pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Scaling Speculative Decoding with Lookahead Reasoning
Authors: Yichao Fu, Rui Ge, Zelei Shao, Zhijie Deng, Hao Zhang
Date: 2025-06-24 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, GSM8K

Reasoning models excel by generating long chain-of-thoughts, but decoding the resulting thousands of tokens is slow. Token-level speculative decoding (SD) helps, but its benefit is capped, because the chance that an entire $\gamma$-token guess is correct falls exponentially as $\gamma$ grows. This means allocating more compute for longer token drafts faces an algorithmic ceiling -- making the speedup modest and hardware-agnostic. We raise this ceiling with Lookahead Reasoning, which exploits a second, step-level layer of parallelism. Our key insight is that reasoning models generate step-by-step, and each step needs only to be semantically correct, not exact token matching. In Lookahead Reasoning, a lightweight draft model proposes several future steps; the target model expands each proposal in one batched pass, and a verifier keeps semantically correct steps while letting the target regenerate any that fail. Token-level SD still operates within each reasoning step, so the two layers of parallelism multiply. We show Lookahead Reasoning lifts the peak speedup of SD both theoretically and empirically. Across GSM8K, AIME, and other benchmarks, Lookahead Reasoning improves the speedup of SD from 1.4x to 2.1x while preserving answer quality, and its speedup scales better with additional GPU throughput. Our code is available at https://github.com/hao-ai-lab/LookaheadReasoning
UniRelight: Learning Joint Decomposition and Synthesis for Video Relighting
Authors: Kai He, Ruofan Liang, Jacob Munkberg, Jon Hasselgren, Nandita Vijaykumar, Alexander Keller, Sanja Fidler, Igor Gilitschenski, Zan Gojcic, Zian Wang
Date: 2025-06-18 00:00:00

We address the challenge of relighting a single image or video, a task that demands precise scene intrinsic understanding and high-quality light transport synthesis. Existing end-to-end relighting models are often limited by the scarcity of paired multi-illumination data, restricting their ability to generalize across diverse scenes. Conversely, two-stage pipelines that combine inverse and forward rendering can mitigate data requirements but are susceptible to error accumulation and often fail to produce realistic outputs under complex lighting conditions or with sophisticated materials. In this work, we introduce a general-purpose approach that jointly estimates albedo and synthesizes relit outputs in a single pass, harnessing the generative capabilities of video diffusion models. This joint formulation enhances implicit scene comprehension and facilitates the creation of realistic lighting effects and intricate material interactions, such as shadows, reflections, and transparency. Trained on synthetic multi-illumination data and extensive automatically labeled real-world videos, our model demonstrates strong generalization across diverse domains and surpasses previous methods in both visual fidelity and temporal consistency.
RoboScape: Physics-informed Embodied World Model
Authors: Yu Shang, Xin Zhang, Yinzhou Tang, Lei Jin, Chen Gao, Wei Wu, Yong Li
Date: 2025-06-29 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D geometry, Depth Estimation, Depth Prediction, model, Video Generation

World models have become indispensable tools for embodied intelligence, serving as powerful simulators capable of generating realistic robotic videos while addressing critical data scarcity challenges. However, current embodied world models exhibit limited physical awareness, particularly in modeling 3D geometry and motion dynamics, resulting in unrealistic video generation for contact-rich robotic scenarios. In this paper, we present RoboScape, a unified physics-informed world model that jointly learns RGB video generation and physics knowledge within an integrated framework. We introduce two key physics-informed joint training tasks: temporal depth prediction that enhances 3D geometric consistency in video rendering, and keypoint dynamics learning that implicitly encodes physical properties (e.g., object shape and material characteristics) while improving complex motion modeling. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RoboScape generates videos with superior visual fidelity and physical plausibility across diverse robotic scenarios. We further validate its practical utility through downstream applications including robotic policy training with generated data and policy evaluation. Our work provides new insights for building efficient physics-informed world models to advance embodied intelligence research. The code is available at: https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/RoboScape.
RDPO: Real Data Preference Optimization for Physics Consistency Video Generation
Authors: Wenxu Qian, Chaoyue Wang, Hou Peng, Zhiyu Tan, Hao Li, AnXiang Zeng
Date: 2025-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Video Generation

