Daily Papers

Large language model (LLM) agents have demonstrated strong capabilities in complex interactive decision-making tasks. However, existing LLM agents typically rely on increasingly long interaction histories, resulting in high computational cost and limited scalability. In this paper, we propose STEP-HRL, a hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) framework that enables step-level learning by conditioning only on single-step transitions rather than full interaction histories. STEP-HRL structures tasks hierarchically, using completed subtasks to represent global progress of overall task. By introducing a local progress module, it also iteratively and selectively summarizes interaction history within each subtask to produce a compact summary of local progress. Together, these components yield augmented step-level transitions for both high-level and low-level policies. Experimental results on ScienceWorld and ALFWorld benchmarks consistently demonstrate that STEP-HRL substantially outperforms baselines in terms of performance and generalization while reducing token usage. Our code is available at https://github.com/TonyStark042/STEP-HRL.

A fundamental dilemma in generative modeling persists: iterative diffusion models achieve outstanding fidelity, but at a significant computational cost, while efficient few-step alternatives are constrained by a hard quality ceiling. This conflict between generation steps and output quality arises from restrictive training objectives that focus exclusively on either infinitesimal dynamics (PF-ODEs) or direct endpoint prediction. We address this challenge by introducing an exact, continuous-time dynamics equation that analytically defines state transitions across any finite time interval. This leads to a novel generative paradigm, Transition Models (TiM), which adapt to arbitrary-step transitions, seamlessly traversing the generative trajectory from single leaps to fine-grained refinement with more steps. Despite having only 865M parameters, TiM achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing leading models such as SD3.5 (8B parameters) and FLUX.1 (12B parameters) across all evaluated step counts. Importantly, unlike previous few-step generators, TiM demonstrates monotonic quality improvement as the sampling budget increases. Additionally, when employing our native-resolution strategy, TiM delivers exceptional fidelity at resolutions up to 4096x4096.

Procedural tasks with multiple ordered steps are ubiquitous in daily life. Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have enabled personal assistants that support daily activities. However, existing systems primarily provide reactive guidance triggered by user queries, or limited proactive assistance for isolated short-term events rather than long-horizon procedural tasks. In this work, we introduce Pro^2Assist, a step-aware proactive assistant that continuously tracks fine-grained task progress and reasons over the user's evolving state to provide timely assistance throughout tasks. Pro^2Assist leverages multimodal data from augmented reality (AR) glasses to achieve motion-based perception. It then extracts step-oriented procedural context from multi-scale temporal dynamics and task-specific expert knowledge. Based on both sensory input and procedural context, Pro^2Assist performs continuous reasoning to infer user needs and display timely assistance on AR glasses. We evaluate Pro^2Assist using a dataset curated from public sources and a real-world dataset collected on our testbed with AR glasses. Extensive evaluations show that Pro^2Assist outperforms the best-performing baselines by over 21% in procedural action understanding accuracy, and it achieves up to 2.29x the proactive timing accuracy of baselines. A user study with 20 participants further shows that 90% find Pro^2Assist useful, indicating its effectiveness for real-world procedural assistance.

Recent advancements in image generation models have enabled the prediction of future Graphical User Interface (GUI) states based on user instructions. However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on general domain visual fidelity, leaving the evaluation of state transitions and temporal coherence in GUI-specific contexts underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce GEBench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating dynamic interaction and temporal coherence in GUI generation. GEBench comprises 700 carefully curated samples spanning five task categories, covering both single-step interactions and multi-step trajectories across real-world and fictional scenarios, as well as grounding point localization. To support systematic evaluation, we propose GE-Score, a novel five-dimensional metric that assesses Goal Achievement, Interaction Logic, Content Consistency, UI Plausibility, and Visual Quality. Extensive evaluations on current models indicate that while they perform well on single-step transitions, they struggle significantly with maintaining temporal coherence and spatial grounding over longer interaction sequences. Our findings identify icon interpretation, text rendering, and localization precision as critical bottlenecks. This work provides a foundation for systematic assessment and suggests promising directions for future research toward building high-fidelity generative GUI environments. The code is available at: https://github.com/stepfun-ai/GEBench.

Performing tasks on the web presents fundamental challenges to large language models (LLMs), including combinatorially large open-world tasks and variations across web interfaces. Simply specifying a large prompt to handle all possible behaviors and states is extremely complex, and results in behavior leaks between unrelated behaviors. Decomposition to distinct policies can address this challenge, but requires carefully handing off control between policies. We propose Stacked LLM Policies for Web Actions (SteP), an approach to dynamically compose policies to solve a diverse set of web tasks. SteP defines a Markov Decision Process where the state is a stack of policies representing the control state, i.e., the chain of policy calls. Unlike traditional methods that are restricted to static hierarchies, SteP enables dynamic control that adapts to the complexity of the task. We evaluate SteP against multiple baselines and web environments including WebArena, MiniWoB++, and a CRM. On WebArena, SteP improves (14.9\% to 33.5\%) over SOTA that use GPT-4 policies, while on MiniWob++, SteP is competitive with prior works while using significantly less data. Our code and data are available at https://asappresearch.github.io/webagents-step.

In this paper we present an approach for localizing steps of procedural activities in narrated how-to videos. To deal with the scarcity of labeled data at scale, we source the step descriptions from a language knowledge base (wikiHow) containing instructional articles for a large variety of procedural tasks. Without any form of manual supervision, our model learns to temporally ground the steps of procedural articles in how-to videos by matching three modalities: frames, narrations, and step descriptions. Specifically, our method aligns steps to video by fusing information from two distinct pathways: i) {\em direct} alignment of step descriptions to frames, ii) {\em indirect} alignment obtained by composing steps-to-narrations with narrations-to-video correspondences. Notably, our approach performs global temporal grounding of all steps in an article at once by exploiting order information, and is trained with step pseudo-labels which are iteratively refined and aggressively filtered. In order to validate our model we introduce a new evaluation benchmark -- HT-Step -- obtained by manually annotating a 124-hour subset of HowTo100MA test server is accessible at \url{https://eval.ai/web/challenges/challenge-page/2082.} with steps sourced from wikiHow articles. Experiments on this benchmark as well as zero-shot evaluations on CrossTask demonstrate that our multi-modality alignment yields dramatic gains over several baselines and prior works. Finally, we show that our inner module for matching narration-to-video outperforms by a large margin the state of the art on the HTM-Align narration-video alignment benchmark.

We address the problem of extracting key steps from unlabeled procedural videos, motivated by the potential of Augmented Reality (AR) headsets to revolutionize job training and performance. We decompose the problem into two steps: representation learning and key steps extraction. We propose a training objective, Bootstrapped Multi-Cue Contrastive (BMC2) loss to learn disciriminative representations for various steps without any labels. Different from prior works, we develop techniques to train a light-weight temporal module which uses off-the-shelf features for self supervision. Our approach can seamlessly leverage information from multiple cues like optical flow, depth or gaze to learn discriminative features for key-steps making it amenable for AR applications. We finally extract key steps via a tunable algorithm that clusters the representations and samples. We show significant improvements over prior works for the task of key step localization and phase classification. Qualitative results demonstrate that the extracted key steps are meaningful to succinctly represent various steps of the procedural tasks.

Autoregressive (AR) video diffusion models enable low-latency streaming generation by synthesizing videos chunk by chunk with cached visual context, but this chunk-wise formulation makes temporal instruction following ambiguous. A single global prompt does not specify which sub-event should be realized in each chunk, while naively switching to step-wise prompts often leads to delayed reactions, blended step semantics, and error propagation across prompt transitions. These failures are difficult to address with supervised fine-tuning or distillation alone: SFT suffers from exposure bias, while rollout-based distillation still optimizes low-level denoising or teacher-distribution matching rather than directly enforcing action ordering and prompt-transition correctness. We address these challenges with TempAct, a planner--executor reinforcement learning framework that jointly optimizes temporal decomposition and step-conditioned execution for temporally plausible AR video generation. TempAct uses an LLM planner to explore span-aware step prompts that are executable by the video model, and trains an AR diffusion executor to follow these prompts under its own generated histories. Its key mechanism is hierarchical group exploration: candidate plans form planning groups, and each plan induces an execution group of multiple continuations from a shared visual context, enabling plan-level credit assignment for long-horizon temporal outcomes and executor-level credit assignment for prompt-switch behavior. We further design hierarchical rewards that combine plan-quality and full-video temporal feedback for the planner with local transition-level step-following rewards, aesthetic regularization, and KL constraints for the executor. Experiments on Self-Forcing and LongLive show that TempAct improves temporal consistency while preserving overall visual quality.

Few-step video generation has been significantly advanced by consistency distillation. However, the performance of consistency-distilled models often degrades as more sampling steps are allocated at test time, limiting their effectiveness for any-step video diffusion. This limitation arises because consistency distillation replaces the original probability-flow ODE trajectory with a consistency-sampling trajectory, weakening the desirable test-time scaling behavior of ODE sampling. To address this limitation, we introduce AnyFlow, the first any-step video diffusion distillation framework based on flow maps. Instead of distilling a model for only a few fixed sampling steps, AnyFlow optimizes the full ODE sampling trajectory. To this end, we shift the distillation target from endpoint consistency mapping (z_{t}rightarrow z_{0}) to flow-map transition learning (z_{t}rightarrow z_{r}) over arbitrary time intervals. We further propose Flow Map Backward Simulation, which decomposes a full Euler rollout into shortcut flow-map transitions, enabling efficient on-policy distillation that reduces test-time errors (i.e., discretization error in few-step sampling and exposure bias in causal generation). Extensive experiments across both bidirectional and causal architectures, at scales ranging from 1.3B to 14B parameters, demonstrate that AnyFlow achieves performance matches or surpasses consistency-based counterparts in the few-step regime, while scaling with sampling step budgets.

The synthesis of immersive 3D scenes from text is rapidly maturing, driven by novel video generative models and feed-forward 3D reconstruction, with vast potential in AR/VR and world modeling. While panoramic images have proven effective for scene initialization, existing approaches suffer from a trade-off between visual fidelity and explorability: autoregressive expansion suffers from context drift, while panoramic video generation is limited to low resolution. We present Stepper, a unified framework for text-driven immersive 3D scene synthesis that circumvents these limitations via stepwise panoramic scene expansion. Stepper leverages a novel multi-view 360° diffusion model that enables consistent, high-resolution expansion, coupled with a geometry reconstruction pipeline that enforces geometric coherence. Trained on a new large-scale, multi-view panorama dataset, Stepper achieves state-of-the-art fidelity and structural consistency, outperforming prior approaches, thereby setting a new standard for immersive scene generation.

Computer use agents (CUAs) can operate real-world digital interfaces but remain difficult to train due to the high cost of graphical user interface (GUI) interaction and the scarcity of high-quality trajectory data. Existing datasets rely on human demonstrations, limiting scalability. A natural alternative is to synthesize data from strong CUAs, yet their rollouts are highly noisy, with incorrect or suboptimal actions consisting a large proportion of the steps, making naive imitation ineffective. To tackle this challenge, we introduce a scalable data synthesis pipeline that transforms noisy rollouts into reliable supervision without human annotation. The core idea is step-level filtering, which evaluates actions individually to retain only correct steps, complemented by reasoning augmentation for improved planning. Using this pipeline, we construct WebSTAR, a dataset of 13.3K trajectories and 100K graded, reasoning-rich steps synthesized from OpenAI's computer-use-preview model. We train Qwen-2.5-VL-Instruct models (7B and 32B) on WebSTAR. On WebVoyager, our 7B model surpasses SoTA open-source CUA model UI-TARS-1.5-7B by more than 15% with only supervised finetuning. Building on step-level grading, we further create WebSCORE, a dataset of graded step-level actions, and train StepRM, a 7B multimodal reward model distilled from o4-mini, which matches its grading quality while being far more efficient to deploy at scale. Our results establish step-level filtering as a key principle for scalable CUA training and construct two new datasets (WebSTAR, WebSCORE) and a lightweight reward model (StepRM) as practical tools to advance robust and efficient CUAs.

We address a fundamental challenge in Reinforcement Learning from Interaction Demonstration (RLID): demonstration noise and coverage limitations. While existing data collection approaches provide valuable interaction demonstrations, they often yield sparse, disconnected, and noisy trajectories that fail to capture the full spectrum of possible skill variations and transitions. Our key insight is that despite noisy and sparse demonstrations, there exist infinite physically feasible trajectories that naturally bridge between demonstrated skills or emerge from their neighboring states, forming a continuous space of possible skill variations and transitions. Building upon this insight, we present two data augmentation techniques: a Stitched Trajectory Graph (STG) that discovers potential transitions between demonstration skills, and a State Transition Field (STF) that establishes unique connections for arbitrary states within the demonstration neighborhood. To enable effective RLID with augmented data, we develop an Adaptive Trajectory Sampling (ATS) strategy for dynamic curriculum generation and a historical encoding mechanism for memory-dependent skill learning. Our approach enables robust skill acquisition that significantly generalizes beyond the reference demonstrations. Extensive experiments across diverse interaction tasks demonstrate substantial improvements over state-of-the-art methods in terms of convergence stability, generalization capability, and recovery robustness.

Computer-use agents provide a promising path toward general software automation because they can interact directly with arbitrary graphical user interfaces instead of relying on brittle, application-specific integrations. Despite recent advances in benchmark performance, strong computer-use agents remain expensive and slow in practice, since most systems invoke large multimodal models at nearly every interaction step. We argue that this uniform allocation of compute is fundamentally inefficient for long-horizon GUI tasks. Such trajectories are highly heterogeneous: many steps are routine and can be handled reliably by smaller, cheaper policies, while errors tend to concentrate at a relatively small number of high-risk moments. Across computer-use benchmarks, these failures repeatedly take two forms: progress stalls, where the agent loops, repeats ineffective actions, or fails to make meaningful progress, and silent semantic drift, where the agent continues taking locally plausible actions after already deviating from the user's true goal. To address this inefficiency, we propose an event-driven, step-level cascade for computer-use agents that runs a small policy by default and escalates to a stronger model only when lightweight learned monitors detect elevated risk. Our framework combines two complementary signals: a Stuck Monitor that detects degraded progress from recent reasoning-action history and triggers recovery, and a Milestone Monitor that identifies semantically meaningful checkpoints where sparse verification is most informative for catching drift. This design turns always-on frontier-model inference into adaptive, on-demand compute allocation over the course of an evolving interaction. The framework is modular and deployment-oriented: it can be layered on top of existing computer-use agents without changing the underlying agent architecture or retraining the large model.

Large language model (LLM) agents now execute long, tool-using tasks where final outcome checks can arrive too late for intervention. Online warning requires lightweight prefix monitors over heterogeneous traces, but hand-authored event schemas are brittle and deployment-time LLM judging is costly. We introduce PrefixGuard, a trace-to-monitor framework with an offline StepView induction step followed by supervised monitor training. StepView induces deterministic typed-step adapters from raw trace samples, and the monitor learns an event abstraction and prefix-risk scorer from terminal outcomes. Across WebArena, τ^2-Bench, SkillsBench, and TerminalBench, the strongest PrefixGuard monitors reach 0.900/0.710/0.533/0.557 AUPRC. Using the strongest backend within each representation, they improve over raw-text controls by an average of +0.137 AUPRC. LLM judges remain substantially weaker under the same prefix-warning protocol. We also derive an observability ceiling on score-based area under the precision-recall curve (AUPRC) that separates monitor error from failures lacking evidence in the observed prefix. For finite-state audit, post-hoc deterministic finite automaton (DFA) extraction remains compact on WebArena and τ^2-Bench (29 and 20 states) but expands to 151 and 187 states on SkillsBench and TerminalBench. Finally, first-alert diagnostics show that strong ranking does not imply deployment utility: WebArena ranks well yet fails to support low-false-alarm alerts, whereas τ^2-Bench and TerminalBench retain more actionable early alerts. Together, these results position PrefixGuard as a practical monitor-synthesis recipe with explicit diagnostics for when prefix warnings translate into actionable interventions.

