Papers for

content creation teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Visual reinforcement learning gains may not improve with more test-time sampling

Do Visual RL Gains Scale at Test Time? A Quantile View of Post-Training

Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training improves the single-sample quality of visual generative models, but deployment often provides additional inference compute through Best-of-N sampling. Whether RL gains transfer under such test-time scaling, particularly on difficult held-out tasks, remains poorly understood in the visual domain. Our central contribution is to systematically identify and characterize a failure mode of scaling transfer in visual RL: across multiple RL methods, model backbones, and evaluations spanning compositional generation, text rendering, and preference alignment, higher single-sample reward does not necessarily imply a better quality-compute frontier. RL gains may attenuate, saturate, or even reverse at large sampling budgets, with the base model eventually outperforming its post-trained counterpart. We explain these regimes through a quantile-transfer framework, showing that Best-of-N places increasing weight on the upper tail of the reward distribution as N grows. Consequently, RL can improve typical samples while compressing or degrading the rare high-quality outcomes that test-time scaling exploits. As a simple intervention motivated by this analysis, we introduce Quantile Utility Policy Optimization (QUPO), which optimizes a controllable mixture of quantile utilities corresponding to different inference budgets. Experiments on SD3.5-M and BAGEL show that QUPO better preserves upper-tail quality and substantially improves scaling on challenging held-out prompts relative to standard RL post-training. Our results suggest that visual generative models should be evaluated and optimized not only for single-sample quality, but for how post-training reshapes the full reward distribution that inference-time scaling exploits.

Mon 2 NovMachine LearningComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Sometimes, teaching a computer to create images using trial and error (reinforcement learning) makes single pictures look better. But this paper finds that when you let the computer pick the best picture out of many tries (test-time scaling), the improvements don’t always hold up and can even get worse. The authors explain this by looking at how rare, very good images change after training. They propose a new method to keep the best images good while still improving typical ones, making the overall results more reliable for harder tasks.
Open → 2611.02366v1

GraftRay enables realistic object insertion into Gaussian splatting scenes

GraftRay: Physically Based Mesh Insertion into Gaussian Splatting Scenes via Path Tracing

Abstract: Inserting virtual objects into scenes reconstructed via 2D or 3D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS/3DGS) is a key capability for content creation, AR, and synthetic data generation. However, realistic insertion requires the object to be seamlessly lit by the scene and, conversely, to cast physically plausible shadows onto it. Existing approaches either harmonize appearance in image space, sacrificing multi-view consistency, or approximate scene illumination with an environment map at the insertion point, which cannot represent near-field area lights such as windows and lamps that dominate indoor lighting. To address this, we present GraftRay, a unified method for physically consistent insertion of mesh objects into indoor scenes represented by either 2D or 3D Gaussians. We recover scene materials and surface normals with diffusion-based priors, and explicitly model spatially-extended emitters, solving their radiance in closed form. A hybrid renderer then jointly path-traces the scene Gaussians and inserted meshes, producing view-consistent shading, interreflections, and soft shadows. On FIPT, GraftRay sets a new state of the art, outperforming recent baselines such as ComGS and EAG-PT in rendering fidelity and shadow accuracy, while maintaining highly competitive rendering efficiency.

Tue 27 OctComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionGraphics
The gist
Putting new virtual objects into computer-generated scenes so they look real is hard because lighting and shadows must fit the scene perfectly. The authors created GraftRay, a method that makes inserted objects look naturally lit and cast realistic shadows by understanding the scene’s light sources and materials. It works for scenes built using Gaussian splatting and uses advanced rendering to produce consistent views from different angles. This leads to better quality and more lifelike scenes than previous approaches.
Open → 2610.37036v1

Nemotron Labs builds unified model for image and language tasks

Nemotron-Labs-Diffusion-Uni: Elastic Self-Refining Unified Diffusion LLM with Cross-Paradigm On-Policy Distillation

Abstract: We propose Nemotron-Labs-Diffusion-Uni (NLD-Uni), a unified discrete diffusion large language model (DLLM) for visual understanding and generation tasks. Compared with prior unified diffusion models, NLD-Uni introduces two major innovations. First, we propose a unified cross-paradigm on-policy distillation (OPD) framework that successfully transfers the visual understanding ability of autoregressive VLMs and visual generation ability of continuous flow models, to a unified DLLM. Second, NLD-Uni incorporates a novel progressive self-refining diffusion process that gradually corrupts each token across multiple steps during training, as opposed to adopting the conventional masked diffusion formulation that directly corrupts a clean image token to an uninformative mask token. At inference, this design allows NLD-Uni to make intermediate commit to a token, enabling progressive self-refinement for better visual quality. Through extensive experiments, we show that NLD-Uni achieves state-of-the-art performance among unified DLLMs on diverse tasks including visual question-answering, multi-modal reasoning, object grounding, text-to-image generation, and image editing.

