Papers for
game developers
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.
Paint-Anything enables precise color control for image generation and editing
Paint-Anything: Unified Any-Color Control for Image Generation and Editing
Abstract: Professional design requires any-color control: the ability to specify an object's target color with any 24-bit hex value for image generation and editing. Prior work has explored color generation, editing, and colorization, but often relies on dedicated color representations or specialized inference procedures. Advances in large language models offer a simpler starting point: even compact models can associate hex values with color semantics. We present Paint-Anything, which learns a shared hex-prompt interface for generation and editing through object-level color supervision. We develop a data pipeline that constructs Paint-500K from real images through object grounding, perceptual color labeling, and editing-pair synthesis. Since shadows make real-image labels only approximate colors, we complement this supervision with pure-color anchors whose pixels exactly match their paired hex values. These anchors are used only at high-noise timesteps, leaving low-noise training to natural images. We further introduce Any Color Benchmark (ACBench), comprising ACBench-T2I and ACBench-Edit, to measure object-level hex color fidelity across both tasks. On FLUX.2-4B, Paint-Anything improves ACBench-T2I and ACBench-Edit scores by 85.3% and 28.3%, respectively, relative to the base model, with ablations supporting the training recipe. It also achieves the highest average CompColor score among the compared methods.
Conservation and factoring improve physical simulation model reliability
Conservation Buys Stability and Factoring Buys Counterfactuals in Physical World Models
Abstract: A learned simulator can reproduce its training conditions accurately yet fail in two distinct ways once those conditions change. Over long rollouts, small errors accumulate until the trajectory drifts away from physically plausible behavior; under an intervention on a physical parameter, the model may continue to follow the law seen during training rather than the intervened one. We show that these two failures require different structural remedies. Evolving a learned energy with a symplectic integrator preserves the geometry of the conservative dynamics and keeps rollouts bounded and physically meaningful for up to $100\times$ the training horizon, while equal-capacity predictors, an energy-regularized predictor, and a tuned neural ODE diverge. By contrast, encoding the physical coupling through an explicit linear factorization enables the model to follow a never-seen sign of that coupling, whereas an unrestricted parameterization remains locked to the training law. Crucially, the two mechanisms are separable: removing the structure responsible for long-horizon stability leaves counterfactual transfer intact, while removing the factorized coupling destroys counterfactual transfer without eliminating stability. This double dissociation, established with matched controls that remove or replace one structural component at a time, persists beyond the headline three-body system and remains visible when the physical state must be inferred from pixels rather than provided directly. The result is a concrete design principle for physical world models: long-horizon stability and changed-law generalization arise from distinct structural commitments, and each can be imposed deliberately without requiring the other.
Cognitive memory and reflection improve language agent task success
Cognitive Extensions for Dual-Process Language Agents: Memory and Self-Reflection in Interactive Environments
Abstract: Language agents remain brittle in interactive environments, where success requires long-horizon state tracking, valid action execution, and recovery from failed steps. We extend SwiftSage, a dual-process agent that combines a fast action proposer with a slower planner, using two modular cognitive extensions: an Adaptive Memory Module (AMM) for salience-gated episodic storage and trigger-driven retrieval, and a Self-Reflection Module (SRM) for bounded execution-time validation and corrective intervention. Both modules are implemented as feature-flagged extensions over the same execution substrate, enabling controlled ablations on ScienceWorld. Across four configurations---baseline, baseline+AMM, baseline+SRM, and the full system---the full system achieves the best mean final score (64.62), success rate (43.17%), and successful-step efficiency (19.33 steps), while SRM is the strongest standalone contributor. The results suggest that execution-time control is the dominant bottleneck in this setting, while episodic memory becomes most useful once the runtime loop is stabilized.
Game characters keep memory efficiently for smoother conversations
Long-Lived Characters, Local Inference: Incremental Memory Maintenance for Game NPCs
Abstract: A game character should not have to reread its entire life before every conversation. For locally deployed language-model characters, however, revising a few memories can invalidate a long reusable prefix. The resulting preparation cost competes with both foreground dialogue and the maintenance of other characters. This matters especially when dialogue feeds game-defined actions and value judgments: a fluent but incorrect account of who owns an item, or whether a transfer has already happened, can corrupt the input to otherwise deterministic rules. We study incremental memory maintenance for long-lived game NPCs in a quantized Qwen hybrid recurrent-attention model. Our runtime removes superseded attention KV entries, computes replacement records at the true sequence tail, and preserves the continuing recurrent state and unchanged KV. Existing local experiments combine multi-update dialogue replays, fixed-input placement ablations, and attention diagnostics. Independent block composition weakens query-conditioned memory selection without a uniform chunk-initial attention collapse. True-tail updates preserve important current-state and historical bindings across eight scripted maintenance rounds; a placement case recovers the full-refill quantity in three reconstructions, while slot-preserving alternatives repeat a double-subtraction error. Attention-distribution proximity alone does not explain these semantic differences. The results motivate treating a character's inference state as a maintained, history-dependent resource, rather than only a disposable encoding of its latest memory text.
Efficient sampling method finds solutions for complex constraint problems
A sampling Lovász Local Lemma
Abstract: We give an approximately uniform sampler for satisfying assignments of constraint satisfaction problems that satisfy $4\mathrm e p(Δ+1)^2\le1$, where $p$ is the largest constraint-violation probability under the uniform product distribution, and $Δ$ is the maximum degree of the dependency graph. The algorithm invokes the recent efficient approximate counting algorithm of Liu, Wang, Yin, Zhang, and Zhou as a subroutine and returns a satisfying assignment sampled within total-variation distance $\varepsilon$ of the uniform distribution in $(n+m/\varepsilon)^{O(kΔ\log D)}$ time, where $n$ and $m$ are the numbers of variables and constraints, $D$ is the common domain size, and $k$ bounds the constraint arity.
In-context learning in multi-agent games mostly follows patterns not reasoning
Recursive Reasoning or Statistical Extrapolation? In-Context Learning in Multi-Agent Interdependent Decision-Making
Abstract: In-context learning (ICL) enables large language model (LLM) agents to improve decisions using interaction history, yet it remains unclear whether such improvement reflects refined internal reasoning or mere extrapolation of statistical patterns. To disentangle these mechanisms, we study LLM agents in multi-agent incomplete-information games that require recursive belief reasoning. By constructing a public goods game and manipulating the statistical structure of historical feedback, we evaluate decision quality against a history-independent rational expectations equilibrium (REE) benchmark. Our experiments reveal that when historical statistical patterns are disrupted, the benefits of longer context largely vanish, degrading decision quality to the no-context baseline in a way sharply amplified by stronger strategic interdependence. These results suggest that, in such strategic environments, ICL behavior is more consistent with statistical extrapolation than with strategic reasoning. Our work extends the mechanistic study of ICL to strategic multi-agent settings, introduces REE as a diagnostic tool for distinguishing reasoning from extrapolation, and provides a reusable framework for probing the boundaries of LLM reasoning in recursive belief tasks.
Indoor laser scan dataset improves point cloud semantic labeling
Semantic-ITC: A Frame-wise Indoor Mobile Laser Scanning Dataset and Benchmark for Semantic Segmentation
Abstract: Semantic labels for indoor mobile laser scanning (MLS) frames remain largely absent from current point cloud semantic segmentation benchmarks, which mainly focus on reconstructed indoor scenes or outdoor LiDAR perception. This paper introduces Semantic-ITC, to the best of our knowledge the first public dataset and benchmark for frame-wise indoor MLS semantic segmentation. The dataset contains 52 indoor sequences, 79,108 MLS frames, and 1.23 billion labeled points collected in classrooms, corridors, meeting rooms, offices, and study areas. Labels are attached directly to measured LiDAR points in each frame using 16 semantic classes covering structural elements, furniture, room equipment, vegetation, and other indoor objects. Semantic-ITC preserves the sparse, non-uniform, and frame-wise sampling pattern of indoor MLS, making it distinct from scene-level reconstructed point clouds and mesh-based indoor datasets. The annotations are produced by a hybrid workflow that combines predictions from a visual foundation model applied to synchronized RGB images, structural information from BIM, and manual refinement, with the final labels assigned to the original LiDAR frames. A single-frame benchmark is provided, and the best baseline reaches 79.27\% mIoU. Remaining errors are concentrated around object boundaries and ambiguous indoor classes, indicating the challenges of indoor MLS segmentation under sparse frame geometry and long-tailed class distributions. The dataset provides a public benchmark for evaluating semantic segmentation directly on measured indoor MLS frames and supports future studies on frame-wise indoor MLS semantic segmentation.
Multiple subject video generation uses separate image references
MSR: Multiple Subject Reference for Video Generation
Abstract: Conditioning a video generator on multiple images requires preserving appearance while associating each reference with its intended role. We present MSR (Multiple Subject Reference), a slot-aware conditioning scheme for LTX-based video generation. Each reference image is independently encoded as a static clip and represented by a separate latent-token group. A compact Fourier-feature multilayer perceptron adds a numeric slot embedding, while slot-dependent temporal offsets modify the group's rotary coordinates. The reference groups are prepended to noisy target tokens and serve as clean context during target-only flow-matching training. We implement this scheme through low-rank adaptation and release the resulting weights and inference workflows. Qualitative examples demonstrate compositions containing distinct characters and referenced environments in realistic and stylized scenes. Development observations suggest reduced reference confusion relative to an earlier continuous-reference baseline, while similar clothing, complex garments, and viewpoint changes remain challenging. We describe the conditioning mechanism, the retained training configuration, and the observed strengths and limitations of the released system. A supplementary audio-reference experiment adds voice conditioning while keeping the visual parameters frozen.