Autonomous agents, which perceive environments and take actions to achieve goals, have become increasingly feasible with the advancements in large language models (LLMs). However, current powerful agents often depend on sophisticated prompt engineering combined with closed-source LLMs like GPT-4. Although training open-source LLMs using expert trajectories from teacher models has yielded some improvements in agent capabilities, this approach still faces limitations such as performance plateauing and error propagation. To mitigate these challenges, we propose STeP, a novel method for improving LLM-based agent training. We synthesize self-reflected trajectories that include reflections and corrections of error steps, which enhance the effectiveness of LLM agents in learning from teacher models, enabling them to become agents capable of self-reflecting and correcting. We also introduce partial masking strategy that prevents the LLM from internalizing incorrect or suboptimal steps. Experiments demonstrate that our method improves agent performance across three representative tasks: ALFWorld, WebShop, and SciWorld. For the open-source model LLaMA2-7B-Chat, when trained using self-reflected trajectories constructed with Qwen1.5-110B-Chat as the teacher model, it achieves comprehensive improvements with less training data compared to agents trained exclusively on expert trajectories.

Multi-scene navigation (clearing an objective in one bounded space and then crossing a portal into the next) is a defining feature of contemporary 3D games, but authoring it is laborious: every portal must have consistent endpoints on both sides, each interior must remain navigable once it is furnished, and the resulting connectivity must be kept consistent across many files. Recent large language model (LLM) and multimodal LLM (MLLM) scene generators have made single-interior synthesis dramatically cheaper, yet they produce one scene at a time and cannot, by naive repetition, yield a connected multi-scene world. We identify three obstacles that single-scene methods leave unsolved: cross-scene consistency, in-scene navigability, and the evaluation of whether a transition actually works. We present MAGIC, a prompt-to-project system that addresses all three. MAGIC is a four-stage pipeline that turns a single natural-language prompt into a runnable multi-scene game project: it plans a shared transition-aware intermediate representation, specifies each scene while enforcing portal reachability with a flood-fill validator, generates the scenes together with their transition scripts, and combines them into one project. Because existing single-scene fidelity metrics never execute a transition, we further introduce a transition-focused evaluation agent that runs each transition in play. On a new benchmark of 100 multi-scene cases, MAGIC produces an executable project for every case and reaches 0.99 precision, 0.95 recall, and 0.96 F1 on end-to-end transition identification; stage by stage, it recovers more ground-truth portals and yields markedly more navigable layouts than an LLM baseline and Holodeck. Our code is available at https://github.com/sereneee1201/MAGIC/.

This paper presents Step-Audio~2, an end-to-end multi-modal large language model designed for industry-strength audio understanding and speech conversation. By integrating a latent audio encoder and reasoning-centric reinforcement learning (RL), Step-Audio 2 achieves promising performance in automatic speech recognition (ASR) and audio understanding. To facilitate genuine end-to-end speech conversation, Step-Audio 2 incorporates the generation of discrete audio tokens into language modeling, significantly enhancing its responsiveness to paralinguistic information such as speaking styles and emotions. To effectively leverage the rich textual and acoustic knowledge in real-world data, Step-Audio 2 integrates retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and is able to call external tools such as web search to mitigate hallucination and audio search to switch timbres. Trained on millions of hours of speech and audio data, Step-Audio 2 delivers intelligence and expressiveness across diverse conversational scenarios. Evaluation results demonstrate that Step-Audio 2 achieves state-of-the-art performance on various audio understanding and conversational benchmarks compared to other open-source and commercial solutions. Please visit https://github.com/stepfun-ai/Step-Audio2 for more information.

Conditional image editing aims to modify a source image according to textual prompts and optional reference guidance. Such editing is crucial in scenarios requiring strict structural control (i.e., anomaly insertion in driving scenes and complex human pose transformation). Despite recent advances in large-scale editing models (i.e., Seedream, Nano Banana, etc), most approaches rely on single-step generation. This paradigm often lacks explicit quality control, may introduce excessive deviation from the original image, and frequently produces structural artifacts or environment-inconsistent modifications, typically requiring manual prompt tuning to achieve acceptable results. We propose CAMEO, a structured multi-agent framework that reformulates conditional editing as a quality-aware, feedback-driven process rather than a one-shot generation task. CAMEO decomposes editing into coordinated stages of planning, structured prompting, hypothesis generation, and adaptive reference grounding, where external guidance is invoked only when task complexity requires it. To overcome the lack of intrinsic quality control in existing methods, evaluation is embedded directly within the editing loop. Intermediate results are iteratively refined through structured feedback, forming a closed-loop process that progressively corrects structural and contextual inconsistencies. We evaluate CAMEO on anomaly insertion and human pose switching tasks. Across multiple strong editing backbones and independent evaluation models, CAMEO consistently achieves 20\% more win rate on average compared to multiple state-of-the-art models, demonstrating improved robustness, controllability, and structural reliability in conditional image editing.

Recent innovations on hardware (e.g. Nvidia A100) have motivated learning N:M structured sparsity masks from scratch for fast model inference. However, state-of-the-art learning recipes in this regime (e.g. SR-STE) are proposed for non-adaptive optimizers like momentum SGD, while incurring non-trivial accuracy drop for Adam-trained models like attention-based LLMs. In this paper, we first demonstrate such gap origins from poorly estimated second moment (i.e. variance) in Adam states given by the masked weights. We conjecture that learning N:M masks with Adam should take the critical regime of variance estimation into account. In light of this, we propose STEP, an Adam-aware recipe that learns N:M masks with two phases: first, STEP calculates a reliable variance estimate (precondition phase) and subsequently, the variance remains fixed and is used as a precondition to learn N:M masks (mask-learning phase). STEP automatically identifies the switching point of two phases by dynamically sampling variance changes over the training trajectory and testing the sample concentration. Empirically, we evaluate STEP and other baselines such as ASP and SR-STE on multiple tasks including CIFAR classification, machine translation and LLM fine-tuning (BERT-Base, GPT-2). We show STEP mitigates the accuracy drop of baseline recipes and is robust to aggressive structured sparsity ratios.

Diffusion and flow matching models have significantly advanced media generation, yet their design space is well-explored, somewhat limiting further improvements. Concurrently, autoregressive (AR) models, particularly those generating continuous tokens, have emerged as a promising direction for unifying text and media generation. This paper introduces Transition Matching (TM), a novel discrete-time, continuous-state generative paradigm that unifies and advances both diffusion/flow models and continuous AR generation. TM decomposes complex generation tasks into simpler Markov transitions, allowing for expressive non-deterministic probability transition kernels and arbitrary non-continuous supervision processes, thereby unlocking new flexible design avenues. We explore these choices through three TM variants: (i) Difference Transition Matching (DTM), which generalizes flow matching to discrete-time by directly learning transition probabilities, yielding state-of-the-art image quality and text adherence as well as improved sampling efficiency. (ii) Autoregressive Transition Matching (ARTM) and (iii) Full History Transition Matching (FHTM) are partially and fully causal models, respectively, that generalize continuous AR methods. They achieve continuous causal AR generation quality comparable to non-causal approaches and potentially enable seamless integration with existing AR text generation techniques. Notably, FHTM is the first fully causal model to match or surpass the performance of flow-based methods on text-to-image task in continuous domains. We demonstrate these contributions through a rigorous large-scale comparison of TM variants and relevant baselines, maintaining a fixed architecture, training data, and hyperparameters.

Current advancements in reinforcement learning (RL) have predominantly focused on learning step-based policies that generate actions for each perceived state. While these methods efficiently leverage step information from environmental interaction, they often ignore the temporal correlation between actions, resulting in inefficient exploration and unsmooth trajectories that are challenging to implement on real hardware. Episodic RL (ERL) seeks to overcome these challenges by exploring in parameters space that capture the correlation of actions. However, these approaches typically compromise data efficiency, as they treat trajectories as opaque black boxes. In this work, we introduce a novel ERL algorithm, Temporally-Correlated Episodic RL (TCE), which effectively utilizes step information in episodic policy updates, opening the 'black box' in existing ERL methods while retaining the smooth and consistent exploration in parameter space. TCE synergistically combines the advantages of step-based and episodic RL, achieving comparable performance to recent ERL methods while maintaining data efficiency akin to state-of-the-art (SoTA) step-based RL.

Real-time speech interaction, serving as a fundamental interface for human-machine collaboration, holds immense potential. However, current open-source models face limitations such as high costs in voice data collection, weakness in dynamic control, and limited intelligence. To address these challenges, this paper introduces Step-Audio, the first production-ready open-source solution. Key contributions include: 1) a 130B-parameter unified speech-text multi-modal model that achieves unified understanding and generation, with the Step-Audio-Chat version open-sourced; 2) a generative speech data engine that establishes an affordable voice cloning framework and produces the open-sourced lightweight Step-Audio-TTS-3B model through distillation; 3) an instruction-driven fine control system enabling dynamic adjustments across dialects, emotions, singing, and RAP; 4) an enhanced cognitive architecture augmented with tool calling and role-playing abilities to manage complex tasks effectively. Based on our new StepEval-Audio-360 evaluation benchmark, Step-Audio achieves state-of-the-art performance in human evaluations, especially in terms of instruction following. On open-source benchmarks like LLaMA Question, shows 9.3% average performance improvement, demonstrating our commitment to advancing the development of open-source multi-modal language technologies. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/stepfun-ai/Step-Audio.

Comparing a user video to a reference how-to video is a key requirement for AR/VR technology delivering personalized assistance tailored to the user's progress. However, current approaches for language-based assistance can only answer questions about a single video. We propose an approach that first automatically generates large amounts of visual instruction tuning data involving pairs of videos from HowTo100M by leveraging existing step annotations and accompanying narrations, and then trains a video-conditioned language model to jointly reason across multiple raw videos. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance at identifying differences between video pairs and ranking videos based on the severity of these differences, and shows promising ability to perform general reasoning over multiple videos. Project page: https://github.com/facebookresearch/stepdiff

Recent advances in multimodal large language models unlock unprecedented opportunities for GUI automation. However, a fundamental challenge remains: how to efficiently acquire high-quality training data while maintaining annotation reliability? We introduce a self-evolving training pipeline powered by the Calibrated Step Reward System, which converts model-generated trajectories into reliable training signals through trajectory-level calibration, achieving >90% annotation accuracy with 10-100x lower cost. Leveraging this pipeline, we introduce Step-GUI, a family of models (4B/8B) that achieves state-of-the-art GUI performance (8B: 80.2% AndroidWorld, 48.5% OSWorld, 62.6% ScreenShot-Pro) while maintaining robust general capabilities. As GUI agent capabilities improve, practical deployment demands standardized interfaces across heterogeneous devices while protecting user privacy. To this end, we propose GUI-MCP, the first Model Context Protocol for GUI automation with hierarchical architecture that combines low-level atomic operations and high-level task delegation to local specialist models, enabling high-privacy execution where sensitive data stays on-device. Finally, to assess whether agents can handle authentic everyday usage, we introduce AndroidDaily, a benchmark grounded in real-world mobile usage patterns with 3146 static actions and 235 end-to-end tasks across high-frequency daily scenarios (8B: static 89.91%, end-to-end 52.50%). Our work advances the development of practical GUI agents and demonstrates strong potential for real-world deployment in everyday digital interactions.

Although existing 3D dance generation methods perform well in controlled scenarios, they often struggle to generalize in the wild. When conditioned on unseen music, existing methods often produce unstructured or physically implausible dance, largely due to limited music-to-dance data and restricted model capacity. This work aims to push the frontier of generalizable 3D dance generation by scaling up both data and model design. (1) On the data side, we develop a fully automated pipeline that reconstructs high-fidelity 3D dance motions from monocular videos. To eliminate the physical artifacts prevalent in existing reconstruction methods, we introduce a Foot Restoration Diffusion Model (FRDM) guided by foot-contact and geometric constraints that enforce physical plausibility while preserving kinematic smoothness and expressiveness, resulting in a diverse, high-quality multimodal 3D dance dataset totaling 100.69 hours. (2) On model design, we propose Choreographic LLaMA (ChoreoLLaMA), a scalable LLaMA-based architecture. To enhance robustness under unfamiliar music conditions, we integrate a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) module that injects reference dance as a prompt. Additionally, we design a slow/fast-cadence Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) module that enables ChoreoLLaMA to smoothly adapt motion rhythms across varying music tempos. Extensive experiments across diverse dance genres show that our approach surpasses existing methods in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations, marking a step toward scalable, real-world 3D dance generation. Code, models, and data will be released.

Shot transitions play a pivotal role in multi-shot video generation, as they determine the overall narrative expression and the directorial design of visual storytelling. However, recent progress has primarily focused on low-level visual consistency across shots, neglecting how transitions are designed and how cinematographic language contributes to coherent narrative expression. This often leads to mere sequential shot changes without intentional film-editing patterns. To address this limitation, we propose ShotDirector, an efficient framework that integrates parameter-level camera control and hierarchical editing-pattern-aware prompting. Specifically, we adopt a camera control module that incorporates 6-DoF poses and intrinsic settings to enable precise camera information injection. In addition, a shot-aware mask mechanism is employed to introduce hierarchical prompts aware of professional editing patterns, allowing fine-grained control over shot content. Through this design, our framework effectively combines parameter-level conditions with high-level semantic guidance, achieving film-like controllable shot transitions. To facilitate training and evaluation, we construct ShotWeaver40K, a dataset that captures the priors of film-like editing patterns, and develop a set of evaluation metrics for controllable multi-shot video generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.

Real-time interactive video generation requires low-latency, streaming, and controllable rollout. Existing autoregressive (AR) diffusion distillation methods have achieved strong results in the chunk-wise 4-step regime by distilling bidirectional base models into few-step AR students, but they remain limited by coarse response granularity and non-negligible sampling latency. In this paper, we study a more aggressive setting: frame-wise autoregression with only 1--2 sampling steps. In this regime, we identify the initialization of a few-step AR student as the key bottleneck: existing strategies are either target-misaligned, incapable of few-step generation, or too costly to scale. We propose Causal Forcing++, a principled and scalable pipeline that uses causal consistency distillation (causal CD) for few-step AR initialization. The core idea is that causal CD learns the same AR-conditional flow map as causal ODE distillation, but obtains supervision from a single online teacher ODE step between adjacent timesteps, avoiding the need to precompute and store full PF-ODE trajectories. This makes the initialization both more efficient and easier to optimize. The resulting pipeline, \ours, surpasses the SOTA 4-step chunk-wise Causal Forcing under the \textbf{frame-wise 2-step setting} by 0.1 in VBench Total, 0.3 in VBench Quality, and 0.335 in VisionReward, while reducing first-frame latency by 50\% and Stage 2 training cost by sim4times. We further extend the pipeline to action-conditioned world model generation in the spirit of Genie3. Project Page: https://github.com/thu-ml/Causal-Forcing and https://github.com/shengshu-ai/minWM .

Recently, tool-augmented LLMs have gained increasing attention. Given an instruction, tool-augmented LLMs can interact with various external tools in multiple rounds and provide a final answer. However, previous LLMs were trained on overly detailed instructions, which included API names or parameters, while real users would not explicitly mention these API details. This leads to a gap between trained LLMs and real-world scenarios. In addition, most works ignore whether the interaction process follows the instruction. To address these issues, we constructed a training dataset called MGToolBench, which contains statement and category-level instructions to better reflect real-world scenarios. In addition, we propose ToolPlanner, a two-stage reinforcement learning framework that utilizes path planning and two feedback mechanisms to enhance the LLM's task completion and instruction-following capabilities. Experimental results show that ToolPlanner significantly improves the Match Rate, Pass Rate and Win Rate by 26.8%, 20.2%, and 5.6% compared to the SOTA model. Human evaluation verifies that the multi-granularity instructions can better align with users' usage habits. Our data and code will be released upon acceptance.

