Search: “vision-language models”

MUSE: Benchmarking Large Vision-Language Models on Multi-Modal Understanding in Situated Educationnew

Introduces MUSE, a twelve-task benchmark evaluating vision-language models on artistic image understanding in situated educational, Southeast Asian contexts.

MUSE is a benchmark assessing large vision-language models on artistic image understanding across twelve tasks spanning visual perception, semantic and affective interpretation, cultural understanding, and compositional reasoning. It decouples image annotation from question generation for controllable difficulty and curates images centering Singaporean and Southeast Asian multicultural contexts alongside Western art. Evaluations of open-source and proprietary models found substantial disparities, especially in affective interpretation and compositional reasoning.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 16, 17:26 UTC · 10h agoAI research

Knowing What Not to Answer: Selective Non-Compliance in Vision-Language Models

Researchers introduce KoNA, a benchmark exposing vision-language models' failures at selective non-compliance, plus fine-tuning that improves refusal and abstention accuracy.

KoNA is a benchmark for evaluating selective non-compliance in vision-language models across five categories: False Premise, Visual Inaccessibility, Universal Unknown, Task Feasibility and Safety. It tests both query-level and component-level non-compliance using paired single and compound queries, and evaluations across diverse VLMs show models often fail to refuse, correct or abstain appropriately, with failures worsening on compound queries. Fine-tuning VLMs on KoNA examples substantially improves non-compliance accuracy while largely maintaining performance on fully answerable tasks.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 3, 20:00 UTC · 13d agoAI research1

PhysBrain 1.5: From Vision-Language Models to Physical Foundation Models

PhysBrain 1.5, an 8B physical foundation model, sets open-source state of the art across 28 embodied understanding benchmarks.

The paper presents PhysBrain 1.5, a unified 8B model for understanding physical environments, generating actions, and predicting future states, built from a vision-language model with joint autoregressive next-token prediction over language, end-effector motion, and dense visual targets. Pre-training uses embodied supervision from human interaction videos, followed by supervised fine-tuning on human demonstrations, robot trajectories, and simulated experience. The model averages 72.5 across 28 embodied benchmarks, setting a new open-source state of the art and performing on par with proprietary GPT-6-Astra and Gemini 3.6 Flash, with best open-source results on 14 benchmarks.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 13, 20:00 UTC · 3d agoAI research1

Can Edge-Deployable Vision-Language Models Identify Species?

Evaluation of 2-8B VLMs (Qwen3-VL, Gemma3) against BioCLIP on camera-trap species ID shows all models degrade sharply on field imagery.

The study tests whether edge-deployable 2-8B vision-language models carry genuine taxonomic knowledge, comparing Qwen3-VL 2B/4B/8B and Gemma3 4B against the 300M specialist BioCLIP on a 96-species task across clean iNaturalist photos and six LILA.science camera-trap collections. All models degrade 9.6-26.6 percentage points on field imagery, and BioCLIP outperforms every VLM by 33.2-59.2 points on an expanded 200-image sample, suggesting specialized data rather than scale drives the gap. Under open-set prompting, 5.9-9.6% of responses are syntactically valid but taxonomically nonexistent species names, with fabrication rankings replicating across evaluation sets.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 10, 17:57 UTC · 6d agoAI research1

Foundation Models for Generalizable Semantic and Goal-Oriented Communication

FMSGOC uses vision-language foundation model priors plus diffusion reconstruction to enable generalizable semantic communication at 0.039 bits per pixel for 6G.

FMSGOC targets generalization failures in semantic and goal-oriented communication for 6G by leveraging broad visual-linguistic foundation model priors. A vision-language model selects sparse, goal-aligned semantic anchors while a fine-tuned diffusion model performs masked completion to reconstruct images at the receiver, decoupling what to send from how to reconstruct. On CIFAR-10 it reaches 0.039 bits per pixel with cosine similarity 0.87-0.90 and 0.83-0.86 on unseen ImageNet inputs, outperforming end-to-end baselines at lower bit rates.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 7, 18:12 UTC · 9d agoAI research

Same Trajectory, Contradictory Rewards (ROBORMBENCH): Paraphrase Fragility in Vision Language Reward Models

New ROBORMBENCH benchmark shows vision-language reward models can flip robot success/failure judgments when goal instructions are paraphrased.

