New AI research, sorted by topic.

Generating novel views from limited observations requires preserving both the appearance and spatial structure of a scene. Although recent approaches exploit fine-grained geometric cues, they do not explicitly model high-level semantic and spatial properties such as object identity, attributes, and inter-object relationships. In this work, we investigate whether 3D language understanding can provide complementary supervision for novel-view generation. We introduce Ask4NV, built on a pretrained unified multimodal model with a Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) architecture. Our model incorporates camera geometry into both VAE and ViT representations and leverages understanding features during generation through joint self-attention with a modality-aware attention masking strategy. Experiments demonstrate strong image quality and geometric consistency in novel-view generation, alongside competitive 3D language understanding. Further analysis shows that joint training improves cross-view correspondence in VAE representations and similarity in a 3D-aware feature space.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are gaining attention in autonomous driving, inheriting commonsense priors from large language models (LLMs) and widening the navigation interface from a fixed command set to free-form natural-language instructions. However, this open-ended interface exposes a new vulnerability surface: an inattentive driver may issue instructions that are unsafe given the current scene, and a malicious user may issue dangerous ones on purpose. We present the first benchmark suite that evaluates navigation following and conflict awareness together, along with adversarial robustness. Existing VLAs fall short on both: SimLingo completes no language-instructed lane change in closed loop, and all models degrade sharply under conflicting signals. We propose SafeDriveVLA, the first driving VLA that (1) explicitly predicts a three-level navigation-compliance mode to decouple conflict reasoning from action generation, and (2) uses navigation-conditioned world model dreaming to inform this prediction. Unlike prior world models that roll out expert or planned actions, ours dreams of strictly following the navigation signal, showing when following is safe. SafeDriveVLA reaches 88.16 Driving Score (DS) and 68.64% Success Rate (SR) on Bench2Drive, lifts closed-loop language following by 49.3% and reduces collisions under unsafe instructions from 60 to 38 compared to the best SimLingo variant. Video demonstrations are available on our project page.

Recent advances in robot learning have driven rapid progress in humanoid control, enabling increasingly agile behaviors in the real world. However, humanoid control networks are typically obtained through conventional training procedures, while comparatively little attention has been given to directly modeling the distribution of their learned weights and generating functional networks in weight space. In this work, we investigate whether high-performing humanoid control networks can be generatively modeled directly through their weights. We adopt a latent diffusion framework that couples a linear autoencoder with a Diffusion Transformer. The autoencoder compresses actor network parameters into a compact latent space, and the Diffusion Transformer models the distribution of these latents. Trained on networks collected from reinforcement learning for the Unitree G1 robot, our approach generates deployable networks that perform various motions in the real world, including walking, dancing, and spin kick. Beyond generation, we further study the learned weight space to better understand the structure captured by these humanoid control networks. We identify a structural principle in the first-layer weights that consistently reflects the robot's kinematic prior. Notably, this kinematic prior emerges under both Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Imitation Learning (IL) training, suggesting that it is not specific to a particular optimization process but may instead reflect common knowledge associated with humanoid embodiment. Together, these results demonstrate the feasibility of generative modeling in humanoid network weight space, while providing initial insights into the information encoded by their learned weights. Additional results are available on our project website: https://humanoid-weight-diffusion.github.io/

Mobile Manipulation (MoMa) is a cornerstone of autonomous robotic systems, yet real-world fine-tuning remains a formidable challenge because of high-dimensional action spaces and intricate coupling between heterogeneous modules. In this paper, we propose HiRe-MoMa (Hierarchical Residual Mobile Manipulation), a systematic framework for stable and sample-efficient real-world fine-tuning of complex MoMa systems. At its core, HiRe-MoMa adopts a Hierarchical Residual Architecture that fine-tunes a frozen base policy. A Policy-Agnostic Residual learns additive corrections atop the base policy, while Hierarchical Decoupling splits the residual into mobile-base and manipulator-arm heads with unidirectional conditioning, mitigating gradient interference and aligning corrections with the platform's physical hierarchy. To improve sample efficiency in data-expensive real-world settings, we propose Expert-Guided Value Alignment, which leverages sparse human interventions with under 20% training coverage to reshape the critic's value landscape, effectively guiding autonomous exploration through expert priors. Extensive real-world experiments on the TIAGo++ platform demonstrate that HiRe-MoMa consistently enhances task performance with only around 30 minutes of online interaction, regardless of the base policy architecture. To our knowledge, this is among the first frameworks to enable efficient on-robot fine-tuning for mobile manipulation in the real world, providing a practical paradigm for deploying complex robotic systems in dynamic, human-centric environments. Further details can be found on our project website: https://hire-moma.github.io/

Representation-alignment methods effectively accelerate the diffusion transformer training. REPA, for example, uses a pretrained vision encoder to supervise an intermediate layer through an MLP projection head which is discarded after training. It aims to import semantics from the vision encoder to the diffusion backbone. While this objective is achieved at early layers by back-propagating the alignment loss, there is no guarantee that later layers, supervised by the velocity prediction loss alone, can well access such semantics. We propose a simple solution, representation conditioning (RECON), to improve semantics in later layers. During training, we feed the pretrained vision encoder tokens into later layers; during inference, because we no longer have the clean image, we reuse the MLP head (as a proxy to the vision encoder) and project its output tokens to the later layers. Our method adds no parameters and leads to much faster convergence: RECON is $63\times$ faster than SiT and $25\times$ faster than REPA. Code is available at https://github.com/saeidrazavi/RECON

World-action models aim to turn visual anticipation into driving decisions, yet typically train action experts on trajectory representations defined independently of visual dynamics. This motivates deriving action targets directly from visual motion. We first examine a simpler setting in which trajectories are reconstructed from recorded future images. Even without the need for future prediction, reconstruction captures the dominant maneuver but leaves centimeter-scale errors. We therefore introduce VITAL (Vision-Induced Tokens for Action Learning), an action tokenizer that couples a visually derived motion scaffold with a compact residual encoding the trajectory error left by that scaffold. This representation makes visual motion the principal prediction target and gives small metric corrections a separate, normalized learning scale. Using flow matching, the action expert jointly predicts both components from the current image, ego state, and navigation command, without generating future images at inference. The same residual coordinates support bounded reinforcement post-training that refines execution while keeping the predicted visual scaffold fixed. With only one action denoising step, VITAL achieves 90.8 PDMS on NAVSIM v1 navtest, within 0.13 points of its ten-step score at 3.29x the end-to-end inference speed. Without retraining, it achieves 91.1 EPDMS on NAVSIM v2 navtest and 38.6 on navhard. Project page: https://worldbench.github.io/vital