Generating coherent and diverse human dances from music signals has gained tremendous progress in animating virtual avatars. While existing methods support direct dance synthesis, they fail to recognize that enabling users to edit dance movements is far more practical in real-world choreography scenarios. Moreover, the lack of high-quality dance datasets incorporating iterative editing also limits addressing this challenge. To achieve this goal, we first construct DanceRemix, a large-scale multi-turn editable dance dataset comprising the prompt featuring over 25.3M dance frames and 84.5K pairs. In addition, we propose a novel framework for iterative and editable dance generation coherently aligned with given music signals, namely DanceEditor. Considering the dance motion should be both musical rhythmic and enable iterative editing by user descriptions, our framework is built upon a prediction-then-editing paradigm unifying multi-modal conditions. At the initial prediction stage, our framework improves the authority of generated results by directly modeling dance movements from tailored, aligned music. Moreover, at the subsequent iterative editing stages, we incorporate text descriptions as conditioning information to draw the editable results through a specifically designed Cross-modality Editing Module (CEM). Specifically, CEM adaptively integrates the initial prediction with music and text prompts as temporal motion cues to guide the synthesized sequences. Thereby, the results display music harmonics while preserving fine-grained semantic alignment with text descriptions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art models on our newly collected DanceRemix dataset. Code is available at https://lzvsdy.github.io/DanceEditor/.

State Space Models (SSMs) have emerged as efficient alternatives to Transformers, mitigating their quadratic computational cost. However, the application of Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods to SSMs remains largely unexplored. In particular, prompt-based methods like Prompt Tuning and Prefix-Tuning, which are widely used in Transformers, do not perform well on SSMs. To address this, we propose state-based methods as a superior alternative to prompt-based methods. This new family of methods naturally stems from the architectural characteristics of SSMs. State-based methods adjust state-related features directly instead of depending on external prompts. Furthermore, we introduce a novel state-based PEFT method: State-offset Tuning. At every timestep, our method directly affects the state at the current step, leading to more effective adaptation. Through extensive experiments across diverse datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Code is available at https://github.com/furiosa-ai/ssm-state-tuning.

Emotion Support Conversation (ESC) is an emerging and challenging task with the goal of reducing the emotional distress of people. Previous attempts fail to maintain smooth transitions between utterances in ESC because they ignore to grasp the fine-grained transition information at each dialogue turn. To solve this problem, we propose to take into account turn-level state Transitions of ESC (TransESC) from three perspectives, including semantics transition, strategy transition and emotion transition, to drive the conversation in a smooth and natural way. Specifically, we construct the state transition graph with a two-step way, named transit-then-interact, to grasp such three types of turn-level transition information. Finally, they are injected into the transition-aware decoder to generate more engaging responses. Both automatic and human evaluations on the benchmark dataset demonstrate the superiority of TransESC to generate more smooth and effective supportive responses. Our source code is available at https://github.com/circle-hit/TransESC.

Imitation learning for end-to-end driving trains policies only on expert demonstrations. Once deployed in a closed loop, such policies lack recovery data: small mistakes cannot be corrected and quickly compound into failures. A promising direction is to generate alternative viewpoints and trajectories beyond the logged path. Prior work explores photorealistic digital twins via neural rendering or game engines, but these methods are prohibitively slow and costly, and thus mainly used for evaluation. In this work, we argue that photorealism is unnecessary for training end-to-end planners. What matters is semantic fidelity and scalability: driving depends on geometry and dynamics, not textures or lighting. Motivated by this, we propose 3D Rasterization, which replaces costly rendering with lightweight rasterization of annotated primitives, enabling augmentations such as counterfactual recovery maneuvers and cross-agent view synthesis. To transfer these synthetic views effectively to real-world deployment, we introduce a Raster-to-Real feature-space alignment that bridges the sim-to-real gap. Together, these components form Rasterization Augmented Planning (RAP), a scalable data augmentation pipeline for planning. RAP achieves state-of-the-art closed-loop robustness and long-tail generalization, ranking first on four major benchmarks: NAVSIM v1/v2, Waymo Open Dataset Vision-based E2E Driving, and Bench2Drive. Our results show that lightweight rasterization with feature alignment suffices to scale E2E training, offering a practical alternative to photorealistic rendering. Project page: https://alan-lanfeng.github.io/RAP/.

Recent advances have substantially improved real-time interactive video generation in the autoregressive regime. However, most existing few-step autoregressive video generation methods, often distilled from a corresponding many-step teacher, default to a 4-step sampling configuration, which still incurs considerable latency during deployment and suffers from severe quality degradation when the number of sampling steps is further reduced, particularly in the one-step setting. Trajectory-style consistency distillation methods often produce videos with weak dynamics, while DMD-based approaches, such as Self-Forcing, tend to yield blurry frames. To address this challenge, we propose One-Forcing, a simple yet effective approach which augments the DMD objective with an auxiliary GAN loss for high-quality and efficient one-step video generation. Experiments on VBench show that One-Forcing achieves a total score of 83.76, establishing state-of-the-art performance among one-step causal video generation methods and remaining competitive with strong many-step approaches. We further demonstrate that one-step framewise autoregressive generation can be achieved stably with merely one-third of the training cost of the chunkwise model, a setting that prior methods have failed to achieve successfully.

Video stabilization is a longstanding computer vision problem, particularly pixel-level synthesis solutions for video stabilization which synthesize full frames add to the complexity of this task. These techniques aim to stabilize videos by synthesizing full frames while enhancing the stability of the considered video. This intensifies the complexity of the task due to the distinct mix of unique motion profiles and visual content present in each video sequence, making robust generalization with fixed parameters difficult. In our study, we introduce a novel approach to enhance the performance of pixel-level synthesis solutions for video stabilization by adapting these models to individual input video sequences. The proposed adaptation exploits low-level visual cues accessible during test-time to improve both the stability and quality of resulting videos. We highlight the efficacy of our methodology of "test-time adaptation" through simple fine-tuning of one of these models, followed by significant stability gain via the integration of meta-learning techniques. Notably, significant improvement is achieved with only a single adaptation step. The versatility of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated by consistently improving the performance of various pixel-level synthesis models for video stabilization in real-world scenarios.

We study the problem of procedure planning in instructional videos, which aims to make a goal-oriented sequence of action steps given partial visual state observations. The motivation of this problem is to learn a structured and plannable state and action space. Recent works succeeded in sequence modeling of steps with only sequence-level annotations accessible during training, which overlooked the roles of states in the procedures. In this work, we point out that State CHangEs MAtter (SCHEMA) for procedure planning in instructional videos. We aim to establish a more structured state space by investigating the causal relations between steps and states in procedures. Specifically, we explicitly represent each step as state changes and track the state changes in procedures. For step representation, we leveraged the commonsense knowledge in large language models (LLMs) to describe the state changes of steps via our designed chain-of-thought prompting. For state change tracking, we align visual state observations with language state descriptions via cross-modal contrastive learning, and explicitly model the intermediate states of the procedure using LLM-generated state descriptions. Experiments on CrossTask, COIN, and NIV benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed SCHEMA model achieves state-of-the-art performance and obtains explainable visualizations.

Procedural activities follow well-defined structures: whether we consider a cooking recipe or a mechanic repairing a car, these activities naturally decompose in a hierarchy of steps and sub-steps. Traditional approaches for step grounding require extensive annotations and scale poorly. Instead, we argue that such hierarchical structure can emerge naturally from uncurated videos of human activities through recurring patterns of co-occurring actions and activities. Our approach builds on HiERO, a weakly-supervised representation learning approach that maps close in the feature space actions that are functionally related to each other, leveraging only fine-grained action-level narrations. In this feature space, procedure steps can be detected by a simple clustering, with no additional task-specific fine-tuning. For the Ego4D Step Grounding challenge, we augment this approach by ensuring fine and coarse level agreement in step assignments, enforcing strict temporal monotonicity of the grounded steps and post-processing the detected steps to reduce the impact of noisy predictions. We call this approach HiERO-StepG and it achieves 56.27 % on the R@1 (IoU = 0.3) metric on the global leaderboard at submission time, ranking second while being completely zero-shot and not requiring procedure-specific annotations. Project page: https://github.com/andreazenotto/HiERO-StepG.

Leveraging text, images, structure maps, or motion trajectories as conditional guidance, diffusion models have achieved great success in automated and high-quality video generation. However, generating smooth and rational transition videos given the first and last video frames as well as descriptive text prompts is far underexplored. We present VTG, a Versatile Transition video Generation framework that can generate smooth, high-fidelity, and semantically coherent video transitions. VTG introduces interpolation-based initialization that helps preserve object identity and handle abrupt content changes effectively. In addition, it incorporates dual-directional motion fine-tuning and representation alignment regularization to mitigate the limitations of pre-trained image-to-video diffusion models in motion smoothness and generation fidelity, respectively. To evaluate VTG and facilitate future studies on unified transition generation, we collected TransitBench, a comprehensive benchmark for transition generation covering two representative transition tasks: concept blending and scene transition. Extensive experiments show that VTG achieves superior transition performance consistently across all four tasks.

We introduce Augmented Physics, a machine learning-integrated authoring tool designed for creating embedded interactive physics simulations from static textbook diagrams. Leveraging recent advancements in computer vision, such as Segment Anything and Multi-modal LLMs, our web-based system enables users to semi-automatically extract diagrams from physics textbooks and generate interactive simulations based on the extracted content. These interactive diagrams are seamlessly integrated into scanned textbook pages, facilitating interactive and personalized learning experiences across various physics concepts, such as optics, circuits, and kinematics. Drawing from an elicitation study with seven physics instructors, we explore four key augmentation strategies: 1) augmented experiments, 2) animated diagrams, 3) bi-directional binding, and 4) parameter visualization. We evaluate our system through technical evaluation, a usability study (N=12), and expert interviews (N=12). Study findings suggest that our system can facilitate more engaging and personalized learning experiences in physics education.

Transition videos play a crucial role in media production, enhancing the flow and coherence of visual narratives. Traditional methods like morphing often lack artistic appeal and require specialized skills, limiting their effectiveness. Recent advances in diffusion model-based video generation offer new possibilities for creating transitions but face challenges such as poor inter-frame relationship modeling and abrupt content changes. We propose a novel training-free Transition Video Generation (TVG) approach using video-level diffusion models that addresses these limitations without additional training. Our method leverages Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) to model latent representations, ensuring smooth and dynamic transitions between frames. Additionally, we introduce interpolation-based conditional controls and a Frequency-aware Bidirectional Fusion (FBiF) architecture to enhance temporal control and transition reliability. Evaluations of benchmark datasets and custom image pairs demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in generating high-quality smooth transition videos. The code are provided in https://sobeymil.github.io/tvg.com.

World-action models (WAMs) jointly generate future video and robot actions through iterative diffusion, achieving strong performance on manipulation benchmarks but requiring tens of denoising steps, a cost that precludes real-time control. Step distillation has emerged as the natural remedy, but off-the-shelf methods break down in the joint video-action setting because video and action streams use different SNR-shifted noise schedules and reach training with substantially different marginal noise distributions, an asymmetry that single-modality distillation methods cannot accommodate. We introduce Flash-WAM, a modality-aware step-distillation framework inspired by consistency distillation that selects the consistency function for each modality to match its noise regime: a linear-gradient-scaling parametrization for the action stream's low-noise regime, paired with a variance-preserving parametrization for the video stream's high-noise regime, grounded in a structural analysis of the consistency-function family that characterizes the achievable gradient scaling under the consistency boundary condition. Instantiated on LingBot-VA, Flash-WAM compresses inference to a single step in each modality. On RoboTwin 2.0, this reduces per-chunk latency from 8.1 seconds to 348 ms on NVIDIA L40S, a 23{times} speedup that enables real-time inference. Flash-WAM preserves task success on simulation benchmarks (85.5% RoboTwin 2.0, 95.7% LIBERO) and substantially recovers real-world performance (60% average on a Unitree G1 humanoid robot), while naive consistency distillation drops to 24% at the same step budget.

When pretrained VLA policies are fine-tuned through online RL, each rollout episode produces only a single binary outcome (success or failure), yet the actor update requires per-transition supervision. Existing approaches commonly reduce this sparse outcome to a single scalar reward or advantage signal, which conflates distinct forms of transition-level feedback and provides limited guidance once basic task success becomes achievable. First, a single scalar signal conflates the two objectives of viability and efficiency; once basic success is achieved, the binary label provides no gradient to distinguish efficient completions from slow ones. Second, real-world rollouts mix autonomous and intervention segments; naively assigning episode outcomes across these boundaries introduces incorrect credit assignment. To address these issues, we propose Hierarchical Advantage-Weighted Behavior Cloning (HABC), which trains separate critic heads for these two objectives on different data subsets and combines their outputs with a state-adaptive balance. A state-adaptive gate g_t merges their one-step advantages, prioritizing viability when success is uncertain and shifting to efficiency only when viability is high, and converts the result into per-transition weights on the actor loss. Intervention-aware credit assignment further restricts outcome labels to segments executed by the current policy, preventing supervision from leaking across intervention boundaries. In real-robot experiments on three contact-rich bimanual tasks, HABC raises success from supervised fine-tuning (SFT) baselines of 36%, 44%, and 12% to 92%, 88%, and 38%.

While many real-world problems that might benefit from reinforcement learning, these problems rarely fit into the MDP mold: interacting with the environment is often expensive and specifying reward functions is challenging. Motivated by these challenges, prior work has developed data-driven approaches that learn entirely from samples from the transition dynamics and examples of high-return states. These methods typically learn a reward function from high-return states, use that reward function to label the transitions, and then apply an offline RL algorithm to these transitions. While these methods can achieve good results on many tasks, they can be complex, often requiring regularization and temporal difference updates. In this paper, we propose a method for offline, example-based control that learns an implicit model of multi-step transitions, rather than a reward function. We show that this implicit model can represent the Q-values for the example-based control problem. Across a range of state-based and image-based offline control tasks, our method outperforms baselines that use learned reward functions; additional experiments demonstrate improved robustness and scaling with dataset size.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have evolved into tool-using agents, they remain brittle in long-horizon interactions. Unlike mathematical reasoning where errors are often rectifiable via backtracking, tool-use failures frequently induce irreversible side effects, making accurate step-level verification critical. However, existing process-level benchmarks are predominantly confined to closed-world mathematical domains, failing to capture the dynamic and open-ended nature of tool execution. To bridge this gap, we introduce AgentProcessBench, the first benchmark dedicated to evaluating step-level effectiveness in realistic, tool-augmented trajectories. The benchmark comprises 1,000 diverse trajectories and 8,509 human-labeled step annotations with 89.1% inter-annotator agreement. It features a ternary labeling scheme to capture exploration and an error propagation rule to reduce labeling ambiguity. Extensive experiments reveal key insights: (1) weaker policy models exhibit inflated ratios of correct steps due to early termination; (2) distinguishing neutral and erroneous actions remains a significant challenge for current models; and (3) process-derived signals provide complementary value to outcome supervision, significantly enhancing test-time scaling. We hope AgentProcessBench can foster future research in reward models and pave the way toward general agents. The code and data are available at https://github.com/RUCBM/AgentProcessBench.