The authors show that paraphrasing the instruction alone can substantially change progress scores from VLM reward models, even flipping identical robot trajectories between failure and success. ROBORMBENCH comprises 2,390 real-robot trajectories with ground-truth progress labels and 21,673 verified paraphrases covering lexical, syntactic, and action-goal rewrites. Instability is widespread across proprietary and open-source VLMs, grows with more divergent rewrites, and is not reliably reduced by scale or explicit reasoning, while trajectory-grounded dedicated reward models are markedly more stable.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 4, 17:47 UTC · 12d agoAI research1

GoDeep: Annotation-Free Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Understanding via Language-Space Lifting

GoDeep achieves annotation-free open-vocabulary 3D segmentation by grounding structured image descriptions in language-only embeddings, outperforming CLIP-based lifting on out-of-vocabulary objects.

GoDeep uses a vision-language model purely as a translator, producing structured entity-level image descriptions that are grounded, projected, and aggregated in a general-purpose language-only embedding space, with no 3D training corpus or dedicated 3D encoder required. On ScanNet++ the pipeline is competitive with strong annotation-free baselines, and on a cultural-heritage benchmark a systematic vocabulary correction reverses initial CLIP-based rankings. Language-space embeddings separate genuinely out-of-vocabulary objects more sharply, localize them within scenes, and keep all predictions explainable as discrete text.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 8, 17:31 UTC · 8d agoAI research

HarnessVLN: Unifying Training-Free Embodied Navigation through an Agent Harness

Researchers introduce HarnessVLN, a zero-shot training-free agent harness that sets new training-free SOTA on vision-language navigation benchmarks including R2R and HM3D.

HarnessVLN is a zero-shot, training-free framework for embodied vision-language navigation that coordinates perception, retrieval, grounding, navigation, recovery, and termination through a unified tool interface. It validates planner proposals against spatial evidence, geometric feasibility, and subgoal consistency, using hierarchical event memory and a persistent Spatiotemporal Graph that stores reusable spatial evidence and failure annotations. It reports success rates of 60.8% on R2R, 53.9% on RxR, 76.0% on HM3D-v2, and 59.3% on HM3D-OVON, surpassing prior training-free state of the art, with real-world humanoid deployment demonstrated.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 13, 20:00 UTC · 3d agoAI research

TANGO: Humanoid Navigation in Cluttered Environments with a Whole-Body Vision-Language-Action Model

Researchers introduce TANGO, a whole-body vision-language-action model enabling zero-shot language-guided humanoid navigation on the Unitree G1 robot.

TANGO addresses humanoid navigation in cluttered indoor environments by predicting 29-DoF joint-space actions directly from natural-language instructions and egocentric RGB, rather than 2D path planning. It is trained entirely in simulation via a pipeline combining global path planning, kinematic whole-body motion generation, obstacle-aware motion editing, and RL-based tracking. In simulation it achieves state-of-the-art vision-language navigation performance and transfers zero-shot to a Unitree G1 humanoid without any real-world navigation data.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 7, 20:00 UTC · 9d agoAI research1

TANGO: Humanoid Navigation in Cluttered Environments with a Whole-Body Vision-Language-Action Model

Researchers present TANGO, a whole-body vision-language-action model enabling humanoid robots to traverse cluttered spaces from language instructions.

