Although text-to-image models can accurately depict subjects and scenes, creators still struggle to specify the fine-grained emotions an image should convey without rewriting its content description. Natural language can suggest emotions, but it offers no control scale with stable meanings and ordered intensities. We propose EMOTRANS, which transforms psychologically grounded valence-arousal-dominance (VAD) coordinates into generation conditions that are independent of the content text and modulated across denoising stages, making emotional style a finely adjustable creative variable. To support this goal, we construct EMOVAD, an art-painting dataset that pairs objective content descriptions with separately collected emotional ratings from multiple annotators. We also coordinate emotional expression and content preservation through dual-branch training with a shared model. Objective and human evaluations show that the framework improves the accuracy of three-dimensional emotion control and produces perceptible, orderable continuous changes while maintaining competitive text alignment and image quality. This work provides a practical emotion-driven approach to image generation that extends objective content depiction to fine-grained emotional adjustment.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24215
Reliable perception is essential for underwater vehicles operating in complex environments, where light attenuation and scattering often degrade visibility and compromise optical sensing. Forward-looking sonar (FLS) offers an alternative by providing high-frame-rate acoustic imaging under poor optical conditions. However, real-time FLS mapping remains challenging due to unresolved target elevation, spatially non-uniform noise, and fragmented target boundaries, which hinder feature extraction and introduce geometric ambiguity during projection. To address these challenges, we propose a cascaded feature reconstruction pipeline combining fast Fourier transform (FFT)-based denoising, fast multiscale constant false alarm rate (MCFAR) detection, and gradient-adaptive boundary connection to extract geometric features from degraded sonar images with low latency. We integrate attitude-aware geometric projection with incremental occupancy accumulation to construct a depth-referenced 2.5D map for local mapping in confined underwater environments. The sonar's vertical position is referenced to an external sensor, while target elevation is assigned under an explicit geometric assumption rather than measured directly by FLS. Experiments in a 3 m X 5 m pool demonstrate centimeter-scale planar mapping accuracy, with a root-mean-square error (RMSE) below 3 cm across three sequences and an average processing time of 42.4 ms per frame.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24195
In latent generative models, reconstruction quality is often assumed to correlate with generative performance. However, reconstruction FID (rFID) can exhibit weak or even negative correlation with generation FID (gFID). We attribute this discrepancy to a latent distribution mismatch: reconstruction evaluates the decoder on encoder-induced latents, whereas generation uses the same decoder on latents produced by the generative model. To characterize this shift, we introduce generation-aware reconstruction (GAR), which constructs a continuous trajectory from standard reconstruction toward generation by perturbing encoder latents with noise and denoising them through the generative model before decoding. GAR probes the decoder behavior along this trajectory, making the transition from encoder to generation-time latent distributions observable and diagnosable. The resulting trajectory-based diagnostic, GAR-FID, exhibits strong empirical correlation with gFID across diverse tokenizers and scales. Importantly, intermediate GAR latents become more generation-aware while preserving correspondence with their source images, thereby retaining paired supervision that is absent for fully generated latents. This correspondence enables decoder adaptation on intermediate GAR latents, consistently improving generative quality across model scales. Overall, latent distribution mismatch provides a useful perspective for evaluating and improving latent generative models.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24088
Despite impressive visual quality, state-of-the-art video diffusion models often generate content that violates real-world physical laws. While existing solutions rely on external priors or specialized data, we investigate the root cause by exploring the internal mechanisms of these models. Specifically, we present the first interpretability study on the ''motion planning'' process of text-to-video diffusion models, revealing how motion trajectories form during early denoising stages. Building upon the ''first shape, then details'' finding, we combine cross-attention trajectory patterns with causal head contributions to identify a specific subset of attention heads driving motion planning. Further, our self-attention analysis shows that Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) induces excessive spatial attention decay. This causes early candidate regions to prematurely lock into physically implausible positions, suppressing reasonable trajectories in adjacent frames and triggering generation failure modes. To address this fundamental flaw, we propose a lightweight architectural modification that scales the frequency of RoPE across different denoising steps. This strategy reduces excessive attention decay, helping the model explore better candidate regions to establish coherent physical motion. Finally, training-free and training-based experiments confirm the effectiveness of our approach in enhancing the physical commonsense of generated videos.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23658