Zing 0.5 enables playable worlds with keyboard and text control
Zing-0.5: Toward Playable Worlds with Real-Time Joint Action and Text Control
Abstract: We introduce Zing-0.5, a 5B autoregressive world model designed for playability: users can explore generated worlds, influence unfolding events, and respond to the resulting feedback through joint keyboard and online text control. Our approach brings together three technical contributions: (1) Unified action and text conditioning, combining magnitude-aware keyboard inputs with temporally aligned text instructions and jointly annotated videos to learn navigation and event control within the same sequence; (2) Event-scale supervision for incremental generation, using a segment-level teacher trained on connected multi-prompt videos to supervise a block-level causal student through distribution-matching distillation; and (3) Low-cost real-time interaction, combining four-step generation with context-preserving streaming to support 832 x 480 inference at 24 FPS at an estimated server rental cost of approximately USD 0.009 per stream-minute. Zing-0.5 achieves an overall score of 81.0 and a consistency score of 88.5 across 158 WBench Navigation cases. A joint-control demonstration shows a text-directed event change during continued navigation without restarting generation. We release the model weights, inference code, and Zing-SGLang serving implementation to support further work on playable generated worlds.
Model adds 3D human figures into graphic designs for better visuals
Human-aware Design Generation: Adding 3D Humans into Graphic Designs
Abstract: Graphic designs nowadays predominantly contain human images, where people are posed and framed in a delicate way to guide viewers' visual exploration and evoke desired feelings. Despite recent progress in automatic graphic design generation, there has been no work on investigating the role of the human representations in design creation. In this paper, we seek to emphasize the importance of visual human representations in graphic design generation, by studying a novel task, dubbed as design-conditioned 3D human adding. To solve this task, we propose a model that adds 3D human representations into an existing partial design, by predicting their 3D poses, their 2D composition in the image containing them, as well as the spatial arrangement of the image in the input design, to generate a complete design. Our experiments show that our model outperforms baselines by predicting the 3D human poses, 2D framing and human image layout that better harmonize with the other existing design elements, and generating higher-quality holistic designs. Our work is the first to explore connections between 3D human generation and 2D graphic design generation, which would inspire future research in leveraging 3D information to build more powerful generative models for graphic designs in the 2D domain. The code is available at https://github.com/GreyNails/Human-aware-Design-Generation-Adding-3D-Humans-into-Graphic-Designs.
Diffusion models improve diverse motor skills for humanoid control
DSD: Learning Diverse and Reusable Motor Skills via Diffusion Skill Discovery
Abstract: Humans efficiently learn new tasks by reusing a rich repertoire of motor skills across different goals and contexts. A similar strategy can also be used to enable simulated characters to efficiently perform new tasks by leveraging reusable motor skills. To support a wide range of downstream tasks, the learned repertoire should be diverse, consisting of distinct behaviors as well as spatial and temporal variation within each behavior. A commonly used method for learning diverse skills is by maximizing the mutual information between skill latents and the states produced by a policy. The marginal state entropy promotes broad behavioral coverage, while the conditional entropy encourages consistent behaviors from each latent. However, directly estimating the marginal state entropy is intractable in high-dimensional control problems. Prior methods therefore rely on indirect latent-space approximations or coarse estimators of the state distribution. These approximations may not effectively promote broad coverage of the state space, resulting in skills with limited behavioral diversity and reduced utility for downstream tasks. In this work, we propose Diffusion Skill Discovery (DSD), a skill discovery method that uses a diffusion model to approximate the entropy gradient of the policy-induced state distribution through score matching. The resulting objective encourages the discovery of skills that produce a broader range of behaviors for high-dimensional humanoid control. The learned skills are reused in two downstream control settings: hierarchical control with a task-specific high-level policy and zero-shot control through latent selection from offline trajectories. Our experiments show that DSD discovers a broader repertoire of reusable motor skills than prior skill discovery methods, leading to the emergence of complex and agile behaviors that can be reused across downstream tasks.
Privacy friendly anti cheat system protects video games without ring 0 access
You Shall Not Pass into Ring-0! A User Privacy-Friendly Anti-Cheat Architecture for Personal Computers
Abstract: Kernel-level anti-cheats are effective against malicious player behavior in competitive video games, but raise significant user privacy concerns regarding installing unverifiable components at privileged modes (i.e., ring-0 in x86). While existing research has focused on improving the effectiveness of anti-cheats, the user privacy concern has been largely ignored. Tirith is an anti-cheat architecture that addresses this problem using two key ideas. First, instead of running video games within regular processes that players (as root admins) have control over, Tirith executes video games in Protected Virtual Machines that naturally sandbox computations from untrusted admins. Second, to monitor user behavior outside the sandbox (e.g., see if they are running malicious drivers), Tirith leverages a virtualization monitor that is trusted by both players and developers. Together, these ideas remove the need to run untrusted kernel-level anti-cheats, while providing the same level of protection compared to such solutions against a wide-range of common cheating mechanisms. The main challenge we face in implementing these ideas, however, is that the existing software stack for virtual machines is not designed to run video games and creates significant security and performance problems. We address these problems by proposing a security-focused Library OS kernel for games and an efficient graphics sharing pipeline for near-native rendering and display performance. In summary, without compromising on cheating behavior detection or performance, this work makes user privacy a first-class citizen in personal computers.
Physics based video generation enables fine control of object motions
PhysStream: Streaming Physics-Grounded Video Generation with Structured Scene Memory and Fine-Grained Motion Control
Abstract: Interactive control for video generation is moving from coarse prompts toward fine-grained, physically meaningful manipulation of dynamic scenes. Yet existing controllable methods either require the full control schedule before generation starts, or use pixel-space signals that dictate object positions rather than physical dynamics. To address these limitations, we propose PhysStream, an autoregressive model for physics-grounded image-to-video synthesis that incorporates structured scene memory---positional maps and object tracking maps derived online from previously generated frames---and supports fine-grained motion control via sparse velocity-increment signals that encode physical quantities, letting the model learn the underlying dynamics. We train our model in two stages: a bidirectional model is first finetuned with motion-control conditioning, then a causal autoregressive model is trained with additional structured scene memory, further improving physical consistency. PhysStream enables interactive, mid-generation control over multi-object tabletop rigid-body scenes---a capability not supported by prior methods---reducing motion distribution distance (FVMD) by 33% and trajectory error by 12% over the strongest baselines on synthetic benchmarks, and is preferred by human evaluators in over 85% of in-the-wild comparisons. Please check our website for more details: https://czzzzh.github.io/PhysStream
Foundation models reshape ai use across game development and play
AI for Games in the Foundation Model Era
Abstract: Foundation models, alongside advances in learned game-world models, are reshaping AI across the game lifecycle. Beyond playing games, recent systems model players and game dynamics, support design and development, adapt player-facing experiences at runtime, and evaluate resulting artifacts. Yet these directions have evolved largely separately, obscuring which capabilities transfer across settings and which remain tied to particular games, engines, interfaces, or player populations. We organize the literature into six roles according to the immediate use of AI output: playing and acting; modeling players and games; designing games; building and maintaining games; generating and adapting at runtime; and testing and evaluating games. For each role, we examine what structure is supplied by the game or workflow, what AI learns or produces, which capabilities and artifacts transfer across settings and roles, and what evidence supports the claims. We identify cross-role connections: trajectories train world models, learned environments provide experience for agents, design specifications drive executable implementations, and play or testing feedback guides revision. However, control schemes, rules, engine interfaces, state representations, and player contexts often remain setting-specific, so downstream claims require validation in the target setting. Evaluation is most standardized for bounded game playing and selected learned environments, while persistent state in learned worlds, repeated software revision, validated player modeling, sustained runtime adaptation, and representative automated testing remain less established. The central challenge is to reuse or transfer outputs and capabilities across roles while re-establishing evidence for effectiveness in the game-specific contexts where they are used.
Hair strand models generated automatically from hair cards
HairCS: Reconstructing Strand-Based Hair from Hair Cards
Abstract: We present an automated pipeline that converts hair-card models into high-quality strand-based hairstyles. Given a collection of textured triangular or quad strips as input, our method produces a strand-based representation that preserves the original hairstyle while enriching it with fine-scale geometric detail and adhering to standard production requirements: strands originate from the scalp, roots are uniformly distributed, and the hair volume is plausibly filled. The resulting assets are directly compatible with strand-based rendering, physics-based simulation, and common grooming modifiers (e.g., clumping, curling, noise) for enhanced realism and artistic control. We validate our approach on a large and diverse set of hairstyles, including short and long hair, curly styles, and complex styles such as buns and ponytails.