Video generation techniques have achieved remarkable advancements in visual quality, yet faithfully reproducing real-world physics remains elusive. Preference-based model post-training may improve physical consistency, but requires costly human-annotated datasets or reward models that are not yet feasible. To address these challenges, we present Real Data Preference Optimisation (RDPO), an annotation-free framework that distills physical priors directly from real-world videos. Specifically, the proposed RDPO reverse-samples real video sequences with a pre-trained generator to automatically build preference pairs that are statistically distinguishable in terms of physical correctness. A multi-stage iterative training schedule then guides the generator to obey physical laws increasingly well. Benefiting from the dynamic information explored from real videos, our proposed RDPO significantly improves the action coherence and physical realism of the generated videos. Evaluations on multiple benchmarks and human evaluations have demonstrated that RDPO achieves improvements across multiple dimensions. The source code and demonstration of this paper are available at: https://wwenxu.github.io/RDPO/
DocReRank: Single-Page Hard Negative Query Generation for Training Multi-Modal RAG Rerankers
Authors: Navve Wasserman, Oliver Heinimann, Yuval Golbari, Tal Zimbalist, Eli Schwartz, Michal Irani
Date: 2025-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Rerankers play a critical role in multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) by refining ranking of an initial set of retrieved documents. Rerankers are typically trained using hard negative mining, whose goal is to select pages for each query which rank high, but are actually irrelevant. However, this selection process is typically passive and restricted to what the retriever can find in the available corpus, leading to several inherent limitations. These include: limited diversity, negative examples which are often not hard enough, low controllability, and frequent false negatives which harm training. Our paper proposes an alternative approach: Single-Page Hard Negative Query Generation, which goes the other way around. Instead of retrieving negative pages per query, we generate hard negative queries per page. Using an automated LLM-VLM pipeline, and given a page and its positive query, we create hard negatives by rephrasing the query to be as similar as possible in form and context, yet not answerable from the page. This paradigm enables fine-grained control over the generated queries, resulting in diverse, hard, and targeted negatives. It also supports efficient false negative verification. Our experiments show that rerankers trained with data generated using our approach outperform existing models and significantly improve retrieval performance.
Fast and Simplex: 2-Simplicial Attention in Triton
Authors: Aurko Roy, Timothy Chou, Sai Surya Duvvuri, Sijia Chen, Jiecao Yu, Xiaodong Wang, Manzil Zaheer, Rohan Anil
Date: 2025-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: valid

Recent work has shown that training loss scales as a power law with both model size and the number of tokens, and that achieving compute-optimal models requires scaling model size and token count together. However, these scaling laws assume an infinite supply of data and apply primarily in compute-bound settings. As modern large language models increasingly rely on massive internet-scale datasets, the assumption that they are compute-bound is becoming less valid. This shift highlights the need for architectures that prioritize token efficiency. In this work, we investigate the use of the 2-simplicial Transformer, an architecture that generalizes standard dot-product attention to trilinear functions through an efficient Triton kernel implementation. We demonstrate that the 2-simplicial Transformer achieves better token efficiency than standard Transformers: for a fixed token budget, similarly sized models outperform their dot-product counterparts on tasks involving mathematics, coding, reasoning, and logic. We quantify these gains by demonstrating that $2$-simplicial attention changes the exponent in the scaling laws for knowledge and reasoning tasks compared to dot product attention.
Do Thinking Tokens Help or Trap? Towards More Efficient Large Reasoning Model
Authors: Bowen Ding, Yuhan Chen, Futing Wang, Lingfeng Ming, Tao Lin
Date: 2025-06-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Math