Tue 27 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Handling both understanding and creating images usually requires different types of AI models. The authors developed Nemotron-Labs-Diffusion-Uni (NLD-Uni), which combines these tasks into one model by learning from existing models specialized in each area. They introduced a new training method that gradually refines predictions step by step, leading to better image quality and understanding. This single model can answer questions about images, reason across words and visuals, locate objects, create images from text, and edit pictures.
Open → 2610.36466v1

Coauthoring support improves control and engagement in writing

CoWriter: Guiding Methodological and Synergetic Human-LLM Co-Authoring

Abstract: While LLMs have transformed text generation, standard chat-and-canvas interfaces often reduce human authoring to quite passive supervision, causing review fatigue, over-reliance on AI, and the sidelining of the human role in long-form, source-grounded writing. Prior systems typically address isolated writing phases, leaving comprehensive end-to-end human-LLM collaboration largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce CoWriter, a proactive agentic scheme that adapts expert human (co-)authoring methodologies from cognitive science to flexibly steer the entire writing workflow while actively encouraging the user to engage. In an exploratory user study, compared to a standard LLM baseline, authors using CoWriter better expressed their perspectives and maintained a higher sense of document ownership, supported quantitatively by $2.2\times$ more successful agent engagements. Furthermore, external reader judges rated the resulting texts higher in "human touch" qualities like storytelling and integrating unique personal experiences. Overall, our results demonstrate that proactively engaging users through established human practices is beneficial for effective LLM-supported co-authoring, providing useful methodologies, techniques and insights for future research on collaborative agents.

Thu 22 OctComputation and LanguageArtificial IntelligenceHuman-Computer Interaction
The gist
Writing long, detailed texts with AI often makes people feel like they're just watching rather than truly creating, leading to tiredness and too much reliance on the AI. The authors made a tool called CoWriter that helps people stay active and involved by guiding them through proven expert writing steps. People using CoWriter felt more ownership of their text and shared their own ideas better than those using regular AI tools. Outside readers also thought texts created this way felt more personal and interesting.
Open → 2610.31277v1

MUNITE enables flexible generation between any combination of modalities

MUNITE: Unified Multimodal Latent Inference for Any-to-Any Multimodal Generation

Abstract: We introduce MUNITE, a latent-variable framework for flexible any-to-any multimodal generation that treats encoding and latent generation as the same inference problem under different amounts of observed evidence. Given any subset of modalities, MUNITE models the conditional distribution over the latent representation associated with the complete observation. Full observation recovers deterministic encoding, no observation recovers the latent marginal, and intermediate subsets define conditional latent inference, all within a single conditional flow model. A shared latent sample captures variation that must remain consistent across generated targets, while modality-specific generative decoders model the remaining uncertainty independently. To learn these conditional distributions from incomplete training examples, we extend conditional flow matching through self-distillation: predictions conditioned on richer available observations supervise the same model conditioned on smaller subsets at the same intermediate latent state. When the richer-evidence trajectory follows the exact conditional flow, this provides the same expected learning signal as full-target denoising. Across PolyMNIST-D-Q, FFHQ64, and image-text-audio, MUNITE achieves competitive or better generation quality and source-target alignment, with higher joint-generation coherence. In particular, it attains the highest coherence in all one-to-many and unconditional image-text-audio comparisons, showing the effectiveness of unified latent inference across diverse multimodal settings.

Wed 7 OctMachine Learning
The gist
Multimodal generation means creating outputs that mix different types of data like images, text, and audio. The new MUNITE method treats the process of understanding inputs and generating outputs as part of one system that works regardless of which data types are available. It uses a shared hidden space to keep consistent information across outputs, even if only some inputs are given. The authors tested MUNITE on various datasets and found it creates high-quality, coherent results across many tasks involving images, text, and sound.
Open → 2610.09866v1