Interpreting and shaping human behavior in language model simulations
Interpreting and Steering LLM Agents for Social Simulations
Abstract: Simulations based on large language models (LLMs) have proven to be powerful for understanding human behavior, making them valuable additions to the social scientific toolkit. However, LLMs are ultimately black boxes based on deep neural networks which limits their value for social science. This is because of a lack of (i) interpretability: i.e. the ability to assign clear mechanisms driving observed behavior; and a lack of (ii) steerability: i.e. the ability to mute or amplify specific theoretically meaningful mechanisms of action to drive specific model behavior. Here, we demonstrate how the black box could be opened up to further enrich LLM-based simulations. Specifically, we compare three types of methods: (1) prompt-based manipulation, (2) SAE-derived feature steering, and (3) probe-based direction steering and examine their utility for LLM-based social scientific simulations. We do so by interpreting and steering two foundational components of human behaviors, namely preferences (risk attitudes, altruism) and capabilities (divergent creativity, product innovation), operationalized using four classic economic and creative tasks implemented as natural-language interactions. Overall, our results show that SAE- and probe-based techniques often outperform basic prompt-based methods for steering LLM agents, although this advantage depends on the specific prompting strategy involved. Together, SAEs and probes constitute an effective pipeline for social scientists seeking to interpret and steer agents in social simulations: SAEs decompose agents' internal representations into human-readable features, after which probes can reliably shift agents' behaviors in specified directions. We discuss implications of these methods for future work using LLM agents for social scientific simulations.
LynnReal-Omni enables controllable multimodal video generation with real-time speed
LynnReal-Omni: Native multi-modal Video Generation for Agentic Visual Workflows
Abstract: Video diffusion models are stochastic and hard to control: precise content often requires repeated sampling without guaranteed success, and long-horizon scenes drift in appearance, interactions, and temporal coherence. Agentic visual creation provides explicit references, editable 3D scenes, or executable game states for stable control, but does not by itself guarantee high object or character fidelity. Combining the two can enable stable, high-quality generation. To realize this combination, we present LynnReal-Omni, a native multimodal video generation framework built on a 32B shared multimodal diffusion transformer that unifies text-to-video, image-conditioned generation, reference-guided generation, structural control, editing, degraded video restoration, and long-video generation. It accepts heterogeneous visual inputs, including appearance references, editable 3D renders, and game recordings, allowing agents to compose visual conditions within a unified model. We also train a dedicated 27B Flash shared multimodal diffusion transformer for real-time rendering. We build a systematic data pipeline for video cleaning, subject association, multimodal annotation, and aligned control construction, yielding a curated corpus of multi-shot audiovisual segments, and introduce MSAVP, a 100-prompt, 20-metric evaluation design that separates instruction following, generating plausibility, visual quality, temporal behavior, and audio coordination. LynnReal-Omni-Flash further reduces inference cost through model and decoding acceleration, including a lightweight VAE decoder; on one H100, warm generation and decoding of a 22-frame 540p video take 843 ms with LynnReal-Omni and 377 ms with Flash. These results provide a foundation for real-time streaming video generation, making LynnReal-Omni a unified, controllable, and efficient basis for agentic visual creation.
Topology-agnostic method improves facial mesh animation accuracy
TopoRig: Topology-Agnostic Facial Rigging via Multi-Source Supervision
Abstract: Automatic facial rigging across heterogeneous mesh topologies remains challenging because high-quality expression supervision is often tied to canonical templates, while deformation transfer to arbitrary meshes can introduce geometric artifacts and correspondence errors. We present TopoRig, a topology-agnostic facial rigging framework that predicts FACS-conditioned deformations directly on input mesh vertices while preserving the original topology. Starting from the ICT FaceKit expression model, we construct complementary supervision from accurate but template-biased common-topology rigs, topology-diverse but noisier transferred rigs, and targeted image-based cues for controls poorly captured by geometric transfer. TopoRig combines local surface geometry, landmark-relative semantic features, global shape context, and FACS controls to predict per-vertex displacements. We train on 3,496 generated identities using 45 non-gaze expression controls from the 53-control ICT FaceKit vocabulary. On held-out identities and unseen mesh topologies, TopoRig more faithfully reproduces the reference expression space than prior neural facial-rigging methods, while qualitative results show consistent localized deformations across diverse character geometries. Ablations demonstrate that semantic landmark features and complementary supervision improve cross-identity and cross-topology generalization. Overall, TopoRig amortizes heterogeneous and imperfect expression supervision into a single topology-preserving deformation model.
KaiNinja extends 3D image generators to create separate parts quickly
Kaininja: Extending Native 3D Generators to the Part Level
Abstract: Native 3D generators turn one image into a single mesh. TRELLIS.2 and its peers deliver high-fidelity non-watertight geometry with materials, but the output is one fused object, while downstream work such as editing, rigging and simulation operates on part-level assets. A naive idea is to run a 3D segmentation network on the fused mesh that TRELLIS.2 generates, but such pipelines are slow and bounded by the accuracy of the segmentation. We want a simple way to extend an existing native 3D generator to the part level. But we face a critical problem: the O-Voxel grid stores one sheet of surface per voxel, so a single volume cannot represent the interface where two parts touch, at any resolution. We introduce a dual-volume representation to solve this problem and put forward KaiNinja, a part-level extension of TRELLIS.2 built on a dual-volume form of its O-Voxel representation. KaiNinja keeps the generation speed and quality of TRELLIS.2 while extending it to the part level, with no mask or segmenter in the pipeline. Its training data come from sources of many kinds, including CAD models and assets authored by an LLM-driven agent; to our knowledge it is the first 3D generative model trained on agent-authored part data. Surprisingly, we also find that whole-object fidelity improves over the same backbone fine-tuned on the same dataset. Against part generation pipelines of different paradigms, it lowers whole-object Chamfer distance by 40% and raises strict part F-score by 16%.
Emotional AI fear expressions shape human creativity and engagement
Spook the Machine: Gamified Exploration of Human Imagination of Machine Fear
Abstract: What happens when AI machines express fear? Do humans engage differently depending on how they express it? And what does it take to design for affective human-AI interaction? We present Spook the Machine, a gamified platform where participants generate images to frighten AI agents endowed with personality-driven phobias. Machines respond with emotional reactions ranging from calm analysis to begging for mercy, and a gallery of successful scares becomes visible to subsequent users. In a public deployment during Halloween 2024, 832 participants created 15,719 artifacts across 89 machines in a $2\times2$ design varying the machine's emotional expressiveness (neutral vs. high-emotion) and reward structure (rewarding scariness alone vs. scariness plus novelty). Emotionally expressive machines deepened engagement at moments of failure: users deliberated longer even when the machine did not express fear, and learned faster from the gallery, yet their creative output remained unchanged across all measures. Rewarding novelty sustained collective creative diversity over time; without it, users increasingly repeated what had previously worked. Each machine developed its own trajectory through accumulated social learning, with the gallery shaping what participants created next. These findings show that emotional expression and reward design are complementary levers for steering collective human-AI interaction: emotional expression shapes how deeply users engage, while reward structure shapes how they explore.
Physically realistic dynamic 3D scenes generated from text prompts
ESG: Generating Physically Consistent Dynamic 3D Scenes from Text Descriptions
Abstract: Recent progress in image and 3D scene generation has enabled increasingly realistic static environments, yet most methods remain confined to such static configurations. Generating dynamic scenes from natural language is fundamentally challenging: it requires joint reasoning over scene structure, temporal evolution, and physical feasibility, while ensuring reliable execution in modern physics engines. We present a unified framework for generating physically consistent dynamic 3D scenes from text, with outputs directly executable in Unreal Engine. Central to our approach is the \emph{Evolutive Scene Graph} (ESG), which specifies entities with physical attributes, spatial relations, and event-driven timelines in a machine-checkable form. Given a prompt, a large language model constructs and validates a complete ESG; spatial layouts are grounded via energy-minimized gradient optimization; timeline-constrained physical parameters are then optimized through differentiable simulation to satisfy user-specified events; and the resulting scene is compiled into an engine-executable class. Experiments on 10 scenes across three complexity levels show that our method achieves $16.4/18$ mean event completion, outperforming Scene Language, the strongest engine-executable baseline (SimWorld), and our ablation without physical optimization by a clear margin in event completion and parameter accuracy.
Benchmark reveals key factors for effective 3D scene editing
What Makes a 3D Scene Editable? A Factorized Benchmark of Fidelity, Locality, Consistency, and Preservation
Abstract: Neural 3D scene editing is often evaluated by semantic alignment alone, although a convincing result may alter unrelated content or become inconsistent across views. We introduce EditBench3D, a representation-agnostic benchmark that treats editing as controlled information replacement. It evaluates four complementary properties: instruction fidelity, spatial locality, cross-view consistency, and preservation of non-target content. The protocol combines visibility-aware 3D target supports, paired descriptions, held-out cameras, and five edit families covering appearance, material, geometry, and object-level changes. We evaluate eight representative NeRF, 3D Gaussian Splatting, hybrid, and proxy-based editors on 240 scene-edit pairs. The study shows that semantic fidelity is only weakly associated with the other editing properties, and that no single method is optimal across all dimensions. Explicit Gaussian editors offer a strong overall balance, whereas direct proxy manipulation provides the most conservative edits at the cost of open-ended fidelity. These findings support reporting editability as a multi-objective profile rather than a single semantic score.