TANGO predicts 29-DoF joint-space actions from egocentric RGB observations and natural-language instructions for whole-body humanoid navigation, going beyond 2D path planning. It is trained entirely in simulation using global path planning, kinematic whole-body motion generation, obstacle-aware motion editing, and RL-based tracking. The model reports state-of-the-art simulation performance and was deployed zero-shot on a Unitree G1 humanoid without any real-world navigation training data.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 8, 17:59 UTC · 8d agoAI research1

Measuring Language Transfer in Robot Policies: Adding Greek to a Cosmos3 Vision-Language-Action Policy

Researchers added Greek to the Cosmos3 vision-language-action policy using only machine-rephrased instructions, finding bilingual training reaches roughly two fifths of English performance.

The paper studies localizing the open Cosmos3 vision-language-action robot policy to Greek without architectural changes, using machine-rephrased instructions only. Bilingual training yields a consistent 6.7-7.1 point margin over controls on a 90-task, three-seed evaluation suite, while Greek-only training gains at most 2.7 points. Several common evaluation instruments, including color-histogram metrics and single-goal benchmarks, produced false conclusions, and results were dominated by seed variation. The authors recommend building guaranteed-null baselines and replicating low-resource-language results across seeds.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 6, 20:00 UTC · 10d agoAI research

Don't Send What You Don't Need: Question-Guided Token Pruning as a Privacy Defense for Vision-Language Models

QPriv-VL prunes privacy-sensitive visual tokens in federated/split VQA, cutting membership-inference success on VQA-RAD from 0.99 to 0.76-0.79 using ~40% of tokens.

The paper proposes QPriv-VL, a question-guided token-pruning framework for federated, split, and U-shaped split learning that suppresses privacy-sensitive visual patches before transmission. Its Dynamic Threshold Predictor combines cross-modal question relevance with frozen DINOv2-derived sensitivity to compute a per-sample pruning ratio and retention mask in one forward pass, without sensitivity labels. Evaluated on GQA, OK-VQA, VQAv2, SLAKE, VQA-RAD, and PathVQA against FSHA, FORA, iDLG, and attribute-inference membership inference attacks, it matches or beats fixed-ratio pruning. On VQA-RAD it reduces membership-inference success from 0.99 to 0.76-0.79 while preserving competitive accuracy with about 40% of the original token budget.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 14, 14:48 UTC · 2d agoResearch

Studying Image Tokenizers as Visual Languages in Unified Multimodal Models

A controlled autoregressive testbed shows validation losses must be analyzed per task, and image tokenizer choice affects joint multimodal text modeling.

Researchers built a pure-autoregressive testbed to study image tokenizers as the 'visual language' of unified multimodal models, tracking task-specific validation losses during multimodal continual pretraining across text, image, text-to-image (T2I), and image-to-text (I2T) prediction. They found that losses exhibit distinct scaling behavior per task and rank tokenizers differently, and that I2T loss over a shared text vocabulary gives a more consistent loss–performance signal than T2I loss. Better reconstruction does not necessarily yield lower task-specific losses or stronger downstream performance, and tokenizer choice can affect text modeling under joint optimization. Case studies examine the discriminator, semantic supervision, and vocabulary size design axes.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 7, 20:00 UTC · 9d agoAI research1

Reason Through the Latent! Making Latent Visual Reasoning Necessary

Researchers introduce CVRR, forcing multimodal models to rely on recurrent latent computation rather than accessible image tokens, validated via causal interventions and benchmarks.

The paper presents Causal Visual Recurrent Reasoning (CVRR), which makes recurrent hidden-state computation the required image-conditioned path for prediction in vision-language models. Before decoding, visual states and the original multimodal KV cache are removed so only the final recurrent state carries image information to the answer. CVRR retains strong performance on V*, MMVP, BLINK, and MME-RealWorld-Lite while comparable latent reasoners fail under the same constraint. Causal interventions show predictions remain sensitive to recurrent content and that persistent visual evidence causally revises the recurrent trajectory.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 5, 20:00 UTC · 11d agoAI research

SpatialBlock: Enhancing Spatial Intelligence in LVLMs via Synthetic Block-Stacking Problem

Researchers release SpatialBlock-15k, a synthetic block-stacking dataset that improves 3D spatial reasoning in large vision-language models without dense geometric annotations.