The performance of autonomous Web GUI agents heavily relies on the quality and quantity of their training data. However, a fundamental bottleneck persists: collecting interaction trajectories from real-world websites is expensive and difficult to verify. The underlying state transitions are hidden, leading to reliance on inconsistent and costly external verifiers to evaluate step-level correctness. To address this, we propose AutoWebWorld, a novel framework for synthesizing controllable and verifiable web environments by modeling them as Finite State Machines (FSMs) and use coding agents to translate FSMs into interactive websites. Unlike real websites, where state transitions are implicit, AutoWebWorld explicitly defines all states, actions, and transition rules. This enables programmatic verification: action correctness is checked against predefined rules, and task success is confirmed by reaching a goal state in the FSM graph. AutoWebWorld enables a fully automated search-and-verify pipeline, generating over 11,663 verified trajectories from 29 diverse web environments at only $0.04 per trajectory. Training on this synthetic data significantly boosts real-world performance. Our 7B Web GUI agent outperforms all baselines within 15 steps on WebVoyager. Furthermore, we observe a clear scaling law: as the synthetic data volume increases, performance on WebVoyager and Online-Mind2Web consistently improves.

We present Step-Back Prompting, a simple prompting technique that enables LLMs to do abstractions to derive high-level concepts and first principles from instances containing specific details. Using the concepts and principles to guide the reasoning steps, LLMs significantly improve their abilities in following a correct reasoning path towards the solution. We conduct experiments of Step-Back Prompting with PaLM-2L models and observe substantial performance gains on a wide range of challenging reasoning-intensive tasks including STEM, Knowledge QA, and Multi-Hop Reasoning. For instance, Step-Back Prompting improves PaLM-2L performance on MMLU Physics and Chemistry by 7% and 11%, TimeQA by 27%, and MuSiQue by 7%.

Context adaptation automates prompt engineering in LLM-based systems by iteratively revising tunable prompts from task feedback, without modifying model weights. Extending this paradigm to multi-LLM agentic systems is crucial: existing methods suffer from inaccurate credit assignment and lack convergence guarantees. We propose Graph-based Target Back-Propagation (GTBP), a context adaptation framework for agentic workflows modeled as directed acyclic graphs. GTBP propagates local target outputs backward through the workflow graph and uses target--output discrepancies to guide a stage-wise prompt update mechanism. Theoretically, we show that GTBP's stage-wise prompt updates become stable over iterations, and that a sufficiently capable LLM optimizer can decrease the overall objective. Empirically, GTBP consistently outperforms strong baselines across three benchmarks while maintaining comparable computational cost.

Multistep instructions, such as recipes and how-to guides, greatly benefit from visual aids, such as a series of images that accompany the instruction steps. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have become adept at generating coherent textual steps, Large Vision/Language Models (LVLMs) are less capable of generating accompanying image sequences. The most challenging aspect is that each generated image needs to adhere to the relevant textual step instruction, as well as be visually consistent with earlier images in the sequence. To address this problem, we propose an approach for generating consistent image sequences, which integrates a Latent Diffusion Model (LDM) with an LLM to transform the sequence into a caption to maintain the semantic coherence of the sequence. In addition, to maintain the visual coherence of the image sequence, we introduce a copy mechanism to initialise reverse diffusion processes with a latent vector iteration from a previously generated image from a relevant step. Both strategies will condition the reverse diffusion process on the sequence of instruction steps and tie the contents of the current image to previous instruction steps and corresponding images. Experiments show that the proposed approach is preferred by humans in 46.6% of the cases against 26.6% for the second best method. In addition, automatic metrics showed that the proposed method maintains semantic coherence and visual consistency across steps in both domains.

Reinforcement learning for multi-turn agents suffers from a credit-assignment mismatch: rewards are sparse and trajectory-level, while success often hinges on a few local decisions. Existing online policy distillation (OPD) provides denser token-level supervision, but typically treats heterogeneous agent trajectories as monolithic strings rather than causal interaction units. We present StepOPSD, a post-rollout preference self-distillation framework that takes the agent step as the unit of credit redistribution. StepOPSD decomposes trajectories into action-centered step segments, rescoring them under hindsight-enriched teacher contexts and converting token-level log-probability gaps into sign-preserving advantage shaping with a normalized per-step credit budget before the GRPO update. Across ALFWorld and Search-QA with Qwen3-1.7B and Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct, StepOPSD attains best or second-best results on subsets most sensitive to local causal errors, including first-place performance on ALFWorld Heat (79.1%), PickTwo (95.0%), Search-QA TriviaQA (61.6%), and tied-best performance on HotpotQA (40.4%). The results further reveal a consistent two-knob law: smaller α_clip acts as a broadly stabilizing local trust region, whereas the optimal global mixing strength λ_mix remains task-dependent. These findings suggest that step-aware distillation is most useful when trajectory-level rewards are weakly aligned with the local action that determines downstream success.

Recently, data augmentation (DA) has emerged as a method for leveraging domain knowledge to inexpensively generate additional data in reinforcement learning (RL) tasks, often yielding substantial improvements in data efficiency. While prior work has demonstrated the utility of incorporating augmented data directly into model-free RL updates, it is not well-understood when a particular DA strategy will improve data efficiency. In this paper, we seek to identify general aspects of DA responsible for observed learning improvements. Our study focuses on sparse-reward tasks with dynamics-invariant data augmentation functions, serving as an initial step towards a more general understanding of DA and its integration into RL training. Experimentally, we isolate three relevant aspects of DA: state-action coverage, reward density, and the number of augmented transitions generated per update (the augmented replay ratio). From our experiments, we draw two conclusions: (1) increasing state-action coverage often has a much greater impact on data efficiency than increasing reward density, and (2) decreasing the augmented replay ratio substantially improves data efficiency. In fact, certain tasks in our empirical study are solvable only when the replay ratio is sufficiently low.

Detection of video shot transition is a crucial pre-processing step in video analysis. Previous studies are restricted on detecting sudden content changes between frames through similarity measurement and multi-scale operations are widely utilized to deal with transitions of various lengths. However, localization of gradual transitions are still under-explored due to the high visual similarity between adjacent frames. Cut shot transitions are abrupt semantic breaks while gradual shot transitions contain low-level spatial-temporal patterns caused by video effects in addition to the gradual semantic breaks, e.g. dissolve. In order to address the problem, we propose a structured network which is able to detect these two shot transitions using targeted models separately. Considering speed performance trade-offs, we design a smart framework. With one TITAN GPU, the proposed method can achieve a 30\(\times\) real-time speed. Experiments on public TRECVID07 and RAI databases show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. In order to train a high-performance shot transition detector, we contribute a new database ClipShots, which contains 128636 cut transitions and 38120 gradual transitions from 4039 online videos. ClipShots intentionally collect short videos for more hard cases caused by hand-held camera vibrations, large object motions, and occlusion.

Flow-based vision-language-action (VLA) models excel in embodied control but suffer from intractable likelihoods during multi-step sampling, hindering online reinforcement learning. We propose \textit{boldsymbolπ-StepNFT} (Step-wise Negative-aware Fine-Tuning), a critic-and-likelihood-free framework that requires only a single forward pass per optimization step and eliminates auxiliary value networks. We identify that wider exploration spaces necessitate finer-grained, step-wise guidance for alignment. Empirically, π-StepNFT unlocks latent potential on LIBERO with competitive few-shot robustness. Moreover, it achieves superior generalization on ManiSkill, outperforming value-based baselines in OOD scenarios by preventing overfitting to multimodal features. This property offers a scalable solution promising for complex real-world applications.

Generative tabular augmentation is appealing in data-scarce domains, yet the prevailing focus on distributional fidelity does not reliably translate into better downstream models. We formalize a fidelity-utility gap: common generative objectives prioritize distributional plausibility, whereas augmentation succeeds only when injected samples reduce the current learner's held-out evaluation loss. This gap motivates learning not just how to generate, but what to generate and when to inject as training evolves. We propose TAP (Tabular Augmentation Policy), which couples diffusion inpainting with a lightweight, learner-conditioned policy to steer generation toward high-utility regions and controls safe injection via explicit gating and conservative windowed commitment. Under severe data scarcity, TAP consistently outperforms strong generative baselines on seven real-world datasets, improving classification accuracy by up to 15.6 percentage points and reducing regression RMSE by up to 32%.

Vision-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (VLN-CE) requires agents to learn complex reasoning from long-horizon human interactions. While Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have driven recent progress, current training paradigms struggle to balance generalization capability, error recovery and training stability. Specifically, (i) policies derived from SFT suffer from compounding errors, struggling to recover from out-of-distribution states, and (ii) Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) methods e.g. GRPO are bottlenecked by sparse outcome rewards. Their binary feedback fails to assign credit to individual steps, leading to gradient signal collapse in failure dominant batches. To address these challenges, we introduce Step-Aware Contrastive Alignment (SACA), a framework designed to extract dense supervision from imperfect trajectories. At its core, the Perception-Grounded Step-Aware auditor evaluates progress step-by-step, disentangling failed trajectories into valid prefixes and exact divergence points. Leveraging these signals, Scenario-Conditioned Group Construction mechanism dynamically routes batches to specialized resampling and optimization strategies. Extensive experiments on VLN-CE benchmarks demonstrate that SACA achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Online resources such as WikiHow compile a wide range of scripts for performing everyday tasks, which can assist models in learning to reason about procedures. However, the scripts are always presented in a linear manner, which does not reflect the flexibility displayed by people executing tasks in real life. For example, in the CrossTask Dataset, 64.5% of consecutive step pairs are also observed in the reverse order, suggesting their ordering is not fixed. In addition, each step has an average of 2.56 frequent next steps, demonstrating "branching". In this paper, we propose the new challenging task of non-sequential graph script induction, aiming to capture optional and interchangeable steps in procedural planning. To automate the induction of such graph scripts for given tasks, we propose to take advantage of loosely aligned videos of people performing the tasks. In particular, we design a multimodal framework to ground procedural videos to WikiHow textual steps and thus transform each video into an observed step path on the latent ground truth graph script. This key transformation enables us to train a script knowledge model capable of both generating explicit graph scripts for learnt tasks and predicting future steps given a partial step sequence. Our best model outperforms the strongest pure text/vision baselines by 17.52% absolute gains on F1@3 for next step prediction and 13.8% absolute gains on Acc@1 for partial sequence completion. Human evaluation shows our model outperforming the WikiHow linear baseline by 48.76% absolute gains in capturing sequential and non-sequential step relationships.

Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) is emerging as a critical post-training paradigm for improving LLM agent capabilities. Existing RL algorithms for LLMs largely follow the token-centric paradigm as in RLHF and RLVR, where tokens serve as the basic units for modeling and optimization. However, this paradigm introduces a granularity mismatch in agentic RL, as it optimizes token-level predictions while LLM agents make step-level decisions through cycles of environmental observations and actions. To bridge this gap, we propose StepPO, a step-centric paradigm for agentic RL via step-aligned policy optimization. Specifically, we reformulate agentic RL from a token-level Markov Decision Process (MDP) into a step-level MDP, where interaction steps serve as the basic trajectory representations. We further propose step-level credit assignment to align policy optimization with the natural granularity of agent decisions. Together, StepPO optimizes agent policies at the step level for multi-turn agent-environment interaction. Experiments across multi-hop QA, academic paper search, and text-world action tasks show that StepPO consistently outperforms various RL algorithms. Further analyses provide insights into how step-centric paradigm improves agent training. We hope this step-centric paradigm offers a useful lens for understanding agent behavior and a practical path for training more capable LLM agents.

Online surgical phase recognition (SPR) underpins context-aware operating-room systems and requires committing to a prediction at every frame from past context alone. Surgical video poses three demands that natural-video recognizers do not jointly address: procedures span tens of thousands of frames, time flows non-uniformly as long routine stretches are punctuated by brief phase-defining transitions, and the visual domain is narrow so backbone features are strongly correlated across channels. Existing recognizers either let per-frame cost grow with elapsed length, or hold cost bounded but advance state at a uniform rate with channel-independent dynamics, leaving the latter two demands unaddressed. We present SurgicalMamba, a causal SPR model built on Mamba2's structured state-space duality (SSD) that holds per-frame cost at O(d). It introduces three SSD-compatible components, each targeting one demand: a dual-path SSD block that separates long- and short-term regimes at the level of recurrent state; intensity-modulated stepping, a continuous-time time-warp that adapts the slow path's effective rate to phase-relevant information; and state regramming, a per-chunk Cayley rotation that opens cross-channel mixing in the otherwise axis-aligned SSM recurrence. The learned rotation planes inherit a phase-aligned structure without any direct supervision, offering an interpretable internal signature of surgical workflow. Across seven public SPR benchmarks, SurgicalMamba reaches state-of-the-art accuracy and phase-level Jaccard under strict online evaluation: 94.6%/82.7% on Cholec80 (+0.7 pp/+2.2 pp over the strongest prior) and 89.5%/68.9% on AutoLaparo (+1.7 pp/+2.0 pp), at 119 fps on a single GPU. Ablations isolate the contribution of each component. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/sukjuoh/Surgical-Mamba.

We propose Framer for interactive frame interpolation, which targets producing smoothly transitioning frames between two images as per user creativity. Concretely, besides taking the start and end frames as inputs, our approach supports customizing the transition process by tailoring the trajectory of some selected keypoints. Such a design enjoys two clear benefits. First, incorporating human interaction mitigates the issue arising from numerous possibilities of transforming one image to another, and in turn enables finer control of local motions. Second, as the most basic form of interaction, keypoints help establish the correspondence across frames, enhancing the model to handle challenging cases (e.g., objects on the start and end frames are of different shapes and styles). It is noteworthy that our system also offers an "autopilot" mode, where we introduce a module to estimate the keypoints and refine the trajectory automatically, to simplify the usage in practice. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the appealing performance of Framer on various applications, such as image morphing, time-lapse video generation, cartoon interpolation, etc. The code, the model, and the interface will be released to facilitate further research.

In professional video compositing workflows, artists must manually create environmental interactions-such as shadows, reflections, dust, and splashes-between foreground subjects and background layers. Existing video generative models struggle to preserve the input video while adding such effects, and current video inpainting methods either require costly per-frame masks or yield implausible results. We introduce augmented compositing, a new task that synthesizes realistic, semi-transparent environmental effects conditioned on text prompts and input video layers, while preserving the original scene. To address this task, we present Over++, a video effect generation framework that makes no assumptions about camera pose, scene stationarity, or depth supervision. We construct a paired effect dataset tailored for this task and introduce an unpaired augmentation strategy that preserves text-driven editability. Our method also supports optional mask control and keyframe guidance without requiring dense annotations. Despite training on limited data, Over++ produces diverse and realistic environmental effects and outperforms existing baselines in both effect generation and scene preservation.

In recent years, image editing models have witnessed remarkable and rapid development. The recent unveiling of cutting-edge multimodal models such as GPT-4o and Gemini2 Flash has introduced highly promising image editing capabilities. These models demonstrate an impressive aptitude for fulfilling a vast majority of user-driven editing requirements, marking a significant advancement in the field of image manipulation. However, there is still a large gap between the open-source algorithm with these closed-source models. Thus, in this paper, we aim to release a state-of-the-art image editing model, called Step1X-Edit, which can provide comparable performance against the closed-source models like GPT-4o and Gemini2 Flash. More specifically, we adopt the Multimodal LLM to process the reference image and the user's editing instruction. A latent embedding has been extracted and integrated with a diffusion image decoder to obtain the target image. To train the model, we build a data generation pipeline to produce a high-quality dataset. For evaluation, we develop the GEdit-Bench, a novel benchmark rooted in real-world user instructions. Experimental results on GEdit-Bench demonstrate that Step1X-Edit outperforms existing open-source baselines by a substantial margin and approaches the performance of leading proprietary models, thereby making significant contributions to the field of image editing.