Unified motion and language model improves AI action understanding and generation
Open-UniMo: Towards Unified Motion-Language Understanding and Generation in the Open World
Abstract: Unified motion generation and understanding is crucial for embodied AI systems that can both synthesize and interpret human actions in open-world environments. Existing motion-language models often treat motion as an auxiliary modality of a language model, leading to text-dominated representations and limited cross-modal interaction. Moreover, the next-token prediction paradigm is not naturally suited to long motion sequences, where autoregressive generation may accumulate prediction errors. To address these challenges, we propose Open-UniMo, a unified Large Motion-Language Model (LMLM) trained on million-scale open-world motion-language data. Open-UniMo promotes modality parity by extending Qwen's vocabulary of about 150K text tokens with 64K motion tokens, enabling motion and language to share a unified token space. We further introduce motion-consistent Chain-of-Thought reasoning as an intermediate representation to bridge language semantics and motion dynamics. Open-UniMo is trained with a two-stage pipeline, where supervised fine-tuning establishes CoT-guided bidirectional motion-language mapping and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) improves semantic alignment while mitigating cumulative errors in autoregressive motion-token generation. To support comprehensive evaluation, we propose Open-MoBench, a VLM-guided benchmark for assessing text-to-motion (T2M) generation, motion-to-text (M2T) understanding, and bidirectional consistency. Extensive experiments show that Open-UniMo achieves state-of-the-art performance on both conventional metrics and Open-MoBench. Furthermore, ablation studies reveal that M2T understanding is not primarily limited by motion-token vocabulary size; instead, coupling M2T with the learnable T2M generation path yields stronger cross-modal representations, demonstrating that generation can facilitate understanding in AR-based motion-language modeling.
Emotion-modulated gait generation enables expressive humanoid walking
EMoG: Emotion-Modulated Gait Generation for Expressive Humanoid Locomotion
Abstract: Existing humanoid locomotion systems primarily focus on stability and task execution, while integrating expressiveness with explicit locomotion control remains challenging. We propose EMoG, an emotion-modulated gait generation framework for expressive humanoid locomotion. EMoG introduces an emotional-style code with continuously adjustable intensity. Conditioned on this code and physical commands, a lightweight MLP generates expressive, command-consistent periodic gait trajectories in real time, which are tracked by a unified reinforcement learning policy for physical execution. To support training, we collect a large-scale emotion-annotated gait dataset from professional performers and develop an automated pipeline to extract physically consistent periodic gait cycles. EMoG also integrates an LLM-based parser that converts free-form language into emotional style and motion parameters for interactive control. Experiments demonstrate continuous gait-style modulation with perceptible expressive cues while maintaining command tracking. EMoG provides a practical approach to parameterized emotional-style walking for human-robot interaction.
Motion style transfers adapt to different body shapes without losing detail
MorphoStyle: Motion Style Transfer with Morphology Control
Abstract: Human motion may be viewed as a combination of action content, style, and body morphology. Existing motion style transfer methods transfer a reference style onto a content motion while assuming a canonical body, whereas shape-aware motion generators adapt motion to a target shape without explicit style control. This separation of motion style and shape (morphology) makes it difficult to generate stylized motions for non-canonical bodies; naively combining a style transfer module with a shape-aware generator often leaks action content from the style reference and disrupts shape-consistent kinematics. We present MorphoStyle, a framework for shape-aware motion style transfer that is built on a shape-conditioned Finite-Scalar-Quantization Variational Auto-Encoder (FSQ-VAE). The key contribution is to pose the desired style transfer as modular latent disentanglement comprising: (i) a contrastive style encoder that extracts content-decoupled style embeddings; (ii) a text-guided style-routing mechanism that locates style-relevant joints in a text-motion feature space; and (iii) a manifold preserving style modulator that injects discriminative style embeddings in content features as a temporally-gated low-rank offset. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that MorphoStyle outperforms competing baselines in terms of both shape control and motion style transfer, while simultaneously providing quantitative shape control. For more details, please see project website: https://github.com/funkdub/MorphoStyle.
DiVA enables smooth long-term interactive digital character videos
DiVA: Enabling Interactive Digital Life Simulation via Video Models
Abstract: We present DiVA, a deeply interactive digital life simulator pioneering a new paradigm for long-term, open-ended interactive experiences within digital character worlds. DiVA's architecture pairs a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) as a router with a meticulously designed stacked video pipeline for seamless, multi-turn interactions with action and audio response. To maintain continuity and avoid degradation, we model generation as a three-part coupled system: waiting video, action video, and the transitions between them. These transitions are critically handled by our Anchored Video Continuation (AVC) module, which returns the character to stable states to prevent degradation. By encoding information from the preceding action video segment, AVC ensures smooth transitions, significantly reducing camera jitter and inconsistencies common in current video transition methods. This design also enables complex pose changes (e.g., sitting to standing) typically difficult for audio-driven models. These system designs together ensure high-fidelity identity, coherence, and dynamics for extended experiences. To validate our pipeline design, we comprehensively compare our system against alternatives by replacing our core generation module with mainstream long-video, continuation, and interpolation methods. We further analyze the necessity of the three-stage design, anchor-state selection, transition naturalness, spatial grounding, and the quality-latency trade-off, and we expand the comparison to additional long-form audio-driven avatar models. Results confirm DiVA is markedly superior in maintaining long-term visual quality and realism, validating its effectiveness as a sustainable, interactive simulation.
Neural operator speeds up incompressible fluid transport by 10000 times
A Variational Optimal Transport Operator on Incompressible Flow
Abstract: We present the Variational Incompressible Optimal Transport (VIOT) operator, a generative neural operator for amortized incompressible density transport. Given a new source-target density pair, VIOT predicts a divergence-free velocity field and generates the full transport trajectory by feed-forward inference, replacing the hour-scale per-pair optimization used by adjoint fluid solvers and differentiable simulation baselines. The system consists of three components: a stream-function or vector-potential representation that enforces incompressibility by construction, a regularized incompressible transport objective that balances endpoint accuracy and flow smoothness, and a Fourier Neural Operator backbone that amortizes the solve across new pairs and grid resolutions. Together, these components make incompressible transport a reusable neural operator that facilitates various transport processes. Further, the generative capability extends beyond the training distribution, with VIOT producing incompressible transports for user-drawn source-target pairs in a real-time interactive system. We demonstrate VIOT on 2D and 3D density-transport benchmarks. Both 2D and 3D rollouts complete in seconds per pair, while per-instance baselines in our 2D comparisons optimize each new pair from scratch and require on the order of an hour, a roughly $10^4\times$ online speedup.
AI gameplay support agent struggles to engage puzzle game players
Oops, Not Now: PEARL, a RAG-Based Support Agent for Gameplay and What Players Want from AI Help
Abstract: AI-powered gameplay support agents hold promise for game-based learning, yet grounding generative models in structured game data remains an open challenge. We present PEARL (Parallel Education Agent for Reflection and Learning), a dual-component Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system that combines semantic knowledge retrieval with structural board-state matching to deliver contextualized scaffolding in Parallel, a puzzle game for learning parallel programming. PEARL operates on two input streams (natural language queries and board topology), retrieving both conceptual explanations of gameplay moves and peer-generated board states as evidence: capabilities unavailable to a standard Large Language Model (LLM) with game state access alone. In a qualitative evaluation (N=10) comparing PEARL against an existing community-based Open Player Model (OPM) visualization system, participants preferred the visualization system on perceived usefulness and reported higher frustration with PEARL; five of ten minimized or abandoned the AI tool during play. Proactive delivery, generic responses, and trust deficits drove disengagement, while a subset of four participants found PEARL's grounded explanations complementary to visualization in specific contexts where they initiated the interaction. We position PEARL as a deployed design probe whose failure modes inform a concrete design agenda for AI gameplay support, captured as seven open problems for the community.
Reinforcement learning improves by using local state symmetries
Groupoid-Based Internal State Representations for Reinforcement Learning with Local Symmetries
Abstract: Symmetries play a central role in reducing the complexity of reinforcement learning problems, yet most existing approaches rely on fixed group actions or predefined state abstractions. Classical reinforcement learning algorithms typically assume a globally structured Markov decision process with uniformly applicable actions and transitions, an assumption that limits their ability to exploit modularity and local, context-dependent regularities present in many realistic environments. We propose a reinforcement learning framework using groupoids to capture local, state-dependent symmetries and support the dy- namic discovery of equivalence structures during interaction. The agent maintains orbit representatives together with transporters that map raw states to canonical forms, enabling learning and decision-making to be performed in a symmetry-reduced space while preserving local distinctions. Empirical results demonstrate that the proposed groupoid-based approach improves sample efficiency and convergence in dense and large-scale environments exhibiting strong partial symmetries, yielding substantial performance gains over standard Q-learning. These findings show that dynamically exploiting local symmetry provides a practical and mathematically principled route to scalable and generalisable reinforcement learning.
MGAvatar improves realistic head avatars with hybrid geometry representation
MGAvatar: Mesh-Bound Gaussians for Head Avatar Geometry and Appearance Modeling
Abstract: Accurate head modeling requires a stable yet expressive geometric representation. Existing Gaussian-based head avatars commonly rely on parametric templates (e.g., FLAME) for Gaussian initialization and deformation, but these templates lack personalized priors and struggle to represent structures such as hair and clothing. To address this issue, we propose MGAvatar, a Gaussian-mesh hybrid representation that jointly models geometry and appearance through two Gaussian-mesh binding modes. Specifically, we introduce vertex-bound Gaussians and constrain their learnable parameters, enabling progressive mesh deformation to represent complex head geometry, while a pose-dependent offset module accounts for non-rigid deformations. Once geometry is stabilized, MGAvatar switches to face-bound Gaussians for appearance modeling. To improve appearance consistency across novel poses and viewpoints, we introduce a view-conditioned neural color field that alleviates artifacts caused by independently optimized Gaussian colors. In addition, we design a Gaussian offset network to predict Gaussian offset maps in the observation space, providing greater flexibility for face-bound Gaussians to capture dynamic facial textures. Extensive experiments on multi-view and monocular videos show that MGAvatar outperforms existing methods in rendering quality, producing high-fidelity head avatars with rich texture details.