The paper addresses limited spatial intelligence in LVLMs by training on structured block-manipulation tasks instead of costly real-scene annotated datasets. SpatialBlock-15k contains 15,000 synthetic problems covering 3D-to-2D projection, viewpoint transformation, and structural combination, with color modulation as visual cues. LVLMs trained on it via direct answering or reasoning-based prediction outperform baselines and generalize to real-world spatial tasks. Code and data are released on GitHub.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 6, 20:00 UTC · 10d agoAI research

Ambient @ EgoLongQA 2026: Distilling Long-Video perception into a Sub-2B Model

Ambient team wins EgoLongQA 2026 sub-2B division by distilling an agentic long-video perception pipeline into a 2B vision-language model.

Ambient's entry to the EgoLongQA track of the Wearable-AI Challenge at ECCV 2026 placed first in the <=2B parameter division with 0.8279 on the held-out test set. The system distills the junior perception module of a tool-using agentic pipeline into a 2B student, reaching 89% of the pipeline's accuracy with 1.1% of its parameters and lifting a 27.1% base model to 81.4%. To meet the division limit, the multilingual embedding table is pruned from 248,320 to 143,469 rows, reaching 1.9985B parameters with provably identical logits on retained rows.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 9, 20:00 UTC · 7d agoAI research

Real-World Knowledge-Guided Change Data Synthesis for Remote Sensing

Researchers introduce KnowChange, a framework that uses pretrained vision-language models to synthesize realistic change-detection training data for remote sensing.

KnowChange is a knowledge-guided change data synthesis framework that leverages pretrained vision-language models to reason about plausible change locations and class transitions from pre-change scenes and desired change types. It addresses the limited class-transition coverage and inflexibility of handcrafted rule-based synthesis methods, enabling diverse change types in a unified pipeline. Experiments show KnowChange-generated data outperforms existing synthetic datasets in both synthetic-to-real transfer and synthetic data augmentation, despite compact generation scale.

Hugging Face daily papers·Aug 24, 20:00 UTC · 23d agoAI research

Studying Image Tokenizers as Visual Languages in Unified Multimodal Models

A controlled pure-autoregressive testbed shows task-specific validation losses rank image tokenizers differently, with I2T loss the most consistent signal.

Researchers built a controlled pure-autoregressive testbed and tracked task-specific validation losses during multimodal continual pretraining across text, image, text-to-image (T2I), and image-to-text (I2T) prediction. They find losses should be analyzed per task because they exhibit distinct scaling behavior and rank tokenizers differently, and that the loss-performance relationship depends on the predicted token space. I2T loss, computed over a shared text vocabulary, correlates consistently with both generation and visual understanding performance after supervised finetuning. Case studies revisit the discriminator, semantic supervision, and vocabulary size as tokenizer design axes.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 8, 17:57 UTC · 8d agoAI research1

CARDEA: Auditable Reasoning Grounded in Spatial Evidence for End-to-End Coronary Angiography Interpretation

CARDEA, a vision-language model trained only on public data, matches cardiologists on coronary angiography complexity assessment while exposing auditable bounding-box evidence.

CARDEA is a unified large vision-language model serving as the inference core of an end-to-end coronary angiography pipeline from multi-view videos to study-level diagnosis. It was trained on public datasets through visual alignment, self-distilled Chain-of-Box cold start, and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards encouraging bounding-box reasoning. It reached 0.91 accuracy on dominance classification under domain shift and 0.90 on complexity assessment, comparable to two interventional cardiologists. RLVR raised zero-shot report generation vessel-severity macro-F1 from 0.513 to 0.686, while supervised imitation alone did not.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 6, 20:00 UTC · 10d agoAI research

Large Language Models Develop Belief State Geometry In-Context

Probing six open-source LLMs on HMM-generated data shows belief states are linearly decodable (R² 0.83–0.99), suggesting in-context learning approximates Bayesian prediction.