Human-object interaction (HOI) detection requires grounding an interacting human-object pair and recognizing the verb that links them, often under severe long-tail supervision. Recent methods improve accuracy with stronger detectors and vision-language priors, but many still stack heavy transformer encoders, intricate denoising schedules, or post-hoc semantic calibration on top of the detector. We present \textbf{HOIBlender}, an efficient HOI detector named after its core design principle: blending detector-grounded visual tokens, spatial subject-object reasoning, and BLIP-2 semantic priors inside one lightweight decoding pipeline. HOIBlender builds on an RF-DETR/LW-DETR-style foundation with a DINOv2 backbone and selects top-$K$ image-conditioned tokens directly from the multi-scale projector as subject and object candidates, removing the dedicated encoder stage retained by prior HOI methods. A dual-stage decoder first stabilizes human-object geometry and then performs verb and HOI classification through progressive BLIP-2 prior fusion, with classifier weights initialized from BLIP-2 text embeddings for long-tail categories. Grouped-query training further enriches optimization without increasing inference cost. Across three model scales (Nano, Small, 2XL), HOIBlender consistently outperforms SOV-STG-VLA and Hybrid-SOV-VLA on HICO-DET, reaching $44.49$ Default Full mAP in only $9$ training epochs while maintaining competitive latency and parameter budgets. These results show that lightweight detection, structured spatial-semantic decoding, and deeply integrated vision-language priors can be blended into a single efficient HOI pipeline.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23431
World Action Models bring the predictive capabilities of video models into robot action generation, providing a rich foundation for modeling future visual states. Tactile sensing complements this foundation with direct measurements of physical interaction. Some existing methods use tactile features as conditioning inputs without jointly predicting future tactile states, visual observations, and actions. Our key insight is that tactile signals, like video, provide observations of the evolving world state and should be modeled as future observations alongside video. We present ME-Dex-1.0 (MachEmbodied-Dex-1.0), a unified World Action Tactile Model for joint visual, tactile, and action learning. ME-Dex-1.0 adopts a Mixture-of-Transformers architecture comprising a Video Expert, a Tactile Expert, and an Action Expert, all trained with flow matching. We use shared attention connects the experts in intermediate layers, allowing action generation to draw on learned representations of visual and tactile dynamics during joint denoising. To support multi-source heterogeneous tactile inputs, a Canonical Hand Model and a Unified Tactile Autoencoder map tactile observations from different embodiments and sensing layouts into shared spatial and latent spaces. To address the limited availability of paired visual, tactile, and action data, we develop the Agentic Tactile Data Engine, an agent-based data production platform. It supplements RoboTwin and DexJoCo with tactile data recorded directly from force sensors during trajectory replay in simulation. Experiments on the RoboTwin, DexJoCo, and ManiFeel simulation platforms, together with real robot evaluations, demonstrate improved manipulation performance using both grippers and dexterous hands equipped with tactile sensing.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21449
Event cameras detect per-pixel brightness changes asynchronously on microsecond timescales, with high dynamic range and low power draw. These are desirable properties for robots that move fast or work in difficult lighting conditions. However, integrating an event camera into a real-world robotic pipeline still requires substantial effort: plug-and-play drivers do not exist, event streams are recorded in a variety of incompatible file formats, and most projects rely on custom research-grade code. Here, we present EventCV, an open-source and extensible Rust library with OpenCV-style Python bindings that lowers the entry barrier to working with event cameras. EventCV provides a wide range of features: denoising filters and geometric transforms, augmentations, corner detection and unsupervised feature learning, contrast-maximization motion estimation, a video-to-events simulator, and Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) inference for deployment in robotic stacks. EventCV integrates the Neuromorphic Drivers package, allowing an event camera stream to be processed directly in real time. No existing toolkit covers this range of operations in one package, and EventCV builds representations and decodes files 1.1x to 3.7x faster than the currently available libraries. We deploy EventCV on a Jetson Orin AGX and present three robotics case studies spanning object detection, on-device model inference, and localization. Project webpage: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21330
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong generalization in robotic manipulation by combining semantic knowledge from pretrained vision-language models with expressive action-generation policies. Diffusion-based action generators are particularly effective for modeling temporally coherent action chunks, but these chunks are typically executed open-loop after inference. This limits responsiveness when objects move, contacts change, or the scene evolves during execution. We propose VLA-Feedback, a two-timescale architecture that combines low-frequency diffusion planning with high-frequency visual feedback. Rather than fully denoising an action chunk before execution, VLA-Feedback retains its final denoising step as a lightweight feedback interface, allowing each action to be corrected using the latest observation before it is executed. This design preserves the expressiveness of the diffusion planner while enabling real-time action correction without rerunning the full vision-language diffusion model. VLA-Feedback matched GR00T on static LIBERO tasks while improving average success on dynamic simulation tasks from 27.5% to 85.0%. On real-robot tasks, it improved average success from 51% to 73%. Additional materials can be found on our project page: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21022