Large Language Models (LLMs) can enhance reasoning capabilities through test-time scaling by generating multiple traces. However, the combination of lengthy reasoning traces with multiple sampling introduces substantial computation and high end-to-end latency. Prior work on accelerating this process has relied on similarity-based or confidence-based pruning, but these signals do not reliably indicate trace quality. To address these limitations, we propose STEP: Step-level Trace Evaluation and Pruning, a novel pruning framework that evaluates reasoning steps using hidden states and dynamically prunes unpromising traces during generation. We train a lightweight step scorer to estimate trace quality, and design a GPU memory-aware pruning strategy that triggers pruning as the GPU memory is saturated by KV cache to reduce end-to-end latency. Experiments across challenging reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that STEP reduces end-to-end inference latency by 45%-70% on average compared to self-consistency while also improving reasoning accuracy. Our code is released at: https://github.com/Supercomputing-System-AI-Lab/STEP

Stepwise inference protocols, such as scratchpads and chain-of-thought, help language models solve complex problems by decomposing them into a sequence of simpler subproblems. Despite the significant gain in performance achieved via these protocols, the underlying mechanisms of stepwise inference have remained elusive. To address this, we propose to study autoregressive Transformer models on a synthetic task that embodies the multi-step nature of problems where stepwise inference is generally most useful. Specifically, we define a graph navigation problem wherein a model is tasked with traversing a path from a start to a goal node on the graph. Despite is simplicity, we find we can empirically reproduce and analyze several phenomena observed at scale: (i) the stepwise inference reasoning gap, the cause of which we find in the structure of the training data; (ii) a diversity-accuracy tradeoff in model generations as sampling temperature varies; (iii) a simplicity bias in the model's output; and (iv) compositional generalization and a primacy bias with in-context exemplars. Overall, our work introduces a grounded, synthetic framework for studying stepwise inference and offers mechanistic hypotheses that can lay the foundation for a deeper understanding of this phenomenon.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents have shown strong results on multi-turn tool-use tasks, yet they operate in isolation during training, failing to leverage experiences accumulated across episodes. Existing experience-augmented methods address this by organizing trajectories into retrievable libraries, but they retrieve experiences only once based on the initial task description and hold them constant throughout the episode. In multi-turn settings where observations change at every step, this static retrieval becomes increasingly mismatched as episodes progress. We propose SLEA-RL (Step-Level Experience-Augmented Reinforcement Learning), a framework that retrieves relevant experiences at each decision step conditioned on the current observation. SLEA-RL operates through three components: (i) step-level observation clustering that groups structurally equivalent environmental states for efficient cluster-indexed retrieval; (ii) a self-evolving experience library that distills successful strategies and failure patterns through score-based admission and rate-limited extraction; and (iii) policy optimization with step-level credit assignment for fine-grained advantage estimation across multi-turn episodes. The experience library evolves alongside the policy through semantic analysis rather than gradient updates. Experiments on long-horizon multi-turn agent benchmarks demonstrate that SLEA-RL achieves superior performance compared to various reinforcement learning baselines.

Recently video generation has achieved substantial progress with realistic results. Nevertheless, existing AI-generated videos are usually very short clips ("shot-level") depicting a single scene. To deliver a coherent long video ("story-level"), it is desirable to have creative transition and prediction effects across different clips. This paper presents a short-to-long video diffusion model, SEINE, that focuses on generative transition and prediction. The goal is to generate high-quality long videos with smooth and creative transitions between scenes and varying lengths of shot-level videos. Specifically, we propose a random-mask video diffusion model to automatically generate transitions based on textual descriptions. By providing the images of different scenes as inputs, combined with text-based control, our model generates transition videos that ensure coherence and visual quality. Furthermore, the model can be readily extended to various tasks such as image-to-video animation and autoregressive video prediction. To conduct a comprehensive evaluation of this new generative task, we propose three assessing criteria for smooth and creative transition: temporal consistency, semantic similarity, and video-text semantic alignment. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our approach over existing methods for generative transition and prediction, enabling the creation of story-level long videos. Project page: https://vchitect.github.io/SEINE-project/ .

LLM agents act in external environments where each action changes the state that later decisions condition on, and where a single wrong step can waste interaction budget or trigger irreversible side effects long before the final failure is observed. Reliable deployment therefore requires step-level confidence estimation: a calibrated probability that each proposed action is productive, available before the action is executed. Existing LLM confidence estimators are designed to score a response from the given prompt, but agent confidence also depends on execution consequences: whether similar actions in similar situations actually advanced the task after the environment responded. We introduce the \method (\methodshort), a self-evolving critic framework in which an LLM critic accumulates evidence from its own past judgments and their observed consequences. After each trajectory, a hindsight LLM that sees the full execution feedback votes on whether each step was productive. The resulting pseudo-labels populate a memory bank from which related productive and unproductive experiences are retrieved into the critic's prompt whenever a similar step recurs. \methodshort requires no training and uses no ground truth step labels. Across three agent benchmarks and three critic backbones, \methodshort attains the best calibration (ECE and Brier) and ranking (AUC) in every dataset--critic combination, reducing ECE by up to 54% relative to the strongest training-free baseline.

Recent advances in interactive video generations have demonstrated diffusion model's potential as world models by capturing complex physical dynamics and interactive behaviors. However, existing interactive world models depend on bidirectional attention and lengthy inference steps, severely limiting real-time performance. Consequently, they are hard to simulate real-world dynamics, where outcomes must update instantaneously based on historical context and current actions. To address this, we present Matrix-Game 2.0, an interactive world model generates long videos on-the-fly via few-step auto-regressive diffusion. Our framework consists of three key components: (1) A scalable data production pipeline for Unreal Engine and GTA5 environments to effectively produce massive amounts (about 1200 hours) of video data with diverse interaction annotations; (2) An action injection module that enables frame-level mouse and keyboard inputs as interactive conditions; (3) A few-step distillation based on the casual architecture for real-time and streaming video generation. Matrix Game 2.0 can generate high-quality minute-level videos across diverse scenes at an ultra-fast speed of 25 FPS. We open-source our model weights and codebase to advance research in interactive world modeling.

Interactive 3D generation is gaining momentum and capturing extensive attention for its potential to create immersive virtual experiences. However, a critical challenge in current 3D generation technologies lies in achieving real-time interactivity. To address this issue, we introduce WonderTurbo, the first real-time interactive 3D scene generation framework capable of generating novel perspectives of 3D scenes within 0.72 seconds. Specifically, WonderTurbo accelerates both geometric and appearance modeling in 3D scene generation. In terms of geometry, we propose StepSplat, an innovative method that constructs efficient 3D geometric representations through dynamic updates, each taking only 0.26 seconds. Additionally, we design QuickDepth, a lightweight depth completion module that provides consistent depth input for StepSplat, further enhancing geometric accuracy. For appearance modeling, we develop FastPaint, a 2-steps diffusion model tailored for instant inpainting, which focuses on maintaining spatial appearance consistency. Experimental results demonstrate that WonderTurbo achieves a remarkable 15X speedup compared to baseline methods, while preserving excellent spatial consistency and delivering high-quality output.

Interactive agent benchmarks face a tension between scalable construction and realistic workflow evaluation. Hand-authored tasks are expensive to extend and revise, while static prompt evaluation misses failures that only appear when agents operate over persistent state. Existing interactive benchmarks have advanced agent evaluation significantly, but most initialize tasks from clean state and do not systematically test how agents handle pre-existing partial, stale, or conflicting artifacts. We present ClawForge, a generator-backed benchmark framework for executable command-line workflows under state conflict. The framework compiles scenario templates, grounded slots, initialized state, reference trajectories, and validators into reproducible task specifications, and evaluates agents step by step over persistent workflow surfaces using normalized end state and observable side effects rather than exact trajectory matching. We instantiate this framework as the ClawForge-Bench (17 scenarios, 6 ability categories). Results across seven frontier models show that the best model reaches only 45.3% strict accuracy, wrong-state replacement remains below 17\% for all models, and the widest model separation (17% to 90%) is driven by whether agents inspect existing state before acting. Partial-credit and step-efficiency analyses further reveal that many failures are near-miss closures rather than early breakdowns, and that models exhibit qualitatively different failure styles under state conflict.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising capabilities for solving Operations Research (OR) problems. While reinforcement learning serves as a powerful paradigm for LLM training on OR problems, existing works generally face two key limitations. First, outcome reward suffers from the credit assignment problem, where correct final answers can reinforce flawed reasoning. Second, conventional discriminative process supervision is myopic, failing to evaluate the interdependent steps of OR modeling holistically. To this end, we introduce StepORLM, a novel self-evolving framework with generative process supervision. At its core, StepORLM features a co-evolutionary loop where a policy model and a generative process reward model (GenPRM) iteratively improve on each other. This loop is driven by a dual-feedback mechanism: definitive, outcome-based verification from an external solver, and nuanced, holistic process evaluation from the GenPRM. The combined signal is used to align the policy via Weighted Direct Preference Optimization (W-DPO) and simultaneously refine the GenPRM. Our resulting 8B-parameter StepORLM establishes a new state-of-the-art across six benchmarks, significantly outperforming vastly larger generalist models, agentic methods, and specialized baselines. Moreover, the co-evolved GenPRM is able to act as a powerful and universally applicable process verifier, substantially boosting the inference scaling performance of both our own model and other existing LLMs.

We focus on agile, continuous, and terrain-adaptive jumping of quadrupedal robots in discontinuous terrains such as stairs and stepping stones. Unlike single-step jumping, continuous jumping requires accurately executing highly dynamic motions over long horizons, which is challenging for existing approaches. To accomplish this task, we design a hierarchical learning and control framework, which consists of a learned heightmap predictor for robust terrain perception, a reinforcement-learning-based centroidal-level motion policy for versatile and terrain-adaptive planning, and a low-level model-based leg controller for accurate motion tracking. In addition, we minimize the sim-to-real gap by accurately modeling the hardware characteristics. Our framework enables a Unitree Go1 robot to perform agile and continuous jumps on human-sized stairs and sparse stepping stones, for the first time to the best of our knowledge. In particular, the robot can cross two stair steps in each jump and completes a 3.5m long, 2.8m high, 14-step staircase in 4.5 seconds. Moreover, the same policy outperforms baselines in various other parkour tasks, such as jumping over single horizontal or vertical discontinuities. Experiment videos can be found at https://yxyang.github.io/jumping\_cod/.

Conditional human animation transforms a static reference image into a dynamic sequence by applying motion cues such as poses. These motion cues are typically derived from video data but are susceptible to limitations including low temporal resolution, motion blur, overexposure, and inaccuracies under low-light conditions. In contrast, event cameras provide data streams with exceptionally high temporal resolution, a wide dynamic range, and inherent resistance to motion blur and exposure issues. In this work, we propose EvAnimate, a framework that leverages event streams as motion cues to animate static human images. Our approach employs a specialized event representation that transforms asynchronous event streams into 3-channel slices with controllable slicing rates and appropriate slice density, ensuring compatibility with diffusion models. Subsequently, a dual-branch architecture generates high-quality videos by harnessing the inherent motion dynamics of the event streams, thereby enhancing both video quality and temporal consistency. Specialized data augmentation strategies further enhance cross-person generalization. Finally, we establish a new benchmarking, including simulated event data for training and validation, and a real-world event dataset capturing human actions under normal and extreme scenarios. The experiment results demonstrate that EvAnimate achieves high temporal fidelity and robust performance in scenarios where traditional video-derived cues fall short.

Autoregressive video diffusion models generate streaming video by producing frames sequentially, conditioning each chunk on previously generated content. These models are structurally anchored to the first frame: its key-value representation occupies a privileged position in the attention cache and serves as the primary scene reference throughout generation. As the cleanest and most error-free position in the cache, this anchor draws disproportionate attention, suppressing video dynamics, and locking scene composition to the initial viewpoint even as the scene naturally evolves. The result is a temporally shallow video in which motion, camera movement, and scene progression are dampened in favor of static consistency. To address this, we replace the static anchor with an adaptive state, a hidden latent that the model denoises alongside content at every chunk but never renders. Rather than referencing a frozen first frame, the model generates its own scene anchor at each step by attending to both the previous state and the current content, producing a reference that evolves with the generated content. Unlike standard video generation, which encodes an absolute notion of time, our formulation treats time as relative: every generation step sees the same positional structure regardless of how far generation has progressed, and the state transition is identical at every chunk. Together, these properties introduce a recurrence into the generation process, where denoising serves as the transition function, and the KV cache serves as the carrier, requiring no external module. Experiments demonstrate that the adaptive state substantially improves video dynamics, enabling richer motion and natural scene progression within generated videos.

Best-of-N decoding methods instruct large language models (LLMs) to generate multiple solutions, score each using a scoring function, and select the highest scored as the final answer to mathematical reasoning problems. However, this repeated independent process often leads to the same mistakes, making the selected solution still incorrect. We propose a novel prompting method named Stepwise Correction (StepCo) that helps LLMs identify and revise incorrect steps in their generated reasoning paths. It iterates verification and revision phases that employ a process-supervised verifier. The verify-then-revise process not only improves answer correctness but also reduces token consumption with fewer paths needed to generate. With StepCo, a series of LLMs demonstrate exceptional performance. Notably, using GPT-4o as the backend LLM, StepCo achieves an average accuracy of 94.1 across eight datasets, significantly outperforming the state-of-the-art Best-of-N method by +2.4, while reducing token consumption by 77.8%.

Modern recommender systems employ various sequential modules such as self-attention to learn dynamic user interests. However, these methods are less effective in capturing collaborative and transitional signals within user interaction sequences. First, the self-attention architecture uses the embedding of a single item as the attention query, making it challenging to capture collaborative signals. Second, these methods typically follow an auto-regressive framework, which is unable to learn global item transition patterns. To overcome these limitations, we propose a new method called Multi-Query Self-Attention with Transition-Aware Embedding Distillation (MQSA-TED). First, we propose an L-query self-attention module that employs flexible window sizes for attention queries to capture collaborative signals. In addition, we introduce a multi-query self-attention method that balances the bias-variance trade-off in modeling user preferences by combining long and short-query self-attentions. Second, we develop a transition-aware embedding distillation module that distills global item-to-item transition patterns into item embeddings, which enables the model to memorize and leverage transitional signals and serves as a calibrator for collaborative signals. Experimental results on four real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed modules.

In settings such as fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, neural networks are often adapted under distribution shift. Standard adaptation methods typically optimize the target objective directly, inducing an abrupt change from the source training objective. This abrupt transition can distort learned representations, including features that may still be useful for the new task. We investigate whether a more gradual transition can improve adaptation. We propose loss smoothing, a simple approach that interpolates between the source and target training objectives at the start of adaptation. This smooth transition helps to preserve useful features from the source distribution while still enabling the model to specialize to the target distribution. Across controlled supervised shifts, pretrained vision adaptation, offline-to-online and online reinforcement learning, and language model fine-tuning, we find that loss smoothing consistently improves performance, suggesting that smoother objective transitions are a broadly useful tool for model adaptation.

The abundance of instructional videos and their narrations over the Internet offers an exciting avenue for understanding procedural activities. In this work, we propose to learn video representation that encodes both action steps and their temporal ordering, based on a large-scale dataset of web instructional videos and their narrations, without using human annotations. Our method jointly learns a video representation to encode individual step concepts, and a deep probabilistic model to capture both temporal dependencies and immense individual variations in the step ordering. We empirically demonstrate that learning temporal ordering not only enables new capabilities for procedure reasoning, but also reinforces the recognition of individual steps. Our model significantly advances the state-of-the-art results on step classification (+2.8% / +3.3% on COIN / EPIC-Kitchens) and step forecasting (+7.4% on COIN). Moreover, our model attains promising results in zero-shot inference for step classification and forecasting, as well as in predicting diverse and plausible steps for incomplete procedures. Our code is available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/ProcedureVRL.