Researchers prompted six open-source LLMs with data from 40 hidden Markov models selected for non-trivial belief structure and probed residual-stream activations for belief states (posteriors over hidden states). Belief states were linearly decodable with peak R² values of 0.83–0.99 across HMM/LLM combinations, spanning early to late layers. Patching and steering the probe-identified subspace preserved downstream prediction quality while control interventions degraded performance substantially, establishing functional relevance. The results provide representation-level evidence that in-context learning approximates optimal Bayesian prediction over a context-inferred generative model.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 15, 16:17 UTC · 1d agoAI research1

nvidia/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-NVFP4 — new model trending #28 on Hugging Face

NVIDIA released an NVFP4 4-bit quantized build of Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, a 125B-parameter MoE vision-language model, via Model Optimizer.

The checkpoint quantizes Qwen3.8-Flash-Next — a hybrid-attention (Gated DeltaNet and Qwen Sparse Attention) Mixture-of-Experts model with 125B total and 6B activated parameters, plus 51B n-gram embeddings and 4B MTP — using NVIDIA Model Optimizer v0.46.0. NVFP4 benchmarks stay close to FP8: GPQA Diamond 91.5 vs 92.0, MMMU Pro 78.3 vs 77.1, Terminal-Bench 2.1 82.9 vs 83.3. It targets Blackwell B200/B300 GPUs, runs on vLLM, supports 262K context extendable to 1M tokens, and is licensed under the NVIDIA Open Model License with Qwen Community License 1.0.

Hugging Face trending models·Sep 2, 04:03 UTC · 15d agoModel release

VoT: Vision-of-Thought for Unified Multimodal Representation Alignment

Researchers propose Vision-of-Thought (VoT), a discrete visual-planning token layer between VLMs and diffusion transformers improving text-to-image semantic alignment.

VoT introduces a discrete visual-thinking layer between vision-language models and diffusion transformers, letting the VLM act as a multimodal planner that emits tokens describing objects and layouts before pixel generation. A specialized VoT tokenizer is trained with VLM alignment, feature reconstruction, and vector-quantization losses. Experiments show improved semantic alignment and a structured, interpretable interface for controllable generation.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 7, 17:53 UTC · 9d agoAI research

rMuscle: Robotic Muscle Memory for Efficient Vision-Language-Action Model Inferencenew

rMuscle, a caching-based inference framework for vision-language-action models, achieves 1.29-1.42x speedups on RTX 4090 and Jetson Thor while preserving success rates.

rMuscle is a real-time inference framework for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models that exploits cross-execution similarity in repetitive robot tasks via a dual-phase muscle-memory cache. The Context Cache reuses visual-token outputs to reduce computation, while the Action Cache reuses neuron activation patterns to reduce weight accesses, with online recomputation and sliding-window retrieval keeping overhead low. It achieves 1.29-1.42x speedups on RTX 4090 and Jetson Thor across LIBERO, RoboTwin, and real-world manipulation tasks while maintaining original success rates.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 16, 17:34 UTC · 10h agoAI tools & infra

Learning 3D Editing without Paired Supervision via Generative Prior Distillation

New framework distills 2D editing and VLM priors into a feed-forward 3D editing model without paired 3D training data.

The method, PriorEdit3D, learns feed-forward instruction-guided 3D editing by distilling knowledge from foundation models instead of using ground-truth 3D pairs. Through a differentiable rendering pipeline it supervises a 2D visual prior from an image editing model at the main view and a Vision-Language Model semantic prior at novel views for instruction fidelity and identity preservation. A 3D-aware Distribution Matching regularization constrains outputs to the manifold of realistic 3D assets defined by a pretrained image-to-3D teacher. Experiments report superior instruction fidelity and cross-view consistency over state-of-the-art baselines, with code released on GitHub.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 3, 20:00 UTC · 13d agoAI research

Breaking the Vision-Action Shortcut: Latent Interface Training for Generalizable Robotics Foundation Models

Latent Interface Training improves robot foundation model generalization by constraining visual conditioning, boosting LIBERO-Plus success up to 10.7 points.

