can be applied to multimodal models. On the other hand, experiments show that the model's performance in downstream tasks is not based solely on the NTP loss, which means that random noise may result in degraded downstream performance. To address the potential adverse effects, we introduce a novel plug-and-play Local Gradient Matching loss, which explicitly enhances the denoising capability of the downstream task head by aligning the gradient of normal and perturbed features without requiring knowledge of the model's parameters. Additional experiments on 8 language and 14 vision benchmarks further validate its effectiveness.

Jiehui Luo, Yuguo Yin, Yuxin Xie et al.

Contrastive language-audio pretraining, which aims to unify multimodal representations in a shared embedding space, serves as a cornerstone for building a wide range of applications, from cross-modal retrieval to cutting-edge multimodal large language models. However, we find that the perpendicular component of the pushing force from negative samples in contrastive learning is a double-edged sword: it contains rich supplementary information from negative samples, yet its unconstrained nature causes optimization trajectory drift and training instability. To address this, we propose Support Vector Regularization (SVR), a method that introduces an auxiliary support vector to control this perpendicular component, aiming to harness its rich information while mitigating the associated trajectory drift. The efficacy of SVR is critically governed by its semantic radius, for which we explore two unsupervised modeling strategies: direct parameterization and an adaptive radius predictor module enhanced with constraints to improve its predicting accuracy. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method surpasses widely used baselines like InfoNCE and SigLIP loss across classification, monolingual retrieval, and multilingual retrieval on standard audio-text datasets. Both the theoretical analysis and the experimental results on optimizing trajectory drift validate the correctness and effectiveness of our SVR method.

Siyuan Fu, Xuchen Guo, Mingjun Liu et al.

The dominant paradigm for Audio-Text Retrieval (ATR) relies on mini-batch-based contrastive learning. This process, however, is inherently limited by what we formalize as the Gradient Locality Bottleneck (GLB), which structurally prevents models from leveraging out-of-batch knowledge and thus impairs fine-grained and long-tail learning. While external knowledge-enhanced methods can alleviate the GLB, we identify a critical, unaddressed side effect: the Representation-Drift Mismatch (RDM), where a static knowledge base becomes progressively misaligned with the evolving model, turning guidance into noise. To address this dual challenge, we propose the Adaptive Self-improving Knowledge (ASK) framework, a model-agnostic, plug-and-play solution. ASK breaks the GLB via multi-grained knowledge injection, systematically mitigates RDM through dynamic knowledge refinement, and introduces a novel adaptive reliability weighting scheme to ensure consistent knowledge contributes to optimization. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets with superior, state-of-the-art performance justify the efficacy of our proposed ASK framework.

Lexiang Tang, Xianwei Zhuang, Bang Yang et al.

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across diverse multimodal tasks, yet they remain highly susceptible to visual hallucinations (VH), often producing confident but inaccurate descriptions of visual content. Building on the insight that not all tokens and attention heads contribute equally to VH mitigation, we introduce VisFlow, a lightweight and training-free framework that alleviates hallucinations by directly modulating attention patterns during inference. To address two primary challenges of VH, namely insufficient visual attention and the dominance of language priors, we identify three problematic attention behaviors in LVLMs: (1) disproportionate allocation of attention to uninformative or trailing visual tokens, (2) over-dependence on the previously generated token, and (3) excessive fixation on system prompts that hinders multimodal integration. To overcome these issues, VisFlow introduces a dual-level Attention Intervention, consisting of Token-level Attention Intervention (TAI), which reinforces attention to salient visual regions, and Head-level Attention Intervention (HAI), which suppresses undue focus on system prompts and adjacent text tokens. Together, these interventions strengthen visual alignment while reducing linguistic bias. Extensive experiments across diverse models and benchmarks demonstrate that VisFlow effectively mitigates hallucinations with minimal computational overhead.