We introduce ACE-Step, a novel open-source foundation model for music generation that overcomes key limitations of existing approaches and achieves state-of-the-art performance through a holistic architectural design. Current methods face inherent trade-offs between generation speed, musical coherence, and controllability. For example, LLM-based models (e.g. Yue, SongGen) excel at lyric alignment but suffer from slow inference and structural artifacts. Diffusion models (e.g. DiffRhythm), on the other hand, enable faster synthesis but often lack long-range structural coherence. ACE-Step bridges this gap by integrating diffusion-based generation with Sana's Deep Compression AutoEncoder (DCAE) and a lightweight linear transformer. It also leverages MERT and m-hubert to align semantic representations (REPA) during training, allowing rapid convergence. As a result, our model synthesizes up to 4 minutes of music in just 20 seconds on an A100 GPU-15x faster than LLM-based baselines-while achieving superior musical coherence and lyric alignment across melody, harmony, and rhythm metrics. Moreover, ACE-Step preserves fine-grained acoustic details, enabling advanced control mechanisms such as voice cloning, lyric editing, remixing, and track generation (e.g. lyric2vocal, singing2accompaniment). Rather than building yet another end-to-end text-to-music pipeline, our vision is to establish a foundation model for music AI: a fast, general-purpose, efficient yet flexible architecture that makes it easy to train subtasks on top of it. This paves the way for the development of powerful tools that seamlessly integrate into the creative workflows of music artists, producers, and content creators. In short, our goal is to build a stable diffusion moment for music. The code, the model weights and the demo are available at: https://ace-step.github.io/.

Large video diffusion and flow models have achieved remarkable success in high-quality video generation, but their use in real-time interactive applications remains limited due to their inefficient multi-step sampling process. In this work, we present Transition Matching Distillation (TMD), a novel framework for distilling video diffusion models into efficient few-step generators. The central idea of TMD is to match the multi-step denoising trajectory of a diffusion model with a few-step probability transition process, where each transition is modeled as a lightweight conditional flow. To enable efficient distillation, we decompose the original diffusion backbone into two components: (1) a main backbone, comprising the majority of early layers, that extracts semantic representations at each outer transition step; and (2) a flow head, consisting of the last few layers, that leverages these representations to perform multiple inner flow updates. Given a pretrained video diffusion model, we first introduce a flow head to the model, and adapt it into a conditional flow map. We then apply distribution matching distillation to the student model with flow head rollout in each transition step. Extensive experiments on distilling Wan2.1 1.3B and 14B text-to-video models demonstrate that TMD provides a flexible and strong trade-off between generation speed and visual quality. In particular, TMD outperforms existing distilled models under comparable inference costs in terms of visual fidelity and prompt adherence. Project page: https://research.nvidia.com/labs/genair/tmd

Gesture synthesis is a vital realm of human-computer interaction, with wide-ranging applications across various fields like film, robotics, and virtual reality. Recent advancements have utilized the diffusion model and attention mechanisms to improve gesture synthesis. However, due to the high computational complexity of these techniques, generating long and diverse sequences with low latency remains a challenge. We explore the potential of state space models (SSMs) to address the challenge, implementing a two-stage modeling strategy with discrete motion priors to enhance the quality of gestures. Leveraging the foundational Mamba block, we introduce MambaTalk, enhancing gesture diversity and rhythm through multimodal integration. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method matches or exceeds the performance of state-of-the-art models.

Real-time motion-controllable video generation remains challenging due to the inherent latency of bidirectional diffusion models and the lack of effective autoregressive (AR) approaches. Existing AR video diffusion models are limited to simple control signals or text-to-video generation, and often suffer from quality degradation and motion artifacts in few-step generation. To address these challenges, we propose AR-Drag, the first RL-enhanced few-step AR video diffusion model for real-time image-to-video generation with diverse motion control. We first fine-tune a base I2V model to support basic motion control, then further improve it via reinforcement learning with a trajectory-based reward model. Our design preserves the Markov property through a Self-Rollout mechanism and accelerates training by selectively introducing stochasticity in denoising steps. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AR-Drag achieves high visual fidelity and precise motion alignment, significantly reducing latency compared with state-of-the-art motion-controllable VDMs, while using only 1.3B parameters. Additional visualizations can be found on our project page: https://kesenzhao.github.io/AR-Drag.github.io/.

Tool-augmented LLMs are a promising approach to create AI agents that can have realistic conversations, follow procedures, and call appropriate functions. However, evaluating them is challenging due to the diversity of possible conversations, and existing datasets focus only on single interactions and function-calling. We present a test generation pipeline to evaluate LLMs as conversational AI agents. Our framework uses LLMs to generate diverse tests grounded on user-defined procedures. For that, we use intermediate graphs to limit the LLM test generator's tendency to hallucinate content that is not grounded on input procedures, and enforces high coverage of the possible conversations. Additionally, we put forward ALMITA, a manually curated dataset for evaluating AI agents in customer support, and use it to evaluate existing LLMs. Our results show that while tool-augmented LLMs perform well in single interactions, they often struggle to handle complete conversations. While our focus is on customer support, our method is general and capable of AI agents for different domains.

Industrial workflows demand adaptive and trustworthy assistance that can operate under limited computing, connectivity, and strict privacy constraints. In this work, we present MICA (Multi-Agent Industrial Coordination Assistant), a perception-grounded and speech-interactive system that delivers real-time guidance for assembly, troubleshooting, part queries, and maintenance. MICA coordinates five role-specialized language agents, audited by a safety checker, to ensure accurate and compliant support. To achieve robust step understanding, we introduce Adaptive Step Fusion (ASF), which dynamically blends expert reasoning with online adaptation from natural speech feedback. Furthermore, we establish a new multi-agent coordination benchmark across representative task categories and propose evaluation metrics tailored to industrial assistance, enabling systematic comparison of different coordination topologies. Our experiments demonstrate that MICA consistently improves task success, reliability, and responsiveness over baseline structures, while remaining deployable on practical offline hardware. Together, these contributions highlight MICA as a step toward deployable, privacy-preserving multi-agent assistants for dynamic factory environments. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/Kratos-Wen/MICA.

Cooking is a sequential and visually grounded activity, where each step such as chopping, mixing, or frying carries both procedural logic and visual semantics. While recent diffusion models have shown strong capabilities in text-to-image generation, they struggle to handle structured multi-step scenarios like recipe illustration. Additionally, current recipe illustration methods are unable to adjust to the natural variability in recipe length, generating a fixed number of images regardless of the actual instructions structure. To address these limitations, we present CookAnything, a flexible and consistent diffusion-based framework that generates coherent, semantically distinct image sequences from textual cooking instructions of arbitrary length. The framework introduces three key components: (1) Step-wise Regional Control (SRC), which aligns textual steps with corresponding image regions within a single denoising process; (2) Flexible RoPE, a step-aware positional encoding mechanism that enhances both temporal coherence and spatial diversity; and (3) Cross-Step Consistency Control (CSCC), which maintains fine-grained ingredient consistency across steps. Experimental results on recipe illustration benchmarks show that CookAnything performs better than existing methods in training-based and training-free settings. The proposed framework supports scalable, high-quality visual synthesis of complex multi-step instructions and holds significant potential for broad applications in instructional media, and procedural content creation.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to automate data-processing workflows, yet coding agents typically produce scripts that are not automatically materialized as persistent, editable platform artifacts. We call this disconnect the NL2Pipeline gap. To bridge it, we introduce DataFlow-Harness, a platform that guides an LLM agent to construct platform-native directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) through typed, incremental mutations rather than free-form scripts. The platform combines DataFlow-Skills for procedural guidance, a Model Context Protocol (MCP) layer that exposes the live operator registry and current pipeline state, and DataFlow-WebUI, which synchronizes conversational authoring with a visual DAG editor. On a 12-task data-engineering benchmark, DataFlow-Harness achieves a 93.3\% observed end-to-end pass rate. Relative to Vanilla Claude Code, it reduces measured monetary cost by 72.5\% and generation latency by 49.9\%; its observed pass rate is within 0.9 percentage points of the Context-Aware Claude Code baseline while its cost is 42.8\% lower. Per-task analysis indicates that Skills are most useful when construction depends on implicit procedural knowledge. These results show that live platform grounding can produce persistent, editable workflow artifacts with an observed reliability close to script-generation baselines and with lower measured construction cost and latency.

Training vision-language web agents with multi-step RL is compute-intensive, with two dominant forms of inefficiency: idle GPUs in synchronous RL, and trajectories that use more steps and tokens than necessary. We present AsyncWebRL, which addresses both. On the system side, an asynchronous design overlaps rollout, gradient update, and policy refresh across iterations, paired with two web-agent-specific adaptations, namely an everlasting rollout pool and lightweight screenshot handling, that together deliver up to a 2.9times end-to-end training-throughput speedup over the previously fastest open synchronous pipeline (WebGym). On the algorithmic side, we identify the per-trajectory normalizer 1/|τ_i| in multi-step GRPO as the root cause of trajectory-level and token-level inefficiency: because failures are systematically longer than successes, it down-weights the negative gradient on failed tokens, so the policy keeps producing verbose memory schemas. Replacing 1/|τ_i| with a constant 1/k breaks this coupling, contracting trajectories while preserving aggregate success. Together, these contributions set a new open-source state of the art on the WebGym out-of-distribution test split (+5.8% relative over the 42.9% prior best), with the largest gains on the harder slices (+42% relative on Medium, +48% relative on Hard).

Although recent tool-augmented benchmarks involve complex requests, evaluation remains limited to answer matching, neglecting critical trajectory aspects like efficiency, hallucination, and adaptivity. The most straightforward method for evaluation is to compare an agent's trajectory with the ground-truth, but annotating all valid ground-truth trajectories is prohibitively expensive. In this manner, we introduce TRACE, a reference-free framework for the multi-dimensional evaluation of tool-augmented LLMs. By incorporating an evidence bank which accumulates knowledge from preceding steps, TRACE assesses an agent's reasoning trajectory effectively. To validate our framework, we develop a new meta-evaluation dataset with diverse and flawed trajectories, each labeled with multi-faceted performance scores. Our results confirm that TRACE accurately evaluates complex trajectories even with small open-source LLMs. Furthermore, we apply our method to evaluate the trajectories that agents produce while solving tool-augmented tasks, presenting previously unreported observations and their corresponding insights.

Language agents have shown promising adaptability in dynamic environments to perform complex tasks. However, despite the versatile knowledge embedded in large language models, these agents still fall short when it comes to tasks that require planning. We introduce STEP, a novel framework designed to efficiently learn from previous experiences to enhance the planning capabilities of language agents in future steps. Concretely, STEP functions through four interconnected components. First, the Planner takes on the task, breaks it down into subtasks and provides relevant insights. Then the Executor generates action candidates, while the Evaluator ensures the actions align with learned rules from previous experiences. Lastly, Memory stores experiences to inform future decisions. In the ScienceWorld benchmark, our results show that STEP consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models, achieving an overall score of 67.4 and successfully completing 12 out of 18 tasks. These findings highlight STEP's potential as a framework for enhancing planning capabilities in language agents, paving the way for more sophisticated task-solving in dynamic environments.

We introduce Step 3.5 Flash, a sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model that bridges frontier-level agentic intelligence and computational efficiency. We focus on what matters most when building agents: sharp reasoning and fast, reliable execution. Step 3.5 Flash pairs a 196B-parameter foundation with 11B active parameters for efficient inference. It is optimized with interleaved 3:1 sliding-window/full attention and Multi-Token Prediction (MTP-3) to reduce the latency and cost of multi-round agentic interactions. To reach frontier-level intelligence, we design a scalable reinforcement learning framework that combines verifiable signals with preference feedback, while remaining stable under large-scale off-policy training, enabling consistent self-improvement across mathematics, code, and tool use. Step 3.5 Flash demonstrates strong performance across agent, coding, and math tasks, achieving 85.4% on IMO-AnswerBench, 86.4% on LiveCodeBench-v6 (2024.08-2025.05), 88.2% on tau2-Bench, 69.0% on BrowseComp (with context management), and 51.0% on Terminal-Bench 2.0, comparable to frontier models such as GPT-5.2 xHigh and Gemini 3.0 Pro. By redefining the efficiency frontier, Step 3.5 Flash provides a high-density foundation for deploying sophisticated agents in real-world industrial environments.

Multi-stage reasoning has emerged as an effective strategy for enhancing the reasoning capability of small language models by decomposing complex problems into sequential sub-stages. However, this comes at the cost of increased latency. We observe that existing adaptive acceleration techniques, such as layer skipping, struggle to balance efficiency and accuracy in this setting due to two key challenges: (1) stage-wise variation in skip sensitivity, and (2) the generation of redundant output tokens. To address these, we propose LiteStage, a latency-aware layer skipping framework for multi-stage reasoning. LiteStage combines a stage-wise offline search that allocates optimal layer budgets with an online confidence-based generation early exit to suppress unnecessary decoding. Experiments on three benchmarks, e.g., OBQA, CSQA, and StrategyQA, show that LiteStage achieves up to 1.70x speedup with less than 4.0% accuracy loss, outperforming prior training-free layer skipping methods.

We present ACE-Step v1.5, a highly efficient open-source music foundation model that brings commercial-grade generation to consumer hardware. On commonly used evaluation metrics, ACE-Step v1.5 achieves quality beyond most commercial music models while remaining extremely fast -- under 2 seconds per full song on an A100 and under 10 seconds on an RTX 3090. The model runs locally with less than 4GB of VRAM, and supports lightweight personalization: users can train a LoRA from just a few songs to capture their own style. At its core lies a novel hybrid architecture where the Language Model (LM) functions as an omni-capable planner: it transforms simple user queries into comprehensive song blueprints -- scaling from short loops to 10-minute compositions -- while synthesizing metadata, lyrics, and captions via Chain-of-Thought to guide the Diffusion Transformer (DiT). Uniquely, this alignment is achieved through intrinsic reinforcement learning relying solely on the model's internal mechanisms, thereby eliminating the biases inherent in external reward models or human preferences. Beyond standard synthesis, ACE-Step v1.5 unifies precise stylistic control with versatile editing capabilities -- such as cover generation, repainting, and vocal-to-BGM conversion -- while maintaining strict adherence to prompts across 50+ languages. This paves the way for powerful tools that seamlessly integrate into the creative workflows of music artists, producers, and content creators. The code, the model weights and the demo are available at: https://ace-step.github.io/ace-step-v1.5.github.io/

Tool-Integrated Reasoning (TIR) empowers large language models (LLMs) to tackle complex tasks by interleaving reasoning steps with external tool interactions. However, existing reinforcement learning methods typically rely on outcome- or trajectory-level rewards, assigning uniform advantages to all steps within a trajectory. This coarse-grained credit assignment fails to distinguish effective tool calls from redundant or erroneous ones, particularly in long-horizon multi-turn scenarios. To address this, we propose MatchTIR, a framework that introduces fine-grained supervision via bipartite matching-based turn-level reward assignment and dual-level advantage estimation. Specifically, we formulate credit assignment as a bipartite matching problem between predicted and ground-truth traces, utilizing two assignment strategies to derive dense turn-level rewards. Furthermore, to balance local step precision with global task success, we introduce a dual-level advantage estimation scheme that integrates turn-level and trajectory-level signals, assigning distinct advantage values to individual interaction turns. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of MatchTIR. Notably, our 4B model surpasses the majority of 8B competitors, particularly in long-horizon and multi-turn tasks. Our codes are available at https://github.com/quchangle1/MatchTIR.