Action chunking is widely used for action generation and execution in Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies, yet existing approaches commonly use a fixed action horizon. During a rollout, different task stages may require different levels of action continuity, control precision, and closed-loop feedback, making a fixed horizon unable to accommodate changing control requirements. We propose \textbf{GeoAAC}, a geometry-based adaptive action chunking method for flow-based VLA policies that adjusts the action horizon according to the reliability of the current action prediction. We show that the geometry of Flow Matching denoising trajectories provides process-level information for characterizing prediction reliability, with geometric variation across action prefixes remaining positively correlated with predictive uncertainty. GeoAAC uses this prefix-wise geometry to construct a horizon-wise geometric profile and adaptively determine the action horizon from a single generation without additional training. Experiments with GR00T N1.5 and {\pi}0.5 on LIBERO, LIBERO-Pro, RoboCasa365, and real-world manipulation tasks show consistent improvements over fixed-action-horizon baselines and existing adaptive methods, including up to 8.7 percentage points in simulation and an increase in average real-world success rate from 53.3\% to 74.4\%.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20776
Characterizing the physical properties of clay and cementitious materials matters across many fields, from materials science to geological waste disposal. Property simulation typically calls for 3D imaging, which is expensive, not always accessible, and technically limited for certain materials. Recent progress in deep generative models offers a way around this, reconstructing 3D volumes from the more easily acquired 2D images. Among GAN-based methods for 3D microstructure generation, SliceGAN has shown strong results for homogeneous isotropic and anisotropic systems. It struggles, however, to capture the finer detail of more complex heterogeneous microstructures, which motivates alternative generative frameworks. We introduce a hybrid approach that draws on the stability and generation quality of denoising diffusion models. Since no 3D ground truth is available, we replace the standard denoising loss with an adversarial loss, which yields a stable training process in our experiments. We show that the resulting model generates microstructures of varying complexity with minimal slice artefacts and close agreement with ground-truth phase fractions and structural descriptors.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20358
Satellite communications are an essential component of sixth-generation (6G) mobile networks, which provide ubiquitous connectivity for global services. However, the satellite uplink remains a critical bottleneck for ground devices: their limited transmit power and antenna apertures result in low data rates and high packet errors. To overcome this bottleneck, this paper advocates a novel relaying paradigm termed generate-and-forward (GF) communications, where satellites exploit on-orbit generative artificial intelligence (AI) to robustly reconstruct corrupted data prior to forwarding. Specifically, we propose SpaceDiffusion, an over-the-orbit diffusion framework for satellite-assisted image transmission. The core of this framework is a channel-distortion-aware diffusion theory developed using the following approach. By formulating the recovery of compressed and lost image tokens as an inverse problem, this theory incorporates a channel-distortion correction term directly into the conventional denoising diffusion implicit model (DDIM) update. As a result, this design enables a single pretrained diffusion model to adapt dynamically to varying packet-loss patterns and compression distortions without retraining. Furthermore, we analytically characterize the progressive token-reconstruction error and derive a diffusion-step activation threshold that predicts when SpaceDiffusion is expected to outperform conventional decode-and-forward (DF) relaying. Building on these theoretical insights, we further develop an energy-aware early-exit policy to efficiently deploy SpaceDiffusion in orbit. Experimental results demonstrate that SpaceDiffusion achieves lower end-to-end latency compared to DF scheme with retransmission protocol and saves approximately 15 dB of uplink transmit power at a target perceptual quality.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20899
Step distillation reduces the cost of video generation, but reusing a LoRA trained for a longer trajectory can alter its functional effect or degrade target quality. Static parameter compatibility offers one perspective on this problem; our observations show that similar measured geometry can coexist with different adapter behavior under a shortened denoising schedule. We propose DART, a training-free method that combines low-rank coordinate transport with target-schedule response calibration using forward evaluations and no source training videos. On a four-step Wan2.2 target, DART-F improves the joint quality score from 0.9029 to 0.9227 and changes macro functional retention from -0.4644 to +0.1349. Component analysis shows that calibration accounts for most of the quality improvement, while coordinate transport provides complementary gains when combined with calibration. Adapter-level results reveal positive functional effects for some adapters and strong attenuation with reduced negative functional effects for others. Evaluations on two additional targets show the same aggregate trend. These results motivate evaluating distilled-model LoRA reuse jointly through functional preservation and negative-transfer avoidance, without assuming recovery for every adapter.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20051