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) excel at solving complex problems but face an overthinking dilemma. When handling simple tasks, they often produce verbose responses overloaded with thinking tokens (e.g., wait, however). These tokens trigger unnecessary high-level reasoning behaviors like reflection and backtracking, reducing efficiency. In this work, our pilot study reveals that these thinking-token-induced behaviors are not essential for effective problem-solving and may even hinder correct reasoning within constrained token budgets. We identify this phenomenon as the thinking trap. To mitigate this issue, we propose Dual Policy Preference Optimization (DuP-PO), a novel algorithm featuring: (1) A rollout sampling strategy that guarantees balanced exposure to responses with and without thinking tokens; (2) A fine-grained advantage control technique to dynamically regulate the prediction of target tokens; (3) A policy shaping method ensuring stable gradient contributions from thinking tokens. Experimental results on five popular math reasoning benchmarks show that DuP-PO performs well on the popular LRM, which significantly improves their token efficiency during reasoning, while achieving superior performance of the base model.
Kwai Keye-VL Technical Report
Authors: Kwai Keye Team, Biao Yang, Bin Wen, Changyi Liu, Chenglong Chu, Chengru Song, Chongling Rao, Chuan Yi, Da Li, Dunju Zang, Fan Yang, Guorui Zhou, Hao Peng, Haojie Ding, Jiaming Huang, Jiangxia Cao, Jiankang Chen, Jingyun Hua, Jin Ouyang, Kaibing Chen, Kaiyu Jiang, Kaiyu Tang, Kun Gai, ShengNan Zhang, Siyang Mao, Sui Huang, Tianke Zhang, Tingting Gao, Wei Chen, Wei Yuan, Xiangyu Wu, Xiao Hu, Xingyu Lu, Yang Zhou, Yi-Fan Zhang, Yiping Yang, Yulong Chen, Zhenhua Wu, Zhenyu Li, Zhixin Ling, Ziming Li, Dehua Ma, Di Xu, Haixuan Gao, Hang Li, Jiawei Guo, Jing Wang, Lejian Ren, Muhao Wei, Qianqian Wang, Qigen Hu, Shiyao Wang, Tao Yu, Xinchen Luo, Yan Li, Yiming Liang, Yuhang Hu, Zeyi Lu, Zhuoran Yang, Zixing Zhang
Date: 2025-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Instruction Following, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Video Understanding

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities on static images, they often fall short in comprehending dynamic, information-dense short-form videos, a dominant medium in today's digital landscape. To bridge this gap, we introduce \textbf{Kwai Keye-VL}, an 8-billion-parameter multimodal foundation model engineered for leading-edge performance in short-video understanding while maintaining robust general-purpose vision-language abilities. The development of Keye-VL rests on two core pillars: a massive, high-quality dataset exceeding 600 billion tokens with a strong emphasis on video, and an innovative training recipe. This recipe features a four-stage pre-training process for solid vision-language alignment, followed by a meticulous two-phase post-training process. The first post-training stage enhances foundational capabilities like instruction following, while the second phase focuses on stimulating advanced reasoning. In this second phase, a key innovation is our five-mode ``cold-start'' data mixture, which includes ``thinking'', ``non-thinking'', ``auto-think'', ``think with image'', and high-quality video data. This mixture teaches the model to decide when and how to reason. Subsequent reinforcement learning (RL) and alignment steps further enhance these reasoning capabilities and correct abnormal model behaviors, such as repetitive outputs. To validate our approach, we conduct extensive evaluations, showing that Keye-VL achieves state-of-the-art results on public video benchmarks and remains highly competitive on general image-based tasks (Figure 1). Furthermore, we develop and release the \textbf{KC-MMBench}, a new benchmark tailored for real-world short-video scenarios, where Keye-VL shows a significant advantage.
PapersPlease: A Benchmark for Evaluating Motivational Values of Large Language Models Based on ERG Theory
Authors: Junho Myung, Yeon Su Park, Sunwoo Kim, Shin Yoo, Alice Oh
Date: 2025-06-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Evaluating the performance and biases of large language models (LLMs) through role-playing scenarios is becoming increasingly common, as LLMs often exhibit biased behaviors in these contexts. Building on this line of research, we introduce PapersPlease, a benchmark consisting of 3,700 moral dilemmas designed to investigate LLMs' decision-making in prioritizing various levels of human needs. In our setup, LLMs act as immigration inspectors deciding whether to approve or deny entry based on the short narratives of people. These narratives are constructed using the Existence, Relatedness, and Growth (ERG) theory, which categorizes human needs into three hierarchical levels. Our analysis of six LLMs reveals statistically significant patterns in decision-making, suggesting that LLMs encode implicit preferences. Additionally, our evaluation of the impact of incorporating social identities into the narratives shows varying responsiveness based on both motivational needs and identity cues, with some models exhibiting higher denial rates for marginalized identities. All data is publicly available at https://github.com/yeonsuuuu28/papers-please.
Reinforcing Language Agents via Policy Optimization with Action Decomposition
Authors: Muning Wen, Ziyu Wan, Weinan Zhang, Jun Wang, Ying Wen
Date: 2024-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Sequential Decision Making