The paper identifies vision-action shortcuts where robot policies exploit task-irrelevant visual cues that fail under distribution shift. Latent Interface Training (LIT) first trains an action expert conditioned on language, robot state, and terminal SE(3) end-effector poses without images, then constrains visual input through a pose-supervised latent interface. Across four VLA and world-action architectures (Pi0.5, MolmoAct2, FAST-WAM, ImageWAM), LIT improves LIBERO-Plus success by 3.87-10.70 percentage points. Real-world tests show 13.30-16.70 percentage-point gains under unseen cameras, lighting, and distractors.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 10, 20:00 UTC · 6d agoAI research

Heart of the Matter: How a Major Children’s Hospital Uses Open Source NVIDIA AI for Cardiac Care

Children's Hospital of Philadelphia uses NVIDIA open-source MONAI, Warp and Newton to build pediatric heart models in seconds for surgical planning.

CHOP's cardiac modeling service uses MONAI, Auto3DSeg and SlicerHeart to turn CT, MRI and 3D ultrasound images into anatomically precise heart models in seconds instead of four hours of manual work. More than 20 US children's hospitals run similar programs, with Boston Children's supporting roughly 500 cardiac surgery cases a year. NVIDIA's Newton physics engine, built on the Warp Python framework, aims to reduce device simulations from hours to near real time in clinical workflows.

NVIDIA Blog·Sep 15, 09:00 UTC · 1d agoAI industry

Augustinian BabyLM: What Ostensive Definition Can and Cannot Teach a Small Language Model

Study shows visually grounded token embeddings in a small masked LM persist through training and improve object-property knowledge, but escape standard BabyLM benchmarks.

The paper implements ostensive definition for a small DeBERTa masked language model trained on 10M words, seeding visually grounded tokens with embeddings derived from labeled image regions before training. Visual initialization leaves a persistent, seed-replicated advantage on object-property knowledge (COMPS) and a corpus-tailored Visual-Property Swap benchmark covering color, material, size, and shape, but has no effect on most BabyLM grammar benchmarks. Synthetic grounding of previously unseeded words causally transfers the advantage to exactly those words.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 10, 17:43 UTC · 6d agoAI research

ShieldFont fights AI scraping by handing crawlers the wrong words

Help Net Security·Aug 7, 00:00 UTC · Aug 7, 2026Industry

Think Before You Link: Rarity, Reasoning, and Retrieval in Multilingual Entity Linking

Training-free reasoning-plus-retrieval framework lifts multilingual multimodal entity linking accuracy by 6.9% overall and up to 23.3% on rare entities.

The paper broadens rarity measurement in multimodal entity linking using knowledge-graph structural metrics beyond popularity-based pageview metrics, identifying many rare entities that popularity metrics miss. Across these rare-entity slices, state-of-the-art accuracy drops by 15.4-39.9%, exposing distinct failure modes under different rarity definitions. The proposed training-free framework iteratively searches and reasons over Wikipedia with a reasoning-capable vision-language model; experiments show reasoning and retrieval are complementary. On the MERLIN benchmark covering Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Tamil, and Vietnamese, the system improves overall accuracy by 6.9% and up to 23.3% on rare entities, with MERLIN-Rare test slices released.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 8, 20:00 UTC · 8d agoAI research

PANORAMA: Panoptic Grounded Captioning via Mask Proposal Selectionnew

PANORAMA grounds vision-language caption phrases in pixel-level masks via mask proposal selection, achieving state-of-the-art grounding on the new PanoCaps benchmark.

