Recent video generators often omit audio or synthesize it in a separate stage, limiting reciprocal modeling of visual dynamics and acoustic events. We present DreamX-Creator 1.0, a compact native joint audio-video generation system centered on a 7B generator. Conditioned on a first frame and a text prompt, the generator jointly denoises modality-specialized audio and video streams. The streams are processed independently in the first half of the network and coupled in the latter half through Gated Cross-Modal Attention, whose token- and head-wise output gates modulate each active cross-modal attention-head output. A unified Audio-Video Data System constructs and filters temporally coherent clips, produces structured multimodal annotations, and organizes clips into capability-oriented data pools. Progressive Joint Training comprises two audio-video pre-training stages followed by High-Quality Finetuning. Audio-Video Reinforcement Learning further post-trains the generator with Modality-Aware Multimodal Feedback that routes video-, audio-, and cross-modal feedback to the corresponding streams. For high-resolution output, our Autoregressive 1-Step 2K Refinement pipeline adapts a bidirectional multi-step teacher into an autoregressive multi-step refiner and distills it into a student requiring one denoising evaluation per temporal chunk. Overall, DreamX-Creator 1.0 achieves native, synchronized audio-video generation with performance competitive with state-of-the-art open-source systems. By releasing our compact 7B generator and 2K Refiner, we seek to democratize native audio-video generation and provide an accessible foundation for future research in unified audio-video generative modeling.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.31106
Masked diffusion language models predict tokens from a partially observed response canvas, enabling bidirectional conditioning and parallel token refinement. Yet standard masked-diffusion decoders use a rigid inference interface: the number of masked positions allocated to the answer is fixed before generation begins. Choosing this length is difficult. A short canvas can truncate reasoning or code, while a long canvas wastes computation and can perturb denoising. We introduce CARVE (Counterfactual-Aware Reveal with Verified Expansion), a training-free variable-length algorithm for masked diffusion LMs. Starting from a shorter canvas, CARVE can grow the response during decoding by inserting additional [MASK] positions. Rather than keeping every insertion, CARVE tests a candidate expanded canvas and asks a counterfactual question: would the model make similar predictions for the unresolved positions in the original canvas if the extra masked space were present? The inserted masks are kept only when they induce low Jensen-Shannon (JS) divergence on aligned unresolved positions. This makes length growth a verified stability decision rather than a pure confidence heuristic. CARVE applies without retraining to both full-canvas and blockwise diffusion decoders. Across code generation and mathematical reasoning benchmarks, CARVE consistently improves average performance over fixed-length baselines across all evaluated model families. Crucially, CARVE achieves these accuracy gains while reducing inference cost, reaching half the FLOPs of fixed-length decoding in some settings.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30922
Most trajectory forecasting models are trained on clean annotated histories, and are often evaluated under the same idealized assumption, although practical deployments rely on trajectories produced by imperfect multi-object trackers. The real-world observations exhibit localization jitter, missed or unstable detections, and data-association ambiguity, which are usually either ignored or removed through denoising. This paper instead treats tracking-derived reliability cues as an informative signal to be propagated to the predictor. We propose a plug-in uncertainty-aware formulation in which each observed state is encoded as an uncertain state representation, modeled by a Gaussian distribution whose covariance combines detection-level localization uncertainty and association-level ambiguity through the law of total variance. Existing backbones are adapted with minimal architectural changes: input trajectories are represented as Gaussian observations, and predicted trajectories are produced as Gaussian forecasts rather than deterministic coordinates. To train predictors that remain robust under structured observation noise, we combine temporally correlated Ornstein-Uhlenbeck perturbations with response-based knowledge distillation from a teacher trained on clean trajectories. Experiments on Oxford Town Centre and VIRAT using real tracker outputs, together with a complementary ETH/UCY pseudo-detection protocol, show that the proposed formulation improves displacement accuracy and the reliability-sharpness trade-off of probabilistic forecasts.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30899
