Wei Liu

Zihan Xu, Puzhen Wu, Lawrence Chun Man Lau et al.

Document parsing is a foundational step for document understanding tasks such as visual question answering and key information extraction, as it transforms unstructured scanned images into structured representations by extracting textual, visual, and layout information. While numerous Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engines and multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have been developed for this purpose, selecting an appropriate document parsing solution for a given document collection remains challenging, particularly in label-scarce settings. In this work, we conduct a systematic evaluation of text recognition performance across a diverse set of OCR engines and state-of-the-art MLLMs on multiple scanned document benchmarks spanning different domains and languages. Motivated by the limited contextual reasoning capabilities of many OCR engines and the high cost of manual annotations, we propose DocOCR-Eval, an annotation-free evaluation framework for automatic OCR assessment and selection. DocOCR-Eval employs a three-staged correction and ranking strategy to approximate annotation-based tool ordering without ground-truth labels. We show that aggregating across multiple MLLMs progressively improves alignment with annotation-based rankings. Extensive experiments further demonstrate that reliable OCR tool selection can be achieved in realistic, label-limited settings, providing practical guidance for deploying document parsing systems across diverse real-world document collections.

Dingyun Zhang, Lixue Gong, Wei Liu

In line with the prevailing direction of vision research, we explore the integration of both generation and editing capabilities for video and image modalities within a single model. Current approaches to collecting video editing data typically depend on labour-intensive, time-consuming curated procedures--involving object mask annotation, the use of error-introducing pair synthesis via I2V model and ControlNet-like guidance, and VLM-based quality filtering or refinement--and demonstrate limited task scalability. As a result, the diversity of editing tasks remains substantially narrower than that available for image editing models. We develop a pixel-pair temporal warped flow field that can directly generate corresponding video editing samples in real time from image editing samples, and we demonstrate across multiple levels of video editing tasks that a model can learn video editing using only such data. We regard the image modality as a particular form of the video modality. Accordingly, we design a modality mimic generation loss and a modality mimic editing loss to relatively align the capabilities--and thereby the output distributions--of the two modalities through mutual imitation. Moreover, language-based visual editing entails the comprehension of the editing instruction and the reference visual content, the localization of the region corresponding to that instruction within the reference visual contents, and the modification of that region alone. Existing approaches predominantly rely on external aids, such as fine-tuning an additional MLLM or explicitly supplying a mask sequence as auxiliary input during inference. In contrast, we aspire for the model to internalize this capability. To that end, we introduce sense-related tasks--for instance, referring expression segmentation--along with corresponding editing-region-aware latent-level loss and attention-level loss.

Zhuohang Fan, Beichen Zhang, Yuanfa Li et al.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents powered by vision-language models hold promise for automating real-world mobile tasks. However, progress is limited by the lack of high-coverage, long-horizon interaction trajectories collected from element-rich and rapidly evolving apps. Existing pipelines often rely on costly human demonstrations or on-policy framework, which tends to over-sample common flows while missing rare transitions and complex multi-step procedures. To address this problem, we propose SEE, a two-stage data synthesis framework consisting of (i) an efficient exploration stage that builds an explicit UI transition graph over screens and elements, and (ii) a graph-based synthesis stage that composes diverse multi-step trajectories via planning and controlled sampling. This design yields reproducible and explainable data generation, while explicitly preventing spurious cycles and enabling long-horizon composition. Across multiple real-world apps, SEE produces trajectories with an average length of 14.8 steps while avoiding spurious loops, and agents fine-tuned on SEE achieve improved task success and generalization to unseen screens. We will publicly release our synthesis code and dataset.

Ye Wang, Hongjun Wang, Hao Fang et al.

Unified multimodal models (UMMs) aim to integrate visual understanding and generation within a single architecture, but architectural unification alone does not ensure semantic consistency. A model may describe the intended target correctly while generating an inconsistent edit. This exposes an understanding-generation alignment gap: linguistic and visual outputs live in different spaces, yet should be governed by the same target semantics. We study this gap in image editing, where an instruction defines a target state that can be both described and visually realized. Given a source image and an edit instruction, we compare a UMM's target caption with its edited image to test whether the two outputs converge on the same result. Our analysis shows that existing UMMs remain weakly aligned, especially for fine-grained entities, attributes, spatial relations, and local details, indicating that semantic unification is not achieved by architecture alone. To bridge this gap, we propose STBridge, a shared-target alignment framework that connects understanding and generation through a common target state. Here the target caption expresses the desired visual result, while the edited image realizes it visually, replacing separate task-specific paths with a shared information flow from target expression to target realization. STBridge follows an align-then-optimize strategy: supervised fine-tuning first establishes the shared-target channel, and sequential reinforcement learning further refines target-centered coordination. Across visual understanding, image generation, and image editing benchmarks, STBridge consistently improves over the initialization model. Alignment analysis confirms that STBridge narrows the gap between what the model describes and what it generates, demonstrating shared-target alignment as an effective post-training strategy for bridging understanding and generation in UMMs.