Autoregressive language models (ARMs) are constrained by sequential, left-to-right generation, while masked diffusion models (MDMs) enable parallel decoding but suffer from high computational overhead due to the inability to reuse Key-Value (KV) cache and from incoherent generation arising from learning dependencies over an intractable space of token combinations. We introduce Zarya, a family of hybrid language models that jointly optimizes an autoregressive (AR) objective and a masked-diffusion objective within a single architecture. Zarya structures training data into variable-size slots and employs a curriculum that gradually increases slot granularity, enabling a smooth transition from fine-grained AR learning to coarse-grained diffusion learning. At inference, Zarya provides two distinct decoding paradigms through a unified interface: (i) MDM sampling with first-hitting denoising, and (ii) slotted speculative decoding that interleaves inter-slot diffusion-based selection with intra-slot autoregressive infilling, achieving full KV cache reuse. The training and inference regimes are fully decoupled, allowing a model trained with any configuration to be deployed in either mode. Extensive configurability --- including grouped noise patterns (Prefix Completion, Fill-In-the-Prefix, Fill-In-the-Middle), ordered sampling schedules, and noise-level permutation strategies --- enables flexible research exploration. We release Zarya models publicly in sizes 0.6B, 1.7B, and 4B, demonstrating performance on standard benchmarks while offering a principled integration of autoregressive and diffusion paradigms.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19868
Autoregressive (AR) video generation degrades over long horizons due to an overlooked train-inference discrepancy we term KV eviction mismatch: models train on short clips where all context frames reside in the KV cache, but at inference, memory constraints force distant frames to be evicted from the KV cache - removing context the model was conditioned on. Rather than simulating eviction via context truncation - which discards temporal information the model still needs and degrades motion coherence - we keep the context but while progressively reducing the influence of distant frames, making their eventual eviction negligible. To guide this design, we introduce the positional response $R( \Delta, \, t_{\text{denoise}})$, a perturbation-based sensitivity measure revealing that context influence decays steeply with temporal distance and varies systematically across denoising steps. Motivated by this analysis, we propose Recency Forcing, which applies a non-positive, timestep-dependent bias, termed Temporal Response Bias (TRB), on pre-softmax attention logits derived directly from $R$, closing the train-inference gap without modifying context length or training objectives. We further introduce Biased Attention Reparameterization (BAR), an exact reformulation that moves the bias outside the softmax, making TRB a standard FlashAttention call at zero overhead. Recency Forcing operates in both training-free mode and training-based mode. Experiments on VBench and VBench-Long demonstrate state-of-the-art long-horizon generation quality at no additional inference cost.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19729
Diffusion-based Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models achieve strong performance in embodied tasks, but their iterative sampling imposes heavy computational and memory-access cost, blocking real-time deployment on edge platforms. Existing acceleration methods either require expensive training (e.g., distillation, flow matching) or degrade perception via statically scheduled pruning and caching, ignoring the dynamic workload variance of robotic interactions. This paper presents FASA (Feedback-Aware Sampling Adaptation), a training-free runtime framework that treats real-time multimodal feedback as a control signal for the denoising pipeline: an interaction-driven range adaptor modulates the global sampling-step budget based on visual and gripper-force feedback, and a proprioception-aware step adaptor pinpoints the optimized step within the adapted range. This co-designed framework allows the underlying hardware architecture to adaptively match the workload demands of different execution phases. Comparative evaluations across several benchmarks show that the inference speed can be increased by up to 1.45$\times$ while maintaining competitive success rates, providing a novel dynamic runtime architecture paradigm for deploying heavy generative embodied AI workloads onto resource-constrained computing platforms.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19475
Factory work is a promising early scenario for embodied AI: assigning repetitive manual jobs to robots has clear economic payoff, and a structured station keeps the jobs tractable for current policies. Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models now dominate as the policy paradigm for these robots. The inference latency of VLA models directly affects robot responsiveness and motion smoothness. However, existing VLA inference frameworks do not fully exploit the characteristics of embodied workloads or account for the distinct bottlenecks across different stages of VLA inference. In this paper, we first characterize embodied workloads and identify substantial task similarity across repeated robot executions. We further find that such similarity extends beyond observations and action trajectories to internal model states. Drawing on these observations, we present rMuscle, a real-time VLA inference framework inspired by human muscle memory. It exploits cross-execution similarity through 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. We keep both the cache memory footprint and access overhead low through online cache recomputation, sliding-window cache retrieval, and mask sharing across consecutive denoising steps. rMuscle achieves 1.29-1.42X speedup on RTX 4090 and Jetson Thor across LIBERO, RoboTwin, and physical manipulation tasks, while maintaining the original success rates on real-world robots.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19104