Language models as intelligent agents push the boundaries of sequential decision-making agents but struggle with limited knowledge of environmental dynamics and exponentially huge action space. Recent efforts like GLAM and TWOSOME manually constrain the action space to a restricted subset and employ reinforcement learning to align agents' knowledge with specific environments. However, they overlook fine-grained credit assignments for intra-action tokens, which is essential for efficient language agent optimization, and rely on human's prior knowledge to restrict action space. This paper proposes decomposing language agent optimization from the action level to the token level, offering finer supervision for each intra-action token and manageable optimization complexity in environments with unrestricted action spaces. Beginning with the simplification of flattening all actions, we theoretically explore the discrepancies between action-level optimization and this naive token-level optimization. We then derive the Bellman backup with Action Decomposition (BAD) to integrate credit assignments for both intra-action and inter-action tokens, effectively eliminating the discrepancies. Implementing BAD within the PPO algorithm, we introduce Policy Optimization with Action Decomposition (POAD). POAD benefits from a finer-grained credit assignment process and lower optimization complexity, leading to enhanced learning efficiency and generalization abilities in aligning language agents with interactive environments. We validate POAD across diverse testbeds, with results affirming the advantages of our approach and the correctness of our theoretical analysis.
Artificial Generals Intelligence: Mastering Generals.io with Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Matej Straka, Martin Schmid
Date: 2025-07-09 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

We introduce a real-time strategy game environment built on Generals.io, a game that hosts thousands of active players each week across multiple game formats. Our environment is fully compatible with Gymnasium and PettingZoo, capable of running thousands of frames per second on commodity hardware. Our reference agent -- trained with supervised pre-training and self-play -- hits the top 0.003\% of the 1v1 human leaderboard after just 36 hours on a single H100 GPU. To accelerate learning, we incorporate potential-based reward shaping and memory features. Our contributions -- a modular RTS benchmark and a competitive, state-of-the-art baseline agent -- provide an accessible yet challenging platform for advancing multi-agent reinforcement learning research.
CoSteer: Collaborative Decoding-Time Personalization via Local Delta Steering
Authors: Hang Lv, Sheng Liang, Hao Wang, Hongchao Gu, Yaxiong Wu, Wei Guo, Defu Lian, Yong liu, Enhong Chen
Date: 2025-07-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Text Generation