The outstanding capabilities of large language models (LLMs) render them a crucial component in various autonomous agent systems. While traditional methods depend on the inherent knowledge of LLMs without fine-tuning, more recent approaches have shifted toward the reinforcement learning strategy to further enhance agents' ability to solve complex interactive tasks with environments and tools. However, previous approaches are constrained by the sparse reward issue, where existing datasets solely provide a final scalar reward for each multi-step reasoning chain, potentially leading to ineffectiveness and inefficiency in policy learning. In this paper, we introduce StepAgent, which utilizes step-wise reward to optimize the agent's reinforcement learning process. Inheriting the spirit of novice-to-expert theory, we first compare the actions of the expert and the agent to automatically generate intermediate rewards for fine-grained optimization. Additionally, we propose implicit-reward and inverse reinforcement learning techniques to facilitate agent reflection and policy adjustment. Further theoretical analysis demonstrates that the action distribution of the agent can converge toward the expert action distribution over multiple training cycles. Experimental results across various datasets indicate that StepAgent outperforms existing baseline methods.

Simulating stylized human-scene interactions (HSI) in physical environments is a challenging yet fascinating task. Prior works emphasize long-term execution but fall short in achieving both diverse style and physical plausibility. To tackle this challenge, we introduce a novel hierarchical framework named SIMS that seamlessly bridges highlevel script-driven intent with a low-level control policy, enabling more expressive and diverse human-scene interactions. Specifically, we employ Large Language Models with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to generate coherent and diverse long-form scripts, providing a rich foundation for motion planning. A versatile multicondition physics-based control policy is also developed, which leverages text embeddings from the generated scripts to encode stylistic cues, simultaneously perceiving environmental geometries and accomplishing task goals. By integrating the retrieval-augmented script generation with the multi-condition controller, our approach provides a unified solution for generating stylized HSI motions. We further introduce a comprehensive planning dataset produced by RAG and a stylized motion dataset featuring diverse locomotions and interactions. Extensive experiments demonstrate SIMS's effectiveness in executing various tasks and generalizing across different scenarios, significantly outperforming previous methods.

We present a method for simultaneously localizing multiple sound sources within a visual scene. This task requires a model to both group a sound mixture into individual sources, and to associate them with a visual signal. Our method jointly solves both tasks at once, using a formulation inspired by the contrastive random walk of Jabri et al. We create a graph in which images and separated sounds correspond to nodes, and train a random walker to transition between nodes from different modalities with high return probability. The transition probabilities for this walk are determined by an audio-visual similarity metric that is learned by our model. We show through experiments with musical instruments and human speech that our model can successfully localize multiple sounds, outperforming other self-supervised methods. Project site: https://hxixixh.github.io/mix-and-localize

Recent prompt-based image editing models have demonstrated impressive prompt-following capability at structural editing tasks. However, existing models still fail to perform local edits, follow detailed editing prompts, or maintain global image quality beyond a single editing step. To address these challenges, we introduce SPICE, a training-free workflow that accepts arbitrary resolutions and aspect ratios, accurately follows user requirements, and improves image quality consistently during more than 100 editing steps. By synergizing the strengths of a base diffusion model and a Canny edge ControlNet model, SPICE robustly handles free-form editing instructions from the user. SPICE outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on a challenging realistic image-editing dataset consisting of semantic editing (object addition, removal, replacement, and background change), stylistic editing (texture changes), and structural editing (action change) tasks. Not only does SPICE achieve the highest quantitative performance according to standard evaluation metrics, but it is also consistently preferred by users over existing image-editing methods. We release the workflow implementation for popular diffusion model Web UIs to support further research and artistic exploration.

Generating naturalistic and nuanced listener motions for extended interactions remains an open problem. Existing methods often rely on low-dimensional motion codes for facial behavior generation followed by photorealistic rendering, limiting both visual fidelity and expressive richness. To address these challenges, we introduce DiTaiListener, powered by a video diffusion model with multimodal conditions. Our approach first generates short segments of listener responses conditioned on the speaker's speech and facial motions with DiTaiListener-Gen. It then refines the transitional frames via DiTaiListener-Edit for a seamless transition. Specifically, DiTaiListener-Gen adapts a Diffusion Transformer (DiT) for the task of listener head portrait generation by introducing a Causal Temporal Multimodal Adapter (CTM-Adapter) to process speakers' auditory and visual cues. CTM-Adapter integrates speakers' input in a causal manner into the video generation process to ensure temporally coherent listener responses. For long-form video generation, we introduce DiTaiListener-Edit, a transition refinement video-to-video diffusion model. The model fuses video segments into smooth and continuous videos, ensuring temporal consistency in facial expressions and image quality when merging short video segments produced by DiTaiListener-Gen. Quantitatively, DiTaiListener achieves the state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets in both photorealism (+73.8% in FID on RealTalk) and motion representation (+6.1% in FD metric on VICO) spaces. User studies confirm the superior performance of DiTaiListener, with the model being the clear preference in terms of feedback, diversity, and smoothness, outperforming competitors by a significant margin.

End-to-end GUI agents for real desktop environments require large amounts of high-quality interaction data, yet collecting human demonstrations is expensive and existing synthetic pipelines often suffer from limited task diversity or noisy, goal-drifting trajectories. We present a trajectory expansion framework Anchor that bootstraps scalable desktop supervision from a small set of verified seed demonstrations. Starting from each seed, we identify branch points that correspond to meaningful state changes and propose new, state-grounded task variants conditioned on the current GUI context. An executing agent then follows the proposed instructions to generate new trajectories, while a verifier enforces task completion via state-aware checks and trajectory-level consistency. To improve supervision quality, we further apply task-conditioned step-level filtering to remove ungrounded actions and denoise post-branch segments to maintain coherent intent. Experiments on standard desktop benchmarks, OSWorld and WindowsAgentArena, show that models fine-tuned on our expanded corpus achieve consistent improvements over zero-shot agents and representative synthesis baselines, and generalize across applications and operating systems.

Large reasoning models that use long chain-of-thought excel at problem-solving yet waste compute on redundant checks. Curbing this overthinking is hard: training-time length penalties can cripple ability, while inference-time early-exit adds system overhead. To bridge this gap, we propose Step-GRPO, a novel post-training framework that internalizes dynamic early-exit capabilities directly into the model. Step-GRPO shifts the optimization objective from raw tokens to semantic steps by utilizing linguistic markers to structure reasoning. We introduce a Dynamic Truncated Rollout mechanism that exposes the model to concise high-confidence trajectories during exploration, synergized with a Step-Aware Relative Reward that dynamically penalizes redundancy based on group-level baselines. Extensive experiments across three model sizes on diverse benchmarks demonstrate that Step-GRPO achieves a superior accuracy-efficiency trade-off. On Qwen3-8B, our method reduces token consumption by 32.0\% compared to the vanilla model while avoiding the accuracy degradation observed in traditional length-penalty methods.

Flow-based generative models have achieved remarkable progress, with classifier-free guidance (CFG) becoming the standard for high-fidelity generation. However, the conventional practice of applying a strong, fixed guidance scale throughout inference is poorly suited for the rapid, few-step sampling required by modern applications. In this work, we uncover the root cause of this conflict: a fundamental sampling instability where the earliest steps are acutely sensitive to guidance. We trace this to a significant spike in the ratio of conditional to unconditional predictions--a spike that we prove to be an inherent property of the training data distribution itself, making it a almost inevitable challenge. Applying a high, static guidance value during this volatile initial phase leads to an exponential amplification of error, degrading image quality. To resolve this, we propose a simple, theoretically grounded, adaptive guidance schedule that automatically dampens the guidance scale at early steps based on the evolving ratio. Our method is lightweight, incurs no inference overhead, and is compatible with standard frameworks. Experiments across state-of-the-art image (SD3.5, Qwen-Image) and video (WAN2.1) models show our approach enables up to 3x faster sampling while maintaining or improving quality, robustness, and semantic alignment. Our findings highlight that adapting guidance to the sampling process, rather than fixing it, is critical for unlocking the full potential of fast, flow-based models.

We envision a proactive multi-modal assistant system which gives users real-time step-by-step guidance on a procedural task, autonomously deciding when to interrupt, and how to coach. However, progress is limited by the absence of large-scale, cross-domain benchmarks that reflect realistic conditions, particularly the common case in which users deviate from the expected step sequence. We address this gap with four contributions: (1)~we release EgoProactive, a large-scale wearable-egocentric dataset for proactive procedural assistance with explicit Out-of-Plan (OOP) annotations and recovery steps; (2)~we augment five established benchmarks (Ego4D, EPIC-KITCHENS, EgoExo4D, HoloAssist, HowTo100M) into Pro\textsuperscript{2Bench} under a unified proactive-guidance schema; (3)~we propose a decoupled planner--interaction architecture specialized for procedural state, visual cues, and recovery injection; (4)~we introduce a post-training recipe that transfers across model families, validated by cross-backbone replication on Llama~4 and Qwen-3.6-VL. In extensive experiments, our trained Llama-4 system substantially improves objective intervention quality over strong proprietary baselines (Claude Opus~4.6, Gemini~3.1~Pro, GPT~5.2) and open-weight baselines (Qwen3~VL~235B) baselines across all six datasets. Oracle-plan experiments further show that, when plan quality is controlled, the trained duplex model produces high-quality guidance and large gains on Out-of-Plan recovery.

Sequential recommendation has increasingly shifted toward generative recommenders that combine sequential patterns with semantic item information. Yet these methods are often evaluated on a small set of widely used benchmarks, raising a key question: do these benchmarks actually require the advanced modeling capabilities that modern generative recommenders claim to provide? We conduct a benchmark audit with an intentionally simple graph heuristic. Starting from only the last one or two interacted items, it retrieves candidates from a few-hop item-transition graph and ranks them by item-feature similarity. Despite using no sequence encoder, generative objective, or training, this heuristic matches or outperforms many modern baselines, with relative NDCG@10 improvements of 38.10% and 44.18% over the best competing baseline on Amazon Review Sports and CDs. We show that this behavior reflects shortcut solvability rather than an artifact of one heuristic. We identify three shortcut structures that can make next-item prediction easier than expected: low-branching local transitions, feature-smooth transitions, and limited dependence on long user histories. These shortcuts need not appear together; even one or two strong signals can make simple local retrieval highly competitive, while weakening them makes the benefits of more sophisticated models clearer. Across 14 datasets, model rankings vary substantially with dataset properties, yet the heuristic remains competitive on 10 of them. Our findings suggest that strong performance on standard benchmarks does not always demonstrate advanced sequential, semantic, or generative modeling ability. We call for more careful dataset selection and dataset-level diagnostic analysis when using benchmarks to support claims about new recommendation models.

As LLMs shift toward autonomous agents, Deep Research has emerged as a pivotal metric. However, existing academic benchmarks like BrowseComp often fail to meet real-world demands for open-ended research, which requires robust skills in intent recognition, long-horizon decision-making, and cross-source verification. To address this, we introduce Step-DeepResearch, a cost-effective, end-to-end agent. We propose a Data Synthesis Strategy Based on Atomic Capabilities to reinforce planning and report writing, combined with a progressive training path from agentic mid-training to SFT and RL. Enhanced by a Checklist-style Judger, this approach significantly improves robustness. Furthermore, to bridge the evaluation gap in the Chinese domain, we establish ADR-Bench for realistic deep research scenarios. Experimental results show that Step-DeepResearch (32B) scores 61.4% on Scale AI Research Rubrics. On ADR-Bench, it significantly outperforms comparable models and rivals SOTA closed-source models like OpenAI and Gemini DeepResearch. These findings prove that refined training enables medium-sized models to achieve expert-level capabilities at industry-leading cost-efficiency.

Understanding physical transformation processes is crucial for both human cognition and artificial intelligence systems, particularly from an egocentric perspective, which serves as a key bridge between humans and machines in action modeling. We define this modeling process as Egocentric Instructed Visual State Transition (EIVST), which involves generating intermediate frames that depict object transformations between initial and target states under a brief action instruction. EIVST poses two challenges for current generative models: (1) understanding the visual scenes of the initial and target states and reasoning about transformation steps from an egocentric view, and (2) generating a consistent intermediate transition that follows the given instruction while preserving object appearance across the two visual states. To address these challenges, we propose the EgoIn framework. It first infers the multi-step transition process between two given states using TransitionVLM, fine-tuned on our curated dataset to better adapt to this task and reduce hallucinated information. It then generates a sequence of frames based on transition conditions produced by the proposed Transition Conditioning module. Additionally, we introduce Object-aware Auxiliary Supervision to preserve consistent object appearance throughout the transition. Extensive experiments on human-object and robot-object interaction datasets demonstrate EgoIn's superior performance in generating semantically meaningful and visually coherent transformation sequences.

Minority samples are underrepresented instances located in low-density regions of a data manifold, and are valuable in many generative AI applications, such as data augmentation, creative content generation, etc. Unfortunately, existing diffusion-based minority generators often rely on computationally expensive guidance dedicated for minority generation. To address this, here we present a simple yet powerful guidance-free approach called Boost-and-Skip for generating minority samples using diffusion models. The key advantage of our framework requires only two minimal changes to standard generative processes: (i) variance-boosted initialization and (ii) timestep skipping. We highlight that these seemingly-trivial modifications are supported by solid theoretical and empirical evidence, thereby effectively promoting emergence of underrepresented minority features. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that Boost-and-Skip greatly enhances the capability of generating minority samples, even rivaling guidance-based state-of-the-art approaches while requiring significantly fewer computations. Code is available at https://github.com/soobin-um/BnS.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) have enabled increasingly capable digital agents for computer use. However, real-world tasks are often long-horizon and involve evolving contexts containing accumulated observations, intermediate edits, failed attempts, and partially completed executions. Existing agents typically operate over raw interaction history, making task progress difficult to interpret, verify, and recover, which ultimately limits reliable long-horizon execution. In this paper, we argue that addressing this challenge requires explicitly structuring both the agent's state and workflow around a unified causal representation of task progress. We present StructAgent, a state-centered framework that introduces a unified state for maintaining compact, verifiable task progress and a structured workflow that regulates progress through verifier-backed state transitions. Building on this design, StructAgent further enables explicit progress checkpointing, evidence-driven task completion, targeted failure recovery, and tool-supported execution, while ensuring that all progress updates remain grounded in verification. Extensive experiments demonstrate that StructAgent consistently improves a wide range of LLM and VLM backbones on long-horizon computer-use tasks. On OSWorld-Verified, it improves Qwen3.5-9B from 27.0\% to 46.9\% success rate and Qwen3.5-27B from 31.6\% to 62.2\%, while achieving a new open-source state of the art of 78.9\% with MiniMax-M3. Moreover, the same framework generalizes beyond desktop environments to Minecraft, demonstrating the generality of our design.

Recent interactive video world model methods generate scene evolution conditioned on user instructions. Although they achieve impressive results, two key limitations remain. First, they fail to fully exploit the correspondence between instruction-driven scene motion and the underlying 3D geometry, which results in structural instability under viewpoint changes. Second, they easily forget historical information during multi-step interaction, resulting in error accumulation and progressive drift in scene semantics and structure. To address these issues, we propose MagicWorld, an interactive video world model that integrates 3D geometric priors and historical retrieval. MagicWorld starts from a single scene image, employs user actions to drive dynamic scene evolution, and autoregressively synthesizes continuous scenes. We introduce the Action-Guided 3D Geometry Module (AG3D), which constructs a point cloud from the first frame of each interaction and the corresponding action, providing explicit geometric constraints for viewpoint transitions and thereby improving structural consistency. We further propose History Cache Retrieval (HCR) mechanism, which retrieves relevant historical frames during generation and injects them as conditioning signals, helping the model utilize past scene information and mitigate error accumulation. Experimental results demonstrate that MagicWorld achieves notable improvements in scene stability and continuity across interaction iterations.