The paper introduces panoptic grounded captioning, requiring VLMs to describe foreground and background regions while grounding each phrase with pixel-level masks. Contributions include PanoCaps, a human-annotated benchmark built from panoptic segmentation datasets with entity-level image-text alignment, a phrase-mask matching protocol, and a generalized Panoptic Quality metric. PANORAMA conditions a pretrained segmenter on contextualized phrase representations to select masks, achieving the best overall grounding on PanoCaps; code, data, and models are released.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 16, 17:59 UTC · 10h agoAI research

Dynin-Robotics: Omnimodal Unified Diffusion Vision-Language-Action Model

Dynin-Robotics omnimodal diffusion vision-language-action model unifies action, dynamics, and goal prediction, reaching 78.4% success on Franka tasks.

Dynin-Robotics builds a shared trajectory model on the Dynin-Omni omnimodal masked-diffusion backbone, representing language, observations, goals, and actions as discrete tokens. One model learns action prediction, action-conditioned next-observation prediction, terminal goal-state prediction, and trajectory-to-instruction reconstruction, enabling test-time scaling through goal prediction and joint refinement. It is continually pretrained on approximately 1.33 million trajectories from 48 Open X-Embodiment datasets and achieves competitive performance on LIBERO and zero-shot LIBERO-Plus plus a 78.4% average success rate across four manipulation conditions on a Franka Research 3 robot. An optimized block-parallel implementation accelerates model-side action decoding by up to 29.2x.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 11, 16:49 UTC · 5d agoAI research 2 sources1

Show-Harness: Just a VLM Agent Can Play Robots

Show-Harness lets VLM agents control robots via discrete semantic action units, outperforming VLA baselines zero-shot and after light fine-tuning.

Show-Harness is an embodied agent harness that exposes discrete semantic action units a VLM reasons over, with embodiment-specific interpreters grounding them into local robot actions. It enables zero-shot robot control with closed-source frontier VLMs and low-cost adaptation of small open-source VLMs using only a few GPU-hours of fine-tuning. The companion GUMI (GUI Manipulation Interface) extends the same semantic action space to GUI-based demonstration collection without specialized teleoperation hardware. Experiments show robust generalization across tasks, embodiments, and environments, beating representative agentic and VLA paradigms.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 9, 17:53 UTC · 7d agoAI research

ENCP: Episode-Normalized Conformal Prediction for Vision-and-Language Navigation

ENCP calibrates conformal prediction per navigation episode, giving step-level coverage guarantees for vision-language navigation agents despite within-episode dependence.

Episode-Normalized Conformal Prediction (ENCP) rescales a nonconformity score by a VLN policy's residual confidence and calibrates one maximum score per episode, preserving step-level coverage of at least 1−α despite dependence among steps within an episode. Across four VLN policies and three nonconformity scores on R2R and REVERIE, ENCP meets all reported empirical step-coverage targets in seen-to-unseen evaluation. The model-agnostic uncertainty estimates can signal when an agent should defer to a stronger predictor or human assistance.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 15, 17:42 UTC · 1d agoAI research

SceneMosaic: Efficient and Diverse Simulation-Ready Scene Generation via Hybrid Agentic Layout Evolution

SceneMosaic combines image-based 3D priors with VLM agent refinement to generate diverse, simulation-ready indoor scenes 24x faster than agentic baselines.

SceneMosaic is a hybrid framework that takes an initial candidate from a learned image-to-3D prior and evolves it with VLM agents for efficiency and physical validity. It decomposes scenes into independent local units, evolves each separately, and composes the global scene via Cartesian product. On SceneEval-100 it matches the strongest agentic baseline in semantic layout quality with a 24x speedup, substantially reduces physical violations, and receives the highest human ratings. Code is publicly available.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 3, 20:00 UTC · 13d agoAI research

E2A-Bench: Benchmarking Evidence-to-Action Reliability in Financial Chart Reasoning

E2A-Bench, a 969-query financial chart reasoning benchmark, finds VLMs fail evidence-to-action consistency, with fine-tuning amplifying BUY:SELL bias 4-6x.