Personalized text generation has become crucial for adapting language models to diverse and evolving users' personal context across cultural, temporal, and contextual dimensions. While existing methods often rely on centralized fine-tuning or static preference alignment, they struggle to achieve real-time adaptation under resource constraints inherent to personal devices. This limitation creates a dilemma: large cloud-based models lack access to localized user-specific information, while small on-device models cannot match the generation quality of their cloud counterparts. To address this dichotomy, we present CoSteer, a novel collaborative framework that enables decoding-time personalization through localized delta steering. Our key insight lies in leveraging the logits difference between personal context-aware and -agnostic outputs from local small models as steering signals for cloud-based LLMs. Specifically, we formulate token-level optimization as an online learning problem, where local delta vectors dynamically adjust the remote LLM's logits within the on-device environment. This approach preserves privacy by transmitting only the final steered tokens rather than raw data or intermediate vectors, while maintaining cloud-based LLMs' general capabilities without fine-tuning. Through comprehensive experiments on various personalized generation tasks, we demonstrate that CoSteer effectively assists LLMs in generating personalized content by leveraging locally stored user profiles and histories, ensuring privacy preservation through on-device data processing while maintaining acceptable computational overhead.
Epona: Autoregressive Diffusion World Model for Autonomous Driving
Authors: Kaiwen Zhang, Zhenyu Tang, Xiaotao Hu, Xingang Pan, Xiaoyang Guo, YuAn Liu, Jingwei Huang, Li Yuan, Qian Zhang, Xiao-Xiao Long, Xun Cao, Wei Yin
Date: 2025-06-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, model, Motion Planning, NavSim, Trajectory Planning, Video Generation, Video Prediction

Diffusion models have demonstrated exceptional visual quality in video generation, making them promising for autonomous driving world modeling. However, existing video diffusion-based world models struggle with flexible-length, long-horizon predictions and integrating trajectory planning. This is because conventional video diffusion models rely on global joint distribution modeling of fixed-length frame sequences rather than sequentially constructing localized distributions at each timestep. In this work, we propose Epona, an autoregressive diffusion world model that enables localized spatiotemporal distribution modeling through two key innovations: 1) Decoupled spatiotemporal factorization that separates temporal dynamics modeling from fine-grained future world generation, and 2) Modular trajectory and video prediction that seamlessly integrate motion planning with visual modeling in an end-to-end framework. Our architecture enables high-resolution, long-duration generation while introducing a novel chain-of-forward training strategy to address error accumulation in autoregressive loops. Experimental results demonstrate state-of-the-art performance with 7.4\% FVD improvement and minutes longer prediction duration compared to prior works. The learned world model further serves as a real-time motion planner, outperforming strong end-to-end planners on NAVSIM benchmarks. Code will be publicly available at \href{https://github.com/Kevin-thu/Epona/}{https://github.com/Kevin-thu/Epona/}.
World4Drive: End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Intention-aware Physical Latent World Model
Authors: Yupeng Zheng, Pengxuan Yang, Zebin Xing, Qichao Zhang, Yuhang Zheng, Yinfeng Gao, Pengfei Li, Teng Zhang, Zhongpu Xia, Peng Jia, Dongbin Zhao
Date: 2025-07-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, NavSim, Self-Supervised Learning

End-to-end autonomous driving directly generates planning trajectories from raw sensor data, yet it typically relies on costly perception supervision to extract scene information. A critical research challenge arises: constructing an informative driving world model to enable perception annotation-free, end-to-end planning via self-supervised learning. In this paper, we present World4Drive, an end-to-end autonomous driving framework that employs vision foundation models to build latent world models for generating and evaluating multi-modal planning trajectories. Specifically, World4Drive first extracts scene features, including driving intention and world latent representations enriched with spatial-semantic priors provided by vision foundation models. It then generates multi-modal planning trajectories based on current scene features and driving intentions and predicts multiple intention-driven future states within the latent space. Finally, it introduces a world model selector module to evaluate and select the best trajectory. We achieve perception annotation-free, end-to-end planning through self-supervised alignment between actual future observations and predicted observations reconstructed from the latent space. World4Drive achieves state-of-the-art performance without manual perception annotations on both the open-loop nuScenes and closed-loop NavSim benchmarks, demonstrating an 18.1\% relative reduction in L2 error, 46.7% lower collision rate, and 3.75 faster training convergence. Codes will be accessed at https://github.com/ucaszyp/World4Drive.