Video world models are increasingly used as simulators, yet visual fidelity alone does not show that a model maintains the hidden state of the world. We examine this gap with an action-conditioned video Shell Game, a visual analog of $S_5$ state tracking that decouples visual rendering from compositing the hidden state underneath. Bidirectional and autoregressive Transformers, Mamba, and linear attention restricted to nonnegative transition eigenvalues all fit the training horizon of 5 swaps and then fall toward chance on longer swap chains (extrapolation) while still rendering plausible video with additional denoising steps providing no benefit. The pixel-based diffusion target never supervises the unseen hidden state, so the generated frames cannot carry it and the state has to live inside the architecture rather than in the tokens. For a Transformer, that architectural state is only an append-only KV cache, so the model has to re-derive the hidden arrangement from the whole history at every chunk. We find two mechanisms that do extrapolate, and both carry a state across chunks and revise it in place. Linear attention succeeds once its transition eigenvalues may be negative, and TTT with a nonlinear fast weight succeeds by updating the feature map through which it reads its own state. We further examine harder cases in dynamic world exploration tasks, and discuss the broader implications for building stateful video world models.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30692
Proactive tamper localization embeds an imperceptible signal into an image prior to distribution, enabling pixel-level manipulation detection. Existing methods assume a spliced (SP) setting, where synthesized regions are composited onto the original background, leaving embedded signals intact. However, real-world diffusion-based inpainting operates in a fully regenerated (FR) setting, where the entire image undergoes denoising, disrupting background signals and rendering existing frameworks ineffective. We propose APT, a semi-fragile latent-space perturbation that embeds a dense, vector-wise localization signal. By aligning each spatial feature vector toward a fixed anchor direction, APT localizes tampering via the alignment disparity between synthesized foreground and anchor-aligned background features after inpainting. The proposed hard negative mining loss and noisy perturbation branch further enforce uniform alignment. Experiments on COCO demonstrate that APT achieves an FR IoU of 0.92, outperforming the strongest baseline (WAM, 0.84), while existing methods collapse to near-random performance (AUC 0.5), establishing APT as a practical forensic framework generalizable across tampering types unknown at test time.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30656
This work presents $\textbf{Lapis}$, a $\textbf{l}$inear-$\textbf{a}$ttention-based $\textbf{pi}$xel-$\textbf{s}$pace generative framework that achieves efficient and high-fidelity depth estimation with one-step diffusion. While generative frameworks have significantly advanced monocular depth estimation with superior detail fidelity, the $\mathcal{O}(N^2)$ complexity of standard attention and the multi-step denoising process introduce prohibitive computational costs when scaling them to high-resolution image applications. Although linear attention and one-step prediction are intuitively viable, directly applying them leads to poor structural consistency, detail loss, and noise. Lapis rectifies these limitations through a coarse-to-fine hierarchy. Specifically, a Patch-level Consistency Module restores structural coherence by integrating semantic and spatial priors. Subsequently, a Pixel-level Refinement Module recovers sharp geometric boundaries via skip-connection-based pixel correspondence. Furthermore, to mitigate sampling noise inherent in one-step diffusion, we leverage the manifold assumption and adopt a direct $\mathbf{x}$-prediction strategy to target the clean data manifold. Extensive evaluations on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that Lapis consistently achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) accuracy and boundary sharpness across various resolutions, reducing inference latency by up to 7.6$\times$ at 1080P and 10.9$\times$ at 1440P resolution compared to previous SOTA generative models.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30129
Modern video generators routinely fail at physical dynamics: objects float, trajectories violate gravity, contacts vanish. Standard denoising and flow-matching objectives fit visual data distributions but do not explicitly penalize such physical violations. Existing remedies can improve physical consistency, but typically add substantial inference or training cost. Candidate-selection methods generate and score multiple videos, while gradient-based world-model guidance repeatedly decodes and re-encodes intermediate estimates. Generator-internal refinement adds perturbation and re-denoising loops, whereas post-training requires curated data and additional optimization. We propose Off-Manifold Refinement (OMR), an inference-time method that instead injects world-model feedback directly into a single sampling trajectory. During scheduled middle ODE steps, we augment the generator velocity with the gradient of an adapter-space V-JEPA 2.1 surprise energy. This external correction can move the latent away from the uncorrected sampling trajectory and toward regions ranked as more physically plausible by the frozen predictor, after which the generator continues rendering from the corrected state. A small trained latent-to-embedding adapter keeps the gradient tractable at inference, and both the video generator and the world model remain frozen. On our fixed 400-prompt VideoPhy-2 detailed subset, OMR lifts the joint Semantic-Adherence-and-Physical-Commonsense metric from 47.0% to 52.0% (+5.0pp absolute, +10.6% relative) over the base Wan2.2-T2V-A14B sampler. On a separate fixed 50-prompt efficiency subset, it requires $1.71 \times$ the base runtime rather than the multiplicative cost of reward/search alternatives. Project page: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29904