Reinforcement learning reward systems evolve alongside policies for better results
EvoRS: On-Policy Self-Evolution of Reward Systems for Open-Ended Reinforcement Learning
Abstract: Open-ended reinforcement learning often relies on rubric-based rewards for tasks without directly verifiable answers. Yet the policy and reward system form a dynamic feedback loop: as the policy optimizes the current reward, an initially useful reward system may become unreliable due to reward hacking or reduced response discriminability. The reward system should therefore evolve rather than remain fixed during training. Existing dynamic-rubric methods adapt evaluation criteria, but reward failures can also arise from scoring mechanisms or signal composition. We introduce EvoRS, a self-evolving RL framework that evolves the reward system from on-policy experience, representing it as an executable Reward-DAG. Specifically, an agentic designer updates this system from on-policy rollouts and reward traces to maintain train-time reliability. Across writing and roleplay, EvoRS achieves the best quality under all three judges, outperforming the policy by \(2.107\) and \(4.767\) points, respectively, while reducing reward hacking and coverage failures and preserving reward informativeness. Ablations confirm that a comprehensive fixed reward system cannot remain reliable in open-ended tasks and must evolve throughout training.
Unified system generates 3D motion for humans and animals
UniMo: Unifying Human and Animal Motion Generation
Abstract: The conditional generation of 3D motion has emerged as a key research topic due to its wide applicability across robotics, AR/VR, gaming, and content creation. However, extending recent advances in text-driven human motion generation to the animal domain remains challenging due to two core limitations. First, animals exhibit highly diverse skeletal topologies, unlike the standard human structure, making unified modeling across species difficult and leading to inefficient per-species models. Second, existing animal motion datasets suffer from limited scale and annotation quality, constraining model performance. To address these challenges, we propose UniMo, a unified point cloud-based motion generation framework that bypasses topological discrepancies by converting parametric skeletons into unparametric representations, further enhanced by dynamic sampling that allocates more points to active joints. Additionally, we present UniML3D, a large-scale motion-language dataset spanning both human and animal categories, containing 145,907 motion sequences and 433,388 captions-over 102x larger than existing animal datasets. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results on UniML3D and three public benchmarks including HumanML3D, KIT-ML, and AnimalML3D, demonstrating the feasibility and effectiveness of unified human-animal motion generation. Website: https://steve-zeyu-zhang.github.io/UniMo.
Agent simulation predicts human workload before task engagement
Synthetic TLX: Forecasting Human Workload Using Agent Simulation
Abstract: Assessing human workload for technology-mediated tasks helps prevent task failure caused by poor technology design. Traditionally, workload is assessed retrospectively using the NASA Task Load Index (TLX) after humans complete a task. What if we could forecast workload before a human attempts a task using agent simulation? We introduce Synthetic TLX, a new paradigm for proactive workload estimation that predicts NASA TLX scores for a given task, unlocking novel interaction opportunities and evaluation methods. To understand its viability, we conducted three experiments comparing human and agent-generated scores to evaluate where they align and diverge. We found agent estimates align with human scores particularly when prompted with a human persona and active task simulation. However, agents and humans diverge in the sources of workload they are sensitive to. Based on our findings, we present three applications to showcase Synthetic TLX's potential and discuss the future of workload-aware human-AI interaction.
High-fidelity 3D human scans enable better avatar images
Revisiting Avatar-As-Image: High-Fidelity Registration is All You Need
Abstract: The representation of 3D clothed humans as standardized 2D UV texture and displacement maps over an underlying body model has long been studied. This compact representation is enticing as it enables pretrained image networks to process, generate, and edit 3D avatars, but is only useful if scans are accurately aligned and brought into correspondence via high-fidelity registration. This prerequisite has never been met, which we argue explains the limited quality of prior UV-based methods for clothed humans. Despite its significance, no public method produces high-fidelity SMPL(-X)+D registrations with UV texture from arbitrary clothed scans. We present AvaImg, a multi-stage optimization pipeline, to close this gap: it enforces body-inside-clothing constraint via signed winding numbers, made viable by a three-level efficiency cascade (~10x runtime reduced, ~95% storage saved), and recovers fine surface detail using coarse-to-fine displacement optimization. AvaImg outperforms all baselines in body fitting, shape estimation, and surface registration across six datasets, yielding textured registrations near-indistinguishable from scans (PSNR=34.48dB). For validation of AvaImg's Avatar-as-Image representation as imminently compatible with image foundation models, we auto-encode our UV maps via the frozen FLUX VAE. This achieves only 0.76mm added Chamfer error relative to scan and shows that the resulting maps lie within natural-image distributions, supporting the use of 2D generative priors for 3D avatar generation. Code, data, and Singularity containers will be at https://yuxuan-xue.com/avaimg.
Avatar motion generated naturally from speech text and path inputs
Multi-Modal Controlled Coherent Motion Generation
Abstract: It is natural for humans to walk and talk simultaneously. This paper tackles the challenge of replicating such natural behaviors in 3D avatar motion generation driven by concurrent multimodal inputs, such as a text description of a man walking alongside speech audio. Existing methods, constrained by the scarcity of aligned multimodal data, typically combine motions from individual modalities sequentially or through weighted sums. However, they often result in mismatched or unrealistic movements. To overcome these limitations, we propose MOCO, a novel diffusion-based framework capable of processing multiple simultaneous inputs, including speech audio, text descriptions, and trajectory data, to generate coherent and lifelike motions without requiring aligned multimodal data. Our key innovation lies in decoupling the motion generation process. During each denoising step, the diffusion model independently generates motions for each modality from the input noise and assembles the body parts according to predefined spatial rules. The resulting combined motion is then diffused and serves as the input noise for the subsequent denoising step. This iterative approach enables each modality to refine its contribution within the context of the overall motion, progressively harmonizing movements across modalities. Consequently, the generated motions become increasingly natural and fluid with each iteration, achieving coherent and synchronized behaviors. We evaluate our approach using a purpose-built multimodal benchmark. Experimental results demonstrate that MOCO outperforms existing baselines, advancing the field of multimodal motion generation for 3D avatars.
Fast real-time light rendering using gaussian mixtures
Gaussian Light Transport
Abstract: We present a novel method for computing global illumination by expressing the solution to the light transport equation as a 13D Gaussian mixture model over positions, directions, surface normals, and material properties. We show that including scene properties in the Gaussian representation drastically reduces the number of functions and speeds up evaluation. As opposed to traditional light transport methods based on Neumann series, the parameters of our model are directly estimated by minimizing the residual of the rendering equation. While both optimization and rendering require repeated evaluations of a linear combination of high-dimensional Gaussian functions, we introduce an efficient culling strategy to keep the optimization tractable and produce renderings in real time. Our representation enables to render fast, view-independent solutions to the light transport equation, achieving rendering times on the order of milliseconds, with a fraction of the memory requirements of conventional neural rendering approaches.
Uncertainty dmd improves diversity in autoregressive video generation
Uncertainty DMD: Restoring Diversity in Few-Step Autoregressive Video Distillation
Abstract: Few-step distillation improves the efficiency of autoregressive (AR) video generation, but often causes diversity collapse: under the same prompt, different noise samples tend to produce highly similar videos with weakened motion dynamics. We analyze this degradation in Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD)-distilled AR video generators and find that, in the autoregressive setting, it takes the form of a structured uncertainty collapse: the mode-seeking bias of DMD maps different noise samples to nearly identical first chunks, and the deterministic AR cache then propagates this collapsed state to all subsequent chunks, turning a local loss of stochasticity at the rollout root into a global suppression of temporal variation. Based on this analysis, we propose Uncertainty DMD, a simple uncertainty-injection framework that restores stochasticity at two key stages of AR generation: a timestep perturbation for the first chunk to increase first-chunk diversity, and a stochastic cache-writing mechanism for later chunks to preserve uncertainty in autoregressive conditioning. The method requires no architectural changes and introduces only lightweight perturbation operations. The same perturbation mechanisms are used during both training and inference. Experiments show that Uncertainty DMD consistently improves diversity and motion dynamics while maintaining comparable per-sample visual quality.
KuaiRP role-playing models balance knowledge and general ability efficiently
KuaiRP Series Role-playing Models Technical Report
Abstract: This paper introduces the complete technical solution for the KuaiRP series of role-playing models. We aim to achieve four core objectives for a dedicated role-playing model: simplified prompt engineering, highly stable output quality, built-in domain world knowledge, and high-efficiency deployment with a small parameter size. However, effectively injecting deep domain knowledge often leads to a severe catastrophic forgetting of the model's general agent capabilities. To overcome this trade-off, we propose a multi-stage training pipeline. First, we design a standardized character template and construct an SFT data pipeline based on user behavior simulation and reverse profile filtering. Next, we utilize a rule-based composite reward function during the Reinforcement Learning (RL) phase to eliminate common degradation phenomena like length expansion and repetitive generation. Finally, to recover the general capabilities compromised during SFT and RL, we propose a novel self-distillation paradigm using Two-stage On-Policy Distillation (OPD) equipped with Cumulative-Divergence Decay (CDD). By using the domain-adapted model as the teacher and the original base model as the student, we effectively balance deep domain knowledge injection with the preservation of general agent capabilities. Experimental results demonstrate that the KuaiRP models not only match the current state-of-the-art proprietary models in role-playing fidelity within our target domains, but also successfully recover general agent capabilities, maintaining extremely low deployment costs.