E2A-Bench is a 969-query benchmark built from 323 HS300 constituents across three input modalities with deterministic OHLCV-derived evidence anchors, evaluating grounding, reasoning-action consistency, evidence-confidence calibration, and directional coverage via UCR, RCI, ECI, and NDR metrics. Testing 20 VLMs showed the lowest-hallucination model ranked near the bottom on coverage with only 6.4% directional coverage, and oracle-aided verification reduced unsupported claims but could collapse coverage. Financial fine-tuning amplified the BUY:SELL ratio by factors of 4.21 to 4.68 across base-fine-tuned pairs.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 12, 20:00 UTC · 4d agoAI research

SimpleMemVLA: A Simple but Effective Native-Video Memory for Vision-Language-Action Models

SimpleMemVLA passes full timestamped video history straight to a VLA backbone, setting state of the art on four memory benchmarks.

SimpleMemVLA is a vision-language-action model for long-horizon manipulation that removes the dedicated memory module entirely. It keeps sampled history intact and feeds it to the backbone as timestamped video, with the hidden states of a generated sub-task serving as the only channel into a standard flow-matching action head. Prefilling the shared history prefix during action execution keeps latency close to a single-frame VLA. The system sets a new state of the art on four memory benchmarks and outperforms retrieval, compression and recurrent-state mechanisms, with causal interventions confirming the policy genuinely reads its history.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 1, 20:00 UTC · 15d agoAI research

Show-Harness: Just a VLM Agent Can Play Robots

Show-Harness enables VLM agents to control robots via a semantic action interface, achieving zero-shot frontier control and few-GPU-hour adaptation of small VLMs.

Show-Harness exposes discrete semantic action units that VLMs reason over, with embodiment-specific interpreters deterministically grounding them into local robot actions. It enables zero-shot closed-source frontier VLM control and adapts small open-source VLMs for low-cost deployment with a few GPU-hours of fine-tuning. The companion GUMI interface extends the same semantic action space to GUI-based demonstration collection without teleoperation hardware, and Show-Harness-equipped agents outperform representative agentic and VLA paradigms.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 8, 20:00 UTC · 8d agoAI research

Do speech foundation models really learn words?

Researchers show via residualization that later layers of HuBERT and wav2vec 2.0 encode word identity and semantics independently of phonetic content.

The study argues that discriminative ability on words does not imply specialized word representations, since good word discrimination can be explained by phoneme encoding alone. By partialling out phoneme information using residualization, the authors show that later layers of HuBERT and wav2vec 2.0 encode words with reasonable fidelity independently of local phonetic content. Applying this disentanglement approach enhances higher-order linguistic information in word discovery tasks, informing analysis of speech foundation models used for recognition and speech tokens.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 9, 16:47 UTC · 7d agoAI research

Unfold The World: Factorize 4D Properties in Reinforcing Spatial Reasoning

FactoSR factorizes 4D spatial reasoning into XY, Z, and T reinforcement-learning sub-objectives, boosting VLM performance on VSI-Bench by 5.9% and All-Angles-Bench by 4.5%.

Researchers present FactoSR, a factorized reinforcement learning framework that decomposes world-consistent reasoning into planar correspondence, depth consistency, and temporal reversibility sub-objectives. Optimizing these verifiable constraints turns the ill-posed projection recovery problem into tangible reasoning steps. Evaluations show gains of 5.9% on VSI-Bench and 4.5% on All-Angles-Bench for 3D and 4D reasoning, arguing VLMs' spatial bottleneck stems from training on 2D projections versus latent 3D geometry and temporal continuity.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 2, 20:00 UTC · 14d agoAI research

Canonical Color as a Lens into Concept Decodability in Vision Encoders and VLMs

Probing study shows vision encoders make canonical color linearly decodable from grayscale images and tie it to object identity.

Researchers use canonical color as a controlled testbed for measuring conceptual (not just visible) information in vision encoder representations. A dataset of objects with canonical colors was built, and probes on both color and grayscale images show canonical color remains decodable even when color is removed from the input, linked to predicted object identity. Extending to full VLMs, they find post-training has a surprisingly large effect on color decodability in the vision encoder.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 8, 17:50 UTC · 8d agoAI research1