Diffusion models are increasingly used not only for sampling from learned data distributions, but also for generating samples that optimize task-specific objectives. A common approach is to guide the reverse diffusion process using gradients of an external objective. However, when the data distribution is supported on a structured feasible set, such as a manifold or a constraint set, gradient guidance can move samples away from the learned data geometry. In this paper, we study a simple projected-gradient-guided diffusion update based on the observation that the Stein denoising operator can act as an approximate projection onto the data geometry. The proposed update incorporates the objective gradient inside the denoising step, yielding an inference-time method that uses only a pretrained denoiser and gradient evaluations. We analyze this update as an inexact projected-gradient method for constrained optimization over learned feasible geometries. Our theory covers three settings: linear manifolds, compact convex feasible sets, and compact Riemannian submanifolds. In all these settings, we prove descent and finite-time convergence guarantees. Numerical experiments support the theoretical interpretation and illustrate how the proposed update balances objective descent with preservation of the learned geometry.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29507
Multi-agent systems in the real-world (e.g., drone swarms, autonomous cars, warehouse robots) must satisfy rich, temporal tasks while avoiding collisions. Signal Temporal Logic (STL) elegantly encodes such objectives, but current STL planning methods face critical limitations. State-of-the-art optimization-based approaches can handle arbitrary STL specifications but struggle with scalability, becoming computationally impractical as the number of agents grows. Learning-based methods efficiently handle a large number of agents with rapid planning times but fare poorly when deployment-time objectives differ from those used during training, and do not support planning tasks that require different specifications to be ascribed to different agents (i.e., heterogeneity) or team-level specifications requiring coordination of multiple agents. This fundamental trade-off between generalizability and scalability presents a challenge for realizing multi-agent STL planning algorithms in practice. To overcome this challenge, we introduce a new diffusion method for multi-agent planning with STL specifications. Using a differentiable approximation of STL, we integrate the STL gradient in the denoising process, making our approach generalizable to novel formulas whose predicates are placed anywhere within the goal region covered during training, while achieving the same scalability as existing learning-based methods. Our method supports heterogeneous specifications, and by using diffusion models, naturally enhances plan diversity, thereby significantly reducing safety-related violations (e.g., collisions) among agents. A detailed evaluation study justifies the utility of STL-guided diffusion-based multi-agent planners for constructing generalizable, scalable, and diverse plans. Videos and code are available at this https URL and this https URL .
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29490
Recent video diffusion models have achieved remarkable generation quality, but high-fidelity results still largely depend on closed-source systems or costly large-scale infrastructure. Test-time scaling (TTS) offers a training-free way to improve lightweight generators by spending additional inference compute, yet existing methods mostly remain within a noise-search paradigm: they sample, select, or perturb denoising trajectories and discard low-scoring candidates after expensive generation. This generate-and-discard process wastes not only computation but also the partial motion, layout, or appearance structure already encoded in recoverable samples. We present \textbf{GEARS} (\textbf{G}uided \textbf{E}diting for \textbf{A}daptive \textbf{R}ecycling \textbf{S}earch), a training-free framework that introduces {diagnosis-guided candidate recycling} into video TTS by turning such candidates into editable priors through a generation-evaluation-editing loop. GEARS consists of two collaborative components. The \textbf{Stage-Aware Scheduler} determines what to repair, when to repair it, and which candidates should be preserved, recycled, or discarded. The \textbf{Candidate Recycler} diagnoses recoverable failures from keyframes and multi-dimensional reward feedback, derives candidate-specific repair prompts, and repairs the corresponding candidates through manifold-aware latent SDEdit. The repaired candidates are recycled into the search pool, creating refinement paths beyond standard noise perturbation while preserving useful structure. Under matched NFE budgets, GEARS consistently outperforms existing video TTS methods on VBench, bringing a 1.3B model to a total score comparable to a 14B counterpart, and ablations verify the necessity of adaptive scheduling, diagnosis-conditioned editing, and manifold-aware re-denoising. Code is available on GitHub.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29322
Unified multimodal models jointly support understanding and generation, but incur substantial redundant computation across tokens, layers, and generation timesteps. Through token-importance probing, we identify an asymmetric core-expansion structure: understanding exhibits a stable importance component, while generation largely shares this component but requires progress-dependent corrections. We therefore propose CE-Router, which uses a task-shared core scorer and progress-conditioned generation expansions, optimized through generation decomposition and cross-task core alignment. At inference, CE-Router compacts token computation and supplies a learned routing signal to Unified Computation Scheduling, which coordinates layer skipping, FFN pruning, diffusion-head cache reuse, and denoising-step early exit. Experiments on two representative UMM architectures demonstrate consistent quality--efficiency improvements across both tasks, retaining 98.03\% of dense understanding performance with a 1.93$\times$ end-to-end inference speedup.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29291