Muscle-driven simulation creates realistic sprinting without real examples
Learning Realistic Athletic Sprinting Without Demonstrations
Abstract: We present a muscle-driven simulation system for generating biomechanically accurate motion for high-speed athletic locomotion tasks that does not require motion demonstrations. Our approach integrates state-of-the-art biomechanical athlete models into a new, high-performance GPU simulator capable of running at 1000x real-time. High-throughput simulation enables large-batch reinforcement learning to train control policies that operate directly in the model's high-dimensional muscle excitation space, and are guided only by task-specific episode termination conditions and a reward that encourages maximizing speed while reducing forces needed to respect joint limits. These policies train within a few hours on a single GPU and generate "near visually realistic" motions for complete athletic activities such as a full 100-meter sprint or performing popular athletic locomotion drills like side-shuffling, backpedaling, and carioca. The generated sprinting motions also exhibit strong agreement with experimental data captured from sprinters.
BenchShield improves detection of reward cheating in AI agent tests
BenchShield: Formal Model-Backed Instrumentation for Reward Integrity in LLM-Agent Evaluation Infrastructure
Abstract: LM-agent benchmarks increasingly function as interactive evaluation infrastructure. Agents observe state, call tools, modify workspaces, submit artifacts, and receive rewards from outcome procedures. This interactivity makes evaluations vulnerable to reward hacking: an agent improves its measured score by exploiting the reward-relevant trajectory instead of solving the intended task. Existing defenses rely largely on task-specific patches, prompt instructions, or post-hoc detectors. They do not provide reusable evidence that a concrete run remained within its intended evaluation boundary. This paper presents BenchShield, a model-backed instrumentation layer for reward integrity in LLM-agent evaluation. BenchShield grounds detection in a finite lifecycle model of an evaluation's reward-relevant events. Within the benchmark infrastructure, two complementary analyses operate over this model. A static, phase-aware taint analysis exposes reward-hacking paths before a run. Its runtime counterpart uses infrastructure-side evidence to attribute concrete agent use and emit evidence-backed claims. We construct BenchShield Trajectories, a human-labeled corpus of 456 adjudicated trajectories from more than 31,000 public agent runs across three benchmarks. Compared with an agentic hackability scanner baseline on the same tasks and model, BenchShield improves full-chain recall from 23-94% to 77-100%, same-vector coverage from 16-56% to 43-78%, and reduces per-task cost by up to 65%. Its runtime analysis achieves 96% accuracy in detecting reward hacking from infrastructure-side evidence.
Contact guided retargeting preserves human object interactions on diverse characters
ReCHOIR: Contact-guided Human Object Interaction Retargeting to Diverse Characters
Abstract: We present ReCHOIR, a novel contact-guided motion retargeting method for transferring human object interaction (HOI) motions across diverse humanoid characters. Unlike prior motion retargeting methods that primarily focus on transferring human motion alone, our goal is to preserve not only the semantics of the original body movement but also consistent interaction between the character and the manipulated object, while jointly producing aligned target human and object motions. Given source HOI motion, object geometry, and contact cues extracted from the source interaction, ReCHOIR retargets an HOI sequence to target characters with different skeletal configurations while maintaining both motion semantics and contact-consistent interaction patterns. Our method builds on a Part-Aware Motion Embedding (PAME) autoencoder, which encodes full-body motion into a shared body-part-wise latent space. This representation enables generalization across heterogeneous skeletons while preserving local motion semantics beneficial for part-aware adaptation in HOI retargeting. On top of this representation, we introduce a contact-guided retargeting module and an object motion decoder for HOI retargeting. The contact-guided retargeting module treats the source object interaction as a condition for refining target character motion: object- and contact-related signals are encoded into a body-part-aligned latent representation and injected into decoding through a residual control branch, enabling stronger adaptation in interaction-relevant body regions without discarding the underlying motion prior. In parallel, the object motion decoder predicts a target object motion aligned with the refined target character motion, ensuring that the object trajectory remains consistent with how the interaction is realized by the target character.
Programmable model keeps track of game worlds for longer play
Programmable World Model
Abstract: Recent video world models generate increasingly realistic and interactive visual experiences, yet lack reliable mechanisms for maintaining persistent world state and enforcing programmable rules over extended interactions. We introduce Programmable World Model, a framework that decouples world-state evolution from visual observation generation. An agent translates natural-language instructions into executable programs that specify entity states and state-transition rules, enabling direct control over individual entities and their interactions. A lightweight engine executes these programs to update and maintain an explicit, persistent global world state, including off-screen entities and non-visual attributes. To connect world state with visual generation, we introduce state-augmented 3D oriented bounding boxes (OBBs) as an intermediate representation. This representation, together with the target camera trajectory, is deterministically compiled into pixel-aligned spatiotemporal conditioning signals for a pretrained video model serving as the generative renderer. This design allows users to create playable games with predefined mechanics, direct control over individual entities, and persistent world state throughout gameplay. We further introduce CombatStateBench, a benchmark for evaluating programmable world models. On CombatStateBench, our method achieves 94% Count Accuracy and 98% State Accuracy, substantially outperforming existing interactive video world models while supporting coherent long-horizon generation. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of separating explicit state evolution from generative rendering for building persistent, programmable worlds.
Semigroup-jepa improves physics prediction and control in varied gravity
Semigroup-JEPA: Latent Dynamics Consistency for Zero-Shot Physics Generalization
Abstract: Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) world models learn a compact latent representation of the world that supports prediction and planning, but their capability to learn physics and generate physically realistic dynamics remains hitherto untested. In this work, we introduce SemiGroup-JEPA (SG-JEPA), which extends the LeWorldModel framework by supplying the parameter governing the physics to the temporal model via action-conditioning and jointly training an encoder and predictor through an autoregressive latent rollout. To evaluate the model's ability to generalize out of distribution, we design dynamical tasks under different gravitational fields that, despite obeying the same physical law, exhibit qualitatively different dynamics, ranging from floating motion in weak gravitational fields to rapid bouncing in strong ones. In contrast to DINO-WM, SG-JEPA reduces open-loop prediction error by up to 2 times on two-dimensional datasets, and increases control success rate up to 2.5 times for three-dimensional robotic datasets, for which we train independent diffusion policies. To explain this advantage, we develop a linear feature model that separates local law-conditioned error from its recursive amplification under rollout. Guided by this model, we find that back-propagating the multi-step rollout loss into the representation trains the encoder to keep the features that the predictor can carry forward, and that those are the features the dynamics depend on, so most of the gain comes from the encoder learning better features rather than from the predictor learning better dynamics. See project page at https://sg-jepa.github.io.
MotionCanvas generates full-body motion from diverse kinematic inputs
MotionCanvas: Learning Implicit Motion Planning from Composable Kinematic Cues
Abstract: Professional character animation requires both natural motion and precise, versatile control. For example, it is common for the creators to define the timing of a specified action, to control the motion range of the character's arm swing, and the route the character walks through, like specifying various kinematic motion cues on a ``motion canvas''. This motivates us to propose MotionCanvas, a model that supports \emph{cue-conditioned implicit motion planning} to faithfully and coherently connect all cues, dense or sparse, full or partial, into one full-body motion sequence. Specifically, MotionCanvas represents heterogeneous kinematic cues on a shared motion canvas, where position and rotation values are specified across body joints and time. A shared flow-matching model generates motion conditioned on this canvas, with optional language and input motion; cue imputation keeps the specified canvas values fixed in both training and sampling. To learn coherent completion across different cue sets, we train with a compositional cue sampler that varies when cues are applied, which positions or rotations are specified, and how they are combined. Together, these designs enable a single generator to synthesize globally coherent actions that jointly satisfy compatible heterogeneous cues. We test this planning ability with temporal, root, and body-part cues---alone and in combination---and language-guided editing. We naturally extend this evaluation to sequential generation and motion repair, since both require the same ability to organize coherent motion from kinematic cues. Across these evaluations, MotionCanvas establishes state-of-the-art results in controlled-motion quality, mixed-cue adherence, sequential generation, instruction editing, and motion repair while preserving its text-to-motion capability.
SceneHI generates consistent high-resolution 3D textures with shadows
SceneHI: High-Resolution 3D-Consistent Scene Texturing with Controllable Illumination
Abstract: SceneHI is a framework that lifts high-resolution, illumination-aware priors from 2D diffusion models to perform 3D texture synthesis. It is the first to demonstrate that high-resolution textures, previously limited to 2D synthesis, can be generated directly on 3D objects without model fine-tuning or optimization. Designed for complex, multi-object environments, SceneHI uniquely combines 3D-consistency, high-resolution fidelity, and physically plausible baked shadows within a single generative pipeline. To enforce strict geometric coherence, we introduce an exact analytical pixel-to-texel mapping that aligns diffusion trajectories across multiple viewpoints. We utilize High-Resolution Latent Textures (HRLTs) as a persistent canvas for gradually denoised textures, while camera views perform the denoising steps in latent pixel space. This ensures a shared base texture that can be subsequently refined to high resolution without compromising multi-view consistency. Finally, a light-aware generative pass embeds realistic geometry-consistent shadows directly into the atlases, bridging the gap to production workflows. SceneHI achieves high visual fidelity while reducing generation time by 80% compared to existing scene-level methods.