FastWAM-style world action models enable efficient action-only inference, but generalize poorly under visual distribution shifts. Their reconstruction-oriented representations emphasize appearance-specific details, limiting generalization to unseen scenes and objects. Without observation history, the model also lacks temporal evidence for robustly identifying task-relevant state changes and motion in unfamiliar visual conditions. To address these limitations, we present the Causal Semantic World Action Model (CSWAM), which augments FastWAM with a causal semantic expert built on V-JEPA 2.1. V-JEPA provides temporally grounded representations of semantic state changes and motion with less dependence on appearance-specific details. The expert learns their future evolution from a sparse history of current and past observations and shares the history-derived context with both the video and action streams through causal attention. At inference, CSWAM conditions action denoising on the current video state and observed semantic history, retaining efficient action-only inference. We conduct simulation and real-robot experiments to evaluate generalization under distribution shifts. With embodied pretraining, CSWAM raises Randomized success on RoboTwin 2.0 Clean-to-Randomized transfer from 10.16% to 45.18%, a gain of 35.02 percentage points over FastWAM. Across two real-robot tasks and three OOD difficulty levels, CSWAM improves average success over FastWAM by 42.5 percentage points, from 27.5% to 70.0%.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18462
Modeling physical dynamics, including how objects move, interact, and change state, is central to video world models for embodied AI. We present StrucPhysVideo, a family of video world models that bridges physics-focused data curation with language- and action-conditioned prediction of scene evolution. Our data pipeline combines motion-aware video segmentation, quality and content filtering, and physical relevance verification with structured annotations of objects, materials, and temporally localized interactions. By disentangling camera motion from object behavior and explicitly describing contact, deformation, and state transitions, the pipeline provides supervision grounded in observable physical events. Building on these data, we introduce StrucPhysVideo-TI2V, a sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) text-image-to-video model trained with a curriculum that progressively emphasizes physical dynamics while retaining general-domain video data. StrucPhysVideo-TI2V achieves state-of-the-art performance on Physics-IQ Verified, scoring 45.5% and outperforming Cosmos3-Super-Image2Video by 2.8 percentage points. Caption ablations across backbones further demonstrate the effectiveness of physics-focused supervision. We further extend StrucPhysVideo-TI2V to StrucPhysVideo-IA2V, an interactive image-action-to-video world model that predicts visual outcomes from robot end-effector commands. Action conditioning, causal autoregressive generation, and few-step distillation enable incremental robot rollouts with only four denoising steps. Together, StrucPhysVideo advances physical dynamics modeling from image- and language-conditioned video prediction toward action-driven interaction.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18430
Generative modeling of time-dependent data is typically formulated on a discrete temporal grid, restricting supervision to the observed timestamps in the training data. We instead frame generation as continuous-time evolution on a learned data manifold. To this end, we leverage pretrained score-based models as geometric priors and learn a vector field that evolves data along score-induced interpolation paths. Because these dynamics follow transitions that respect the geometry learned by the score model, they support generation at arbitrary timestamps and temporal super-resolution beyond the discretization of the training data. Moreover, this geometric formulation allows us to train the vector field simulation-free through a regression objective. To improve long-horizon rollout robustness, we introduce an objective that promotes path-relative transverse exponential stability. While motivated by stability theory, it admits a practical interpretation as denoising score matching transverse to the interpolation path. Further, we extend the framework to a probabilistic setting that models a distribution over plausible future trajectories. We demonstrate the method on natural video and scientific dynamical data, including temporal super-resolution, PDE-based spatiotemporal fields, and molecular dynamics. Our results show that score-based priors provide a strong foundation for learning stochastic continuous-time generative dynamics.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.17901
Oracle bone script (OBS), one of the earliest Chinese writing systems, plays an important role in the study of Chinese etymology. Traditional decipherment relies heavily on domain experts who analyze characters through semantic context and structural evolution. To assist this labor-intensive process, we formulate OBS decipherment assistance as a cross-era image translation task and propose FROD (Feature Matching Residual Denoising Oracle Bone Decipher). Although many OBS characters differ substantially from their modern counterparts, they often preserve local topological invariants at the radical level. During training, FROD leverages fast feature matching to provide gated segmentation supervision: paired samples with sufficient matches are processed patch-wise to align fine-grained radicals, whereas low-similarity pairs are trained holistically to avoid mismatched artifacts. In addition, a Residual Denoising Diffusion Model (RDDM) jointly estimates noise and residual signals, thereby reducing the positional drift and stroke disorder commonly observed in standard diffusion models. Finally, a multi-stage font stylization refinement network refines the generated images by eliminating edge noise and stabilizing stroke structures. On our augmented character-disjoint dataset, FROD achieves higher Top-1 recognition accuracy than the evaluated baselines, with a 3.8% absolute gain over OBSD.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.17227