Generating long-form storytelling videos with consistent visual narratives remains a significant challenge in video synthesis. We present a novel framework, dataset, and a model that address three critical limitations: background consistency across shots, seamless multi-subject shot-to-shot transitions, and scalability to hour-long narratives. Our approach introduces a background-consistent generation pipeline that maintains visual coherence across scenes while preserving character identity and spatial relationships. We further propose a transition-aware video synthesis module that generates smooth shot transitions for complex scenarios involving multiple subjects entering or exiting frames, going beyond the single-subject limitations of prior work. To support this, we contribute with a synthetic dataset of 10,000 multi-subject transition sequences covering underrepresented dynamic scene compositions. On VBench, InfinityStory achieves the highest Background Consistency (88.94), highest Subject Consistency (82.11), and the best overall average rank (2.80), showing improved stability, smoother transitions, and better temporal coherence.

While generative artificial intelligence has advanced significantly across text, image, audio, and video domains, 3D generation remains comparatively underdeveloped due to fundamental challenges such as data scarcity, algorithmic limitations, and ecosystem fragmentation. To this end, we present Step1X-3D, an open framework addressing these challenges through: (1) a rigorous data curation pipeline processing >5M assets to create a 2M high-quality dataset with standardized geometric and textural properties; (2) a two-stage 3D-native architecture combining a hybrid VAE-DiT geometry generator with an diffusion-based texture synthesis module; and (3) the full open-source release of models, training code, and adaptation modules. For geometry generation, the hybrid VAE-DiT component produces TSDF representations by employing perceiver-based latent encoding with sharp edge sampling for detail preservation. The diffusion-based texture synthesis module then ensures cross-view consistency through geometric conditioning and latent-space synchronization. Benchmark results demonstrate state-of-the-art performance that exceeds existing open-source methods, while also achieving competitive quality with proprietary solutions. Notably, the framework uniquely bridges the 2D and 3D generation paradigms by supporting direct transfer of 2D control techniques~(e.g., LoRA) to 3D synthesis. By simultaneously advancing data quality, algorithmic fidelity, and reproducibility, Step1X-3D aims to establish new standards for open research in controllable 3D asset generation.

Animated video separates foreground and background elements into layers, with distinct processes for sketching, refining, coloring, and in-betweening. Existing video generation methods typically treat animation as a monolithic data domain, lacking fine-grained control over individual layers. In this paper, we introduce LayerAnimate, a novel architectural approach that enhances fine-grained control over individual animation layers within a video diffusion model, allowing users to independently manipulate foreground and background elements in distinct layers. To address the challenge of limited layer-specific data, we propose a data curation pipeline that features automated element segmentation, motion-state hierarchical merging, and motion coherence refinement. Through quantitative and qualitative comparisons, and user study, we demonstrate that LayerAnimate outperforms current methods in terms of animation quality, control precision, and usability, making it an ideal tool for both professional animators and amateur enthusiasts. This framework opens up new possibilities for layer-specific animation applications and creative flexibility. Our code is available at https://layeranimate.github.io.

World models enable agents to anticipate the effects of their actions by internalizing environment dynamics. In enterprise systems, however, these dynamics are often defined by tenant-specific business logic that varies across deployments and evolves over time, making models trained on historical transitions brittle under deployment shift. We ask a question the world-models literature has not addressed: when the rules can be read at inference time, does an agent still need to learn them? We argue, and demonstrate empirically, that in settings where transition dynamics are configurable and readable, runtime discovery complements offline training by grounding predictions in the active system instance. We propose enterprise discovery agents, which recover relevant transition dynamics at runtime by reading the system's configuration rather than relying solely on internalized representations. We introduce CascadeBench, a reasoning-focused benchmark for enterprise cascade prediction that adopts the evaluation methodology of World of Workflows on diverse synthetic environments, and use it together with deployment-shift evaluation to show that offline-trained world models can perform well in-distribution but degrade as dynamics change, whereas discovery-based agents are more robust under shift by grounding their predictions in the current instance. Our findings suggest that, in configurable enterprise environments, agents should not rely solely on fixed internalized dynamics, but should incorporate mechanisms for discovering relevant transition logic at runtime.

With the widespread adoption of Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents for automating GUI interaction tasks, substantial research focused on improving GUI perception to ground task instructions into concrete action steps. However, the step execution capability of these agents has gradually emerged as a new bottleneck for task completion. In particular, existing GUI agents often adopt overly simplified strategies for handling swipe interactions, preventing them from accurately replicating human-like behavior. To address this limitation, we decompose human swipe gestures into multiple quantifiable dimensions and propose an automated pipeline SwipeGen to synthesize human-like swipe interactions through GUI exploration. Based on this pipeline, we construct and release the first benchmark for evaluating the swipe execution capability of GUI agents. Furthermore, leveraging the synthesized data, we propose GUISwiper, a GUI agent with enhanced interaction execution capabilities. Experimental results demonstrate that GUISwiper achieves a swipe execution accuracy of 69.07%, representing a 214% improvement over existing VLM baselines.

The advancement of large language models (LLMs) has significantly propelled the field of code generation. Previous work integrated reinforcement learning (RL) with compiler feedback for exploring the output space of LLMs to enhance code generation quality. However, the lengthy code generated by LLMs in response to complex human requirements makes RL exploration a challenge. Also, since the unit tests may not cover the complicated code, optimizing LLMs by using these unexecuted code snippets is ineffective. To tackle these challenges, we introduce StepCoder, a novel RL framework for code generation, consisting of two main components: CCCS addresses the exploration challenge by breaking the long sequences code generation task into a Curriculum of Code Completion Subtasks, while FGO only optimizes the model by masking the unexecuted code segments to provide Fine-Grained Optimization. In addition, we furthermore construct the APPS+ dataset for RL training, which is manually verified to ensure the correctness of unit tests. Experimental results show that our method improves the ability to explore the output space and outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in corresponding benchmarks.

Recent advances in trajectory-controllable video generation have achieved remarkable progress. Previous methods mainly use adapter-based architectures for precise motion control along predefined trajectories. However, all these methods rely on a multi-step denoising process, leading to substantial time redundancy and computational overhead. While existing video distillation methods successfully distill multi-step generators into few-step, directly applying these approaches to trajectory-controllable video generation results in noticeable degradation in both video quality and trajectory accuracy. To bridge this gap, we introduce FlashMotion, a novel training framework designed for few-step trajectory-controllable video generation. We first train a trajectory adapter on a multi-step video generator for precise trajectory control. Then, we distill the generator into a few-step version to accelerate video generation. Finally, we finetune the adapter using a hybrid strategy that combines diffusion and adversarial objectives, aligning it with the few-step generator to produce high-quality, trajectory-accurate videos. For evaluation, we introduce FlashBench, a benchmark for long-sequence trajectory-controllable video generation that measures both video quality and trajectory accuracy across varying numbers of foreground objects. Experiments on two adapter architectures show that FlashMotion surpasses existing video distillation methods and previous multi-step models in both visual quality and trajectory consistency.

Recent video diffusion foundation models have achieved remarkable progress in high-quality video generation, yet turning them into real-time interactive video world models remains challenging. Interactive world models require controllable, causal, and low-latency rollout, which in practice demands a full pipeline spanning data construction, controllable fine-tuning, autoregressive training, few-step distillation, and streaming inference. In this work, we present minWM, a full-stack open-source framework for building real-time interactive video world models. minWM provides an end-to-end pipeline that converts existing bidirectional T2V/TI2V video foundation models into camera-controllable few-step autoregressive world models. Specifically, minWM first fine-tunes a bidirectional video diffusion model with camera control, and then applies the Causal Forcing / Causal Forcing++ pipeline, including AR diffusion training, causal ODE or causal consistency distillation, and asymmetric DMD, to distill it into a few-step autoregressive generator for low-latency rollout. The framework is modular and architecture-extensible: we instantiate it on representative open backbones, including Wan2.1-T2V-1.3B and HY1.5-TI2V-8B, covering both cross-attention-based condition injection and MMDiT-style architectures. minWM also supports adapting existing video world models, such as HY-WorldPlay, to new data distributions, training recipes, and latency targets. Beyond releasing runnable scripts, checkpoints, documentation, and inference code, we provide practical ablations on camera trajectory quality, controllability training steps, and minimal batch-size requirements. We hope minWM serves as a reproducible and extensible recipe for building and adapting real-time interactive video world models. Project Page: [https://github.com/shengshu-ai/minWM](https://github.com/shengshu-ai/minWM)

Despite recent advances in image-to-video generation, better controllability and local animation are less explored. Most existing image-to-video methods are not locally aware and tend to move the entire scene. However, human artists may need to control the movement of different objects or regions. Additionally, current I2V methods require users not only to describe the target motion but also to provide redundant detailed descriptions of frame contents. These two issues hinder the practical utilization of current I2V tools. In this paper, we propose a practical framework, named Follow-Your-Click, to achieve image animation with a simple user click (for specifying what to move) and a short motion prompt (for specifying how to move). Technically, we propose the first-frame masking strategy, which significantly improves the video generation quality, and a motion-augmented module equipped with a short motion prompt dataset to improve the short prompt following abilities of our model. To further control the motion speed, we propose flow-based motion magnitude control to control the speed of target movement more precisely. Our framework has simpler yet precise user control and better generation performance than previous methods. Extensive experiments compared with 7 baselines, including both commercial tools and research methods on 8 metrics, suggest the superiority of our approach. Project Page: https://follow-your-click.github.io/

High-resolution video generation faces a coupled bottleneck of optimization instability and prohibitive computational costs. The massive expansion of the token sequence not only biases optimization toward local textures at the expense of global coherence, leading to structural collapse, but also imposes prohibitive training costs and severe inference latency. To address this, we propose PixelWizard, a framework that hierarchically decouples global structure modeling from fine-grained detail synthesis. PixelWizard first establishes a compact spatiotemporal anchor to concentrate dense structural priors, which then guides fine-grained generation at high resolution. This mitigates the local optimization bias to ensure structural stability without compromising high-frequency details. Leveraging this structural stability, we introduce Noise-Span Aligned Shortcut Training to break the inference bottleneck. By explicitly modeling the step size, this mechanism allows the model to traverse the generation trajectory with large steps. Crucially, we incorporate Exponential Index-Biased Sampling and Adaptive Noise-Span Calibration to align optimization with the shifted noise schedules of high-resolution grids, ensuring robust few-step inference without incurring the heavy overhead of distillation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PixelWizard achieves superior visual quality while accelerating the generative sampling of native 2K/4K videos by over 10x.

Continuous-time Consistency Models (CMs) promise efficient few-step generation but face significant challenges with training instability. We argue this instability stems from a fundamental conflict: by training a network to learn only a shortcut across a probability flow, the model loses its grasp on the instantaneous velocity field that defines the flow. Our solution is to explicitly anchor the model in the underlying flow during training. We introduce the Flow-Anchored Consistency Model (FACM), a simple but effective training strategy that uses a Flow Matching (FM) task as an anchor for the primary CM shortcut objective. This Flow-Anchoring approach requires no architectural modifications and is broadly compatible with standard model architectures. By distilling a pre-trained LightningDiT model, our method achieves a state-of-the-art FID of 1.32 with two steps (NFE=2) and 1.76 with just one step (NFE=1) on ImageNet 256x256, significantly outperforming previous methods. This provides a general and effective recipe for building high-performance, few-step generative models. Our code and pretrained models: https://github.com/ali-vilab/FACM.

The consistency model (CM) has recently made significant progress in accelerating the generation of diffusion models. However, its application to high-resolution, text-conditioned image generation in the latent space (a.k.a., LCM) remains unsatisfactory. In this paper, we identify three key flaws in the current design of LCM. We investigate the reasons behind these limitations and propose the Phased Consistency Model (PCM), which generalizes the design space and addresses all identified limitations. Our evaluations demonstrate that PCM significantly outperforms LCM across 1--16 step generation settings. While PCM is specifically designed for multi-step refinement, it achieves even superior or comparable 1-step generation results to previously state-of-the-art specifically designed 1-step methods. Furthermore, we show that PCM's methodology is versatile and applicable to video generation, enabling us to train the state-of-the-art few-step text-to-video generator. More details are available at https://g-u-n.github.io/projects/pcm/.

Computer Use Agents (CUAs) fundamentally rely on graphical user interface (GUI) grounding to translate language instructions into executable screen actions, but editing-level grounding in dense coding interfaces, where sub-pixel accuracy is required to interact with dense IDE elements, remains underexplored. Existing approaches typically rely on single-shot coordinate prediction, which lacks a mechanism for error correction and often fails in high-density interfaces. In this technical report, we conduct an empirical study of pixel-precise cursor localization in coding environments. Instead of a single-step execution, our agent engages in an iterative refinement process, utilizing visual feedback from previous attempts to reach the target element. This closed-loop grounding mechanism allows the agent to self-correct displacement errors and adapt to dynamic UI changes. We evaluate our approach across GPT-5.4, Claude, and Qwen on a suite of complex coding benchmarks, demonstrating that multi-turn refinement significantly outperforms state-of-the-art single-shot models in both click precision and overall task success rate. Our results suggest that iterative visual reasoning is a critical component for the next generation of reliable software engineering agents. Code: https://github.com/microsoft/precision-cua-bench.

Reinforcement learning (RL) holds significant promise for training LLM agents to handle complex, goal-oriented tasks that require multi-step interactions with external environments. However, a critical challenge when applying RL to these agentic tasks arises from delayed rewards: feedback signals are typically available only after the entire task is completed. This makes it non-trivial to assign delayed rewards to earlier actions, providing insufficient guidance regarding environmental constraints and hindering agent training. In this work, we draw on the insight that the ultimate completion of a task emerges from the cumulative progress an agent makes across individual steps. We propose Stepwise Progress Attribution (SPA), a general reward redistribution framework that decomposes the final reward into stepwise contributions, each reflecting its incremental progress toward overall task completion. To achieve this, we train a progress estimator that accumulates stepwise contributions over a trajectory to match the task completion. During policy optimization, we combine the estimated per-step contribution with a grounding signal for actions executed in the environment as the fine-grained, intermediate reward for effective agent training. Extensive experiments on common agent benchmarks (including Webshop, ALFWorld, and VirtualHome) demonstrate that SPA consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art method in both success rate (+2.5\% on average) and grounding accuracy (+1.9\% on average). Further analyses demonstrate that our method remarkably provides more effective intermediate rewards for RL training. Our code is available at https://github.com/WangHanLinHenry/SPA-RL-Agent.

LLM-based evolution has emerged as a promising way to improve agents by refining non-parametric artifacts, but its wall-clock cost remains a major bottleneck. We identify that this cost comes from synchronized stage execution and imbalance inside each LLM-heavy stage. We present FlashEvolve, an efficient framework that replaces synchronized execution with asynchronous workers and queues, allowing different stages and steps to overlap. To handle data staleness introduced by asynchrony, FlashEvolve tracks artifact versions and applies different policies to update, discard, or patch stale artifacts. Unlike weight-space staleness in asynchronous RL, language-space staleness is inspectable and repairable: a stale artifact is not just delayed work, but readable evidence that the LLM can reflect on, revise, and turn into useful evolution signal. FlashEvolve further improves throughput and token efficiency with speculative stage completion and adaptive workflow control. On GEPA workloads, FlashEvolve improves proposal throughput by 3.5times on local vLLM and 4.9times on API serving over synchronous GEPA. The same design also applies to ACE and Meta-Harness.