In this work we propose a novel non-linear diffusion filtering approach for images based on their channel representation. To derive the diffusion update scheme we formulate a novel energy functional using a soft-histogram representation of image pixel neighborhoods obtained from the channel encoding. The resulting Euler-Lagrange equation yields a non-linear robust diffusion scheme with additional weighting terms stemming from the channel representation which steer the diffusion process. We apply this novel energy formulation to image reconstruction problems, showing good performance in the presence of mixtures of Gaussian and impulse-like noise, e.g. missing data. In denoising experiments of common scalar-valued images our approach performs competitive compared to other diffusion schemes as well as state-of-the-art denoising methods for the considered noise types.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29227
Conditional flow matching has enabled a step forward in object 6D pose estimation, achieving state-of-the-art performance by progressively denoising and registering object representations to observed scenes. Existing methods require training task-specific encoders supervised on object-scene overlap and rely on trivial feature fusion strategies to resolve pose ambiguities. We present FunFlow6D, a novel flow matching-based formulation that leverages features from geometric and appearance foundation models for pose estimation, eliminating the need for task-specific encoder training. We also introduce a cross attention-based fusion mechanism that dynamically combines geometric and appearance features to provide richer conditioning for the flow matching module. Experiments on four datasets from the BOP benchmark show that FunFlow6D outperforms the previous state of the art while reducing supervision requirements and memory overhead. Extensive ablations validate the contribution of each proposed component. Project website: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29183
We present a novel variational approach to a tensor-based total variation formulation which is called gradient energy total variation, GETV. We introduce the gradient energy tensor [6] into the GETV and show that the corresponding Euler-Lagrange (E-L) equation is a tensor-based partial differential equation of total variation type. Furthermore, we give a proof which shows that GETV is a convex functional. This approach, in contrast to the commonly used structure tensor, enables a formal derivation of the corresponding E-L equation. Experimental results suggest that GETV compares favourably to other state of the art variational denoising methods such as extended anisotropic diffusion (EAD)[1] and total variation (TV) [18] for gray-scale and colour images.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29172
In this work, we introduce a novel tensor-based functional for targeted image enhancement and denoising. Via explicit regularization, our formulation incorporates application dependent and contextual information using first principles. Few works in literature treat variational models that describe both application dependent information and contextual knowledge of the denoising problem. We prove the existence of a minimizer and present results on tensor symmetry constraints, convexity, and geometric interpretation of the proposed functional. We show that our framework excels in applications where nonlinear functions are present such as in gamma correction and targeted value range filtering. We also study general denoising performance where we show comparable results to dedicated PDE-based state of the art methods.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29164
We aim to improve frozen flow-matching image generators by adding inference computation inside the denoiser, without changing model weights or the outer sampler. Existing generators usually spend extra test-time computation by increasing the number of sampling steps, which repeatedly evaluates the entire denoiser and couples quality gains to sampler cost. A key challenge is how to use extra computation inside a frozen transformer denoiser: the method must decide which tokens, layers, and sampling times receive repeated updates while preserving the original generation pipeline. We introduce a training-free looping framework that repeatedly applies selected transformer layers inside each denoising call. Dense and Sparse Token Loop vary the token scope; Sampling-Progress Gating and the loop layer range specify when and where looping is active; loop count and strength control the repeated updates; and Loop Guidance combines ordinary and looped vector-field predictions. Across two Scale-RAE model scales, loop variants improve primary and auxiliary quality metrics with competitive quality--efficiency trade-offs. Loop Guidance further improves both primary metrics across all three tested models; on Scale-RAE DiT2.4B, it raises GenEval from 0.4471 to 0.5691 and DPG-Bench from 0.7656 to 0.8053. Code will be released.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29160