Stable mask pruning reduces 3D Gaussian data for better view synthesis
LinearMask-GS: Stable-Mask Importance Pruning for Compact 3D Gaussian Splatting
Abstract: 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables real-time novel view synthesis but produces millions of primitives through adaptive densification, leading to significant storage overhead. Learned-mask pruning methods such as LP-3DGS address this by assigning each Gaussian a learnable mask to identify and prune redundant primitives. However, we identify a limitation of this paradigm: the steep slope of the Gumbel-Sigmoid activation drives mask values to the extremes within the short mask-training window, before the importance ranking has stabilized, producing a sharply bimodal distribution from which that ranking can no longer be reliably recovered. We propose LinearMask-GS, which replaces Gumbel-Sigmoid with a linear increment activation that keeps mask values in a mid-confidence regime throughout mask training, producing a stable, unimodal mask distribution whose ranking tracks importance. On Mip-NeRF 360, our method achieves 3.6x and 1.6x Gaussian reductions over 3DGS and LP-3DGS, respectively, while maintaining or improving rendering quality. For outdoor scenes, it yields a 1.6x reduction (from 2.18M to 1.36M) with notable gains in PSNR (+0.38 dB), SSIM (+0.025), and LPIPS (-0.029).
StreetDiff improves urban street scene generation with consistent views
StreetDiff: Multi-view Street Scenes Generation via Cross-view Consistent Multi-view Stable Diffusion with Structure Prompts
Abstract: Multi-view diffusion models have shown strong performance in scenes with strong geometric priors and sparse semantics, such as indoor rooms or simple outdoor environments (e.g., fields, courtyards). However, they often fail to maintain cross-view consistency under camera rotation, especially in structurally complex urban environments. Without explicit modeling of spherical correspondence across views, existing approaches tend to produce object duplication, structural distortion, and layout inconsistency. To address this limitation, we propose StreetDiff, a multi-view diffusion framework that explicitly enforces cross-view alignment during denoising. StreetDiff introduces a Panorama--Perspective Synergy design to decouple global layout reasoning from local detail synthesis, and incorporates a Panorama Alignment Module (PAM) that establishes spherical-projection-based attention constraints across views. By injecting structured alignment constraints without modifying the diffusion backbone, our framework achieves robust cross-view coherence in challenging urban street scene generation tasks. In addition, we construct Street360, a large-scale HDR multi-view urban panorama dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that StreetDiff significantly improves structural consistency and visual fidelity compared to prior multi-view diffusion generation methods.
InstantMimic speeds up physics learning for realistic character control
InstantMimic: A High Performance System for Learning Physics-based Skills in Seconds
Abstract: Physics-based character control is a long-standing challenge in computer graphics and robotics, requiring policies that satisfy complex dynamics while producing realistic motion. Recent Deep RL approaches, particularly imitation learning methods such as DeepMimic, have had broad impact beyond animation, influencing robotics by enabling agile and expressive behaviors. While these approaches achieve impressive results, they remain computationally inefficient to train in practice. Despite GPU-accelerated simulation, we find that end-to-end pipelines often underutilize hardware due to overheads outside the physics solver, caused by fragmented GPU kernels and CPU memory access in the critical path. We present InstantMimic, a system that addresses these inefficiencies by making the entire training loop GPU-native. Built on a GPU-native physics backend, our unified pipeline integrates simulation, environment computation, policy inference, and policy updates within a single execution flow. As a result, InstantMimic reduces training time for diverse physics-based skills to a few seconds and makes LLM-agent-driven hyperparameter search practical.
Animatable 3D animals created from a single image with fur detail
AnimalLift: Reconstructing Animatable 3D Animals from a Single Image by Learning Canonical Shape, Texture, and Fur Maps
Abstract: Reconstructing a fully animatable 3D animal from a single image remains challenging because animation-ready assets require not only plausible geometry, but also a unified topology, editable appearance, and fur representations compatible with deformation and simulation. Existing image-to-3D approaches often rely on implicit or loosely structured representations that are difficult to rig or edit, while parametric animal models support animation but cannot capture detailed texture and fur appearance. We present AnimalLift, a framework for reconstructing structured, animation-compatible 3D animal assets with explicit fur from a single image. Our method lifts an input image into a shared canonical space with a consistent topology and UV parameterization across the dataset, enabling joint prediction of canonical geometry, texture, and fur in a unified feed-forward architecture. A key component of our representation is a UV-aligned fur map that encodes strand geometry in a surface-aligned canonical domain, allowing explicit fur reconstruction compatible with mesh deformation and fur simulation. To train the model, we introduce a procedural data generation pipeline that provides large-scale supervision with aligned geometry, texture, and fur across diverse animal species and appearances. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate strong reconstruction quality and generalization across animal categories. Beyond reconstruction, our structured representation directly supports downstream applications including animation, pose transfer, fur editing, and simulation-compatible rendering.
Valerant builds 3D game maps automatically from single images
Valerant: An Automatic Navigable Game Map Generator via Action-Conditioned World Model Exploration
Abstract: World Action Models (WAMs) couple predictive world modeling with action generation, allowing anticipated future states to guide agent behavior. Although WAMs are rapidly advancing embodied AI, general-purpose counterparts remain largely unexplored in games. Existing game-oriented approaches often combine action-conditioned world models with external policies and reward functions to realize WAM-like decision-making, yet they operate mainly in 2D visual observation space and do not instantiate persistent 3D geometry. Extending this paradigm to 3D games introduces a distinct challenge. In autonomous driving and robotics, the physical environment exists independently of the model, providing a persistent 3D world in which selected actions can be executed. Games have no such external substrate; the virtual world itself must be instantiated. Most playable games require a persistent and navigable space, while 3D games additionally require explicit geometry that supports movement and interaction. Action-conditioned video rollouts provide visual observations but not this spatial representation. We present \textsc{Valerant}, a training-free framework that transforms a pretrained action-conditioned world model into a WAM for exploring and constructing 3D game maps. By coupling predictive visual rollouts with SLAM-based spatial reconstruction and exploration-driven action selection, \textsc{Valerant} progressively transforms a single image into a persistent 3D game map. This framework extends WAM-based interaction beyond 2D visual simulation and offers a new approach to reducing manual effort in 3D game-map creation.
PlayTrain enables fast training on JavaScript-generated video games
PlayTrain: An Efficient Reinforcement Learning Framework for LLM-Generated Adaptable JavaScript Games
Abstract: While many video-game environments (VGEs) have played crucial roles in advancing reinforcement learning (RL), developing novel VGEs or modifying existing ones to support new features, has been a laborious process requiring extensive hand-coding. Here we present PlayTrain, an RL framework that combines the abilities of large language models (LLMs) to robustly generate JavaScript (JS) games from a minimal human prompt, and an efficient pipeline that can run any JS game in a standard 'gym' environment. Not only are recent LLMs particularly good at writing JS code, but the JS format also allows users to easily play generated VGEs, while PlayTrain enables us to train RL agents on the exact same games. We demonstrate multiple use cases of PlayTrain, including cloning well-known Atari and ProcGen games in simple JS, where PlayTrain trains pixel-based agents end-to-end at over 1M agent-decisions per second on a single GPU node; and creating modified versions thereof (e.g., that support novel test sets, procedural generation logics, or game dynamics). Through PlayTrain, we reimagine RL VGE development: all we need is a single JS file, generated and modified through an LLM. We discuss promising future RL research directions that PlayTrain unlocks.
Fire3D creates interactive 3D scenes from images fast
FIRE3D: Feed-forward Interactive 3D Scene Reconstruction Within A Minute
Abstract: We present FIRE3D, a unified framework that takes a single RGB image or casual RGB video and transforms it into simulation-ready 3D scene assets for games and interactive applications in under a minute. At the core of FIRE3D is a feed-forward, end-to-end network that predicts a compositional scene representation from posed RGB-D observations estimated from the RGB capture, including the 6-DoF pose, bounding box, mesh, and texture for every object. By modeling the scene as a collection of discrete entities, FIRE3D produces amodally complete and simulation-ready environments where objects are physically decoupled and ready for interaction. Our framework requires no test-time optimization, runs orders of magnitude faster than prior interaction-ready methods, and provides object-level completeness beyond existing feed-forward 3D approaches. We demonstrate competitive or state-of-the-art results across pose accuracy, geometry completeness, and texture quality across various datasets while being orders of magnitudes faster. Project page: https://xiahongchi.github.io/Fire3D/
Reachability-aware goal selection improves exploration in reinforcement learning
SUN: Reaching for Novelty in Reinforcement Learning
Abstract: Exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) remains a fundamental challenge. Recent goal-conditioned RL strategies (which select goals to encourage broader state coverage) have shown promising results, but none scores a goal by novelty and reachability jointly: the two signals are traded off by hand, applied in sequence, or one is neglected outright. In this paper, we introduce a reachability-aware goal-selection framework that explicitly integrates these two aspects, and that can be seamlessly incorporated into any off-policy RL algorithm. To this aim, we propose SUccessor-to-Novelty (SUN), an indicator derived from successor value functions to identify goals that are both novel and reachable. We prove that SUN recovers count-based bonuses in the limit, bounds short-horizon hitting probabilities, and provably rejects unreachable goals. We further present an adaptive goal-selection strategy that leverages these properties, and an accurate yet lightweight pseudocount to avoid the overhead of classic methods. We back up all our claims with thorough benchmarks: SUN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in standard and novel environments with unreachable or hard-to-reach states, irreversible transitions, obstacles, mazes, and unbounded spaces.