The total scaled-gradient variation (TSGV) regularizer, derived from sparse modeling of piecewise-linear structures, has been shown to preserve edges and corners in image restoration. However, its highly nonconvex and nonlinear nature poses severe computational challenges, as existing methods often suffer from parameter sensitivity or lack convergence guarantees. To overcome this, we propose a tailored bilinear decomposition that decouples the nonlinear weighted gradient in the TSGV regularizer. This approach yields an equivalent optimization problem governed by cone or sphere constraints, depending on the chosen scaling function. In particular, the cone constraint plays a central role in characterizing edge- and corner-preserving behavior. We solve this reformulation using the alternating minimization method (AMM) equipped with a majorization--minimization strategy, ensuring a monotonic decrease in energy without step-size tuning. Furthermore, we provide a geometric interpretation of the edge-preserving properties of these constraints by analyzing their asymptotic behavior near image singularities. We establish the global convergence of the proposed method to a critical point within the Kurdyka--Åojasiewicz framework. Extensive numerical experiments on Gaussian denoising and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) imaging show that the proposed method achieves PSNR and SSIM competitive with or superior to representative variational methods, especially at high noise levels, and improves the structural reconstruction under dense and sparse scanning.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.00036
Noise poses a widespread challenge in signal processing, particularly when it comes to denoising images. Although convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have exhibited remarkable success in this field, they are predicated upon the belief that noise follows established distributions, which restricts their practicality when dealing with real-world noise. To overcome this limitation, several efforts have been taken to collect noisy image datasets from the real world. Generative methods, employing techniques such as generative adversarial networks (GANs) and normalizing flows (NFs), have emerged as a solution for generating realistic noisy images. Recent works model noise using camera metadata, however requiring metadata even for sampling phase. In contrast, in this work, we aim to estimate the underlying camera settings, enabling us to improve noise modeling and generate diverse noise distributions. To this end, we introduce a new NF framework that allows us to both classify noise based on camera settings and generate various noisy images. Through experimental results, our model demonstrates exceptional noise quality and leads in denoising performance on benchmark datasets.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29038
Joint-embedding predictive architectures (JEPAs) have primarily been developed for self-supervised representation learning. Denoising JEPA (D-JEPA) recently demonstrated strong generative capabilities on natural images, yet the applicability to 3D medical imaging remains unexplored. Building on the D-JEPA framework, we present Med-D-JEPA, a systematic adaptation and evaluation of joint-embedding predictive generation for 3D brain MRI. Med-D-JEPA operates on continuous latent tokens produced by a 3D KL-regularized adversarial variational autoencoder, and combines masked context prediction, representation-level alignment, per-token diffusion, and iterative next-set-of-token sampling. We evaluate unconditional and class-conditional generation quality on BraTS2019 and OASIS-1 datasets; downstream classification utility; and preliminary whole-tumor segmentation on BraTS2020. Across different generation settings, Med-D-JEPA achieves superior or competitive performance compared to several strong baselines on fidelity and diversity metrics. Compared to training with real samples, Med-D-JEPA-based synthetic pretraining improves classification AUC from 0.63 to 0.85 on BraTS2019 and from 0.78 to 0.87 on OASIS-1. In the segmentation study, pretraining on Med-D-JEPA samples improves Dice from 0.74 to 0.80 and reduces HD95 from 13.40 to 9.56 mm. These findings establish joint-embedding predictive generation as a promising direction for 3D medical image synthesis and encourage further research in this direction.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.28787
Existing audio-video generation methods produce well-synchronized clips but are limited to short durations, while long-video generation methods extend duration through chunk-based iterative synthesis yet lack audio entirely. Generating long audio-video jointly is fundamentally harder than either task alone: each chunk must simultaneously maintain video temporal coherence, audio temporal coherence, and cross-modal synchronization, whose conditioning signals enter the model through different pathways. In this work, we present Encore for long-form synchronized audio-video generation. Our key insight is to factor this challenge into: (1) local continuity handled by iterative generation with explicit cross-chunk context propagation, and (2) global consistency enforced via reference audio-video signals with shifted position embedding. Building on this design, we propose Adaptive Signal Routing (ASR), which introduces learnable attention biases within self-attention and learnable residual scales on cross-attention outputs, enabling the model to adaptively modulate the influence of each conditioning signal. Trained end-to-end for joint audio-video generation, Encore also supports infinite-length audio-to-video and video-to-audio synthesis at inference by conditioning on the ground-truth modality throughout the denoising process. Experiments on our extended VerseBench for long audio-video evaluation demonstrate that Encore significantly outperforms existing methods in both generation quality and temporal coherence. Code and data for this paper are at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04249