Feedback enriched environments improve training for long task AI agents
Environments as Scaffold: Enriching Feedback to Bootstrap Self-Evolving Agents in Long-Horizon Tasks
Abstract: Large Language Models demonstrate remarkable proficiency in static reasoning, yet training them as autonomous agents through Reinforcement Learning (RL) for long-horizon tasks is often hindered by severe reward sparsity. While conventional \textit{agent-side warming} up via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) can alleviate this, it is frequently limited by data scarcity and constrained exploration. To address this, we propose a paradigm shift to \textit{environment-side adaptation} by constructing \textbf{F}eedback-\textbf{E}nriched \textbf{E}nvironments (\textbf{FEEs}). Through a pilot study, we establish a feedback design strategy that reformulates environments by transitioning from action guidance to observation enrichment during the later stages of both intra-episode exploration and inter-episode evolution. Large-scale experiments on SciWorld and BFCL benchmarks using various Qwen3 model scales and RL algorithms such as GRPO, GSPO, and DAPO demonstrate that FEEs consistently yield performance improvements over standard settings. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that training with FEEs \textbf{(1)} stabilizes training dynamics by reducing entropy volatility, \textbf{(2)} facilitates proactive state-space exploration in difficult tasks, \textbf{(3) }ensures the internalization of environmental guidance into policy weights rather than acting as a mere inference-time prior, and \textbf{(4) }identifies intra-group feedback consistency as a critical boundary for stable optimization.
Improved AI method generates human motion from text with faster and better accuracy
ReMoMask-2: Latent Retrieval-Augmented Masked Motion Generation
Abstract: Text-to-motion (T2M) generation maps natural language to human joint movements, aiding gaming, VR, and robotics. Retrieval-Augmented Text-to-Motion (RAG-T2M) improves generation on complex descriptions by conditioning on retrieved motion-text pairs. However, existing RAG-T2M models face two challenges: coarse-grained retrieval and fusion mechanisms overlook the hierarchical, spatial-temporal topology of human motion, and a representation gap exists because retrieved evidence resides in a semantic space separate from the generator's latents. To address the first, we present ReMoMask, a structure-aware RAG framework coupling Hierarchical Bidirectional Momentum (HBM) contrastive learning to align global and part-level features with text; Semantic Spatial-Temporal Attention (SSTA) for topology-aware fusion; and Topology Structured Masking (TSM) to force robust part-level grounding via adaptive masking. To address the second, we introduce ReMoMask-2, which rebuilds the retrieval database directly within the generator's pre-quantization latent space and aligns text queries via a distilled lightweight projector, allowing the generator to directly consume the retrieved motion's semantic content. Extensive experiments on HumanML3D, KIT-ML, and SnapMoGen demonstrate our retriever achieves state-of-the-art accuracy, while ReMoMask-2 attains the lowest FID on KIT-ML and SnapMoGen; notably, its single mask-transformer stage surpasses ReMoMask's full two-stage pipeline and delivers the fastest inference.
Actionsplice enables instant action updates in video world models
ActionSplice: In-Flight Action Editing for Interactive World Models
Abstract: Chunk-autoregressive video world models typically condition each generated chunk on one action. An action received during sampling must therefore wait for the next chunk, condition future solver evaluations on a state produced under the previous action, or trigger rollback that repeats completed evaluations. We introduce ActionSplice, an inference framework that formulates this problem as Counterfactual State Transport (CST). A lightweight corrector transports the interrupted backbone-native representation toward the matched state induced by the revised action at the same solver step. The world model and sampler remain frozen, and sampling resumes without replaying completed evaluations. The retargeting variant $\mathrm{CST}*{R}$ updates the entire active chunk, while the temporal-splicing variant $\mathrm{CST}*{T}$ preserves a temporal prefix and updates only the suffix. Across minWM-Wan Action2V and HY-WM1.5, $\mathrm{CST}*{R}$ reduces rollback-relative LPIPS by 61.5% and 75.9% relative to direct condition swapping. $\mathrm{CST}*{T}$ reduces suffix LPIPS by 56.1% and 77.5%, respectively, while providing $2.73\times$ and $1.69\times$ pixel-ready speedups over waiting. Under the HY-WorldPlay protocol, $\mathrm{CST}_{R}$ obtains a PSNR of 25.66 dB, an SSIM of 0.6902, and an LPIPS of 0.1337 against the original rollout.
Multi agent simulations maintain diversity with prospect state modeling
Scaling Multi-Agent Systems with Prospect-State Propagation
Abstract: Current LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) periodically compress intermediate states to reduce inference-time token consumption, thereby attempting to incorporate more agents. However, naive scaling strategies face challenges. For example, in economic simulations, large-scale MAS typically discard semantically rich economic states, i.e., agent behavioral trajectories, which are key drivers of macroeconomic fluctuations. In this paper, we reveal a phenomenon in which agent heterogeneity gradually decreases during simulation, and propose Prospect-State Propagation for Multi-Agent Systems (PspMAS). Inspired by prospect theory, PspMAS decouples each agent's micro state into a compact Prospect State and an expressive Semantic State. The former records psychological traces through a lightweight, parallelizable propagator and continuously injects heterogeneity into the system. The latter leverages the strong perception, reasoning, planning, and decision-making abilities of LLMs. These two components work complementarily, providing a scalable LLM-based multi-agent simulation solution.
Flexible human motion created from language and style examples
Flexible Motion Generation from Language and Style References
Abstract: We introduce FlexMoGen, a novel framework for flexible human motion synthesis conditioned on both natural language descriptions and motion style references. Text prompts are effective at defining semantic content, but they are often limited in capturing fine-grained style details such as timing, limb articulation, and expressive dynamics. A style example clip supplements the text by conveying these nuanced motion characteristics directly, enabling the model to preserve high-level intent while reproducing the desired stylistic traits. Given a text prompt and a style example clip, FlexMoGen generates high-quality motions that preserve semantic content while faithfully reflecting the target style, offering users greater control over the animation generation process. Unlike prior methods that rely on discrete style labels and do not generalize to long or multi-style generation, FlexMoGen learns a variational style encoder without style supervision and supports long, time-varying, multi-style synthesis. Our framework jointly pre-trains the style encoder and a text-to-motion latent diffusion model within a unified architecture, modulating motion style through a lightweight adaptation module. It integrates an efficient relative positional encoding scheme and is trained on both stylized and non-stylized datasets, enabling strong generalization to unseen text-style combinations. Experiments show that FlexMoGen achieves the best balance between content fidelity and style reflection.
Physics grounded system synthesizes dynamic multi part object scenes
PhysMAS: Physics-Grounded Multi-Agent Synthesis of Compositional 4D Gaussians
Abstract: Efficient, fully automatic, and physically plausible 4D Gaussian synthesis is an important goal for dynamic scene generation. Recent physics-based methods couple 3D Gaussians with the Material Point Method (MPM) to generate physically driven motion, but extending this paradigm to heterogeneous multi-part objects and interacting multi-object scenes remains challenging. Object-level physical assignment collapses distinct parts into a single material state, while one-shot predictions from large language models, vision-language models, or agents neither reliably bind different materials to identified parts nor verify that the resulting MPM configuration is executable. Score Distillation Sampling (SDS)-based parameter optimization, meanwhile, requires repeated per-scene score evaluations and gradient backpropagation, incurring lengthy optimization and potentially yielding suboptimal or unstable solutions. We therefore present PhysMAS, a physics-grounded multi-agent framework. From a motion prompt and four scene views, an Object-Part Scene Agent establishes persistent identities and calls a Material Reasoning Agent for part-wise profiles. It invokes solver-aware skills to bind these identities and profiles to per-particle MPM fields and execute all objects in a shared domain; the framework then screens candidate forward-simulation results. This supports heterogeneous multi-part and interacting multi-object scenes without per-scene diffusion-score backpropagation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, compared with recent physics-based 4D Gaussian baselines that rely on SDS, PhysMAS achieves better semantic alignment and perceived physical plausibility while requiring less runtime.
Image based 3D objects generated more accurately with frequency based method
Single Image to Textured 3D Object Generation in Frequency Domain: From Theory to Pipeline
Abstract: Single-view 3D reconstruction, also known as image-to-3D, is a persistently challenging task due to the extreme lack of information. Recently, diffusion models pre-trained on large-scale datasets served as 2D priors are used to solve the ill-posed task but suffer from color deviation and view inconsistency, which can be curbed by using diffusion models fine-tuned with 3D annotated data served as 3D priors. However, 3D priors lack high-frequency details, which cannot be solved by direct complementation with 2D priors in spatial domain for introducing erroneous low-frequency 2D prior guidance. In this paper, we revisit the characteristics of different diffusion priors from the frequency perspective. Based on our observations, we theoretically present a unified framework of hybrid optimization using multiple diffusion priors in frequency domain. Under this framework, we further propose Morpheus3D, a pipeline of 3D object generation from any single unposed image in the wild. Morpheus3D enhances 3D prior with high-pass image-prompt 2D prior guidance to reconstruct high-quality 3D objects while effectively suppressing view inconsistency, low-frequency color deviation, and high-frequency lacking problems. Both quantitative and qualitative experiments on the public and our collected datasets with complex textures show that our method exhibits significant improvements in generation quality.