Daily Paper Cast

Jingwen Liang, Gengyu Wang

We update every weekday to discuss highest-voted papers from Huggingface Daily Paper (https://huggingface.co/papers). Both the podcast scripts and audio are generated by AI. Feedback and suggestions are welcome! Email us: dailypapercast.ai@gmail.com Creator: Jingwen Liang, 3D ML, https://www.linkedin.com/in/jingwen-liang/ Gengyu Wang, LLM ML, http://wanggengyu.com Listen on: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/21nrhmdaA8qoBiH8q03NXL Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/daily-paper-cast/id1777620236 Cover Image by Kawen Kuang https://kawen.art

  1. -2 H

    Thinking with Video: Video Generation as a Promising Multimodal Reasoning Paradigm

    🤗 Upvotes: 127 | cs.CV, cs.CL Authors: Jingqi Tong, Yurong Mou, Hangcheng Li, Mingzhe Li, Yongzhuo Yang, Ming Zhang, Qiguang Chen, Tianyi Liang, Xiaomeng Hu, Yining Zheng, Xinchi Chen, Jun Zhao, Xuanjing Huang, Xipeng Qiu Title: Thinking with Video: Video Generation as a Promising Multimodal Reasoning Paradigm Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04570v1 Abstract: "Thinking with Text" and "Thinking with Images" paradigm significantly improve the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs). However, these paradigms have inherent limitations. (1) Images capture only single moments and fail to represent dynamic processes or continuous changes, and (2) The separation of text and vision as distinct modalities, hindering unified multimodal understanding and generation. To overcome these limitations, we introduce "Thinking with Video", a new paradigm that leverages video generation models, such as Sora-2, to bridge visual and textual reasoning in a unified temporal framework. To support this exploration, we developed the Video Thinking Benchmark (VideoThinkBench). VideoThinkBench encompasses two task categories: (1) vision-centric tasks (e.g., Eyeballing Puzzles), and (2) text-centric tasks (e.g., subsets of GSM8K, MMMU). Our evaluation establishes Sora-2 as a capable reasoner. On vision-centric tasks, Sora-2 is generally comparable to state-of-the-art (SOTA) VLMs, and even surpasses VLMs on several tasks, such as Eyeballing Games. On text-centric tasks, Sora-2 achieves 92% accuracy on MATH, and 75.53% accuracy on MMMU. Furthermore, we systematically analyse the source of these abilities. We also find that self-consistency and in-context learning can improve Sora-2's performance. In summary, our findings demonstrate that the video generation model is the potential unified multimodal understanding and generation model, positions "thinking with video" as a unified multimodal reasoning paradigm.

    24 min
  2. -2 H

    V-Thinker: Interactive Thinking with Images

    🤗 Upvotes: 66 | cs.CV Authors: Runqi Qiao, Qiuna Tan, Minghan Yang, Guanting Dong, Peiqing Yang, Shiqiang Lang, Enhui Wan, Xiaowan Wang, Yida Xu, Lan Yang, Chong Sun, Chen Li, Honggang Zhang Title: V-Thinker: Interactive Thinking with Images Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04460v1 Abstract: Empowering Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) to deeply integrate image interaction with long-horizon reasoning capabilities remains a long-standing challenge in this field. Recent advances in vision-centric reasoning explore a promising "Thinking with Images" paradigm for LMMs, marking a shift from image-assisted reasoning to image-interactive thinking. While this milestone enables models to focus on fine-grained image regions, progress remains constrained by limited visual tool spaces and task-specific workflow designs. To bridge this gap, we present V-Thinker, a general-purpose multimodal reasoning assistant that enables interactive, vision-centric thinking through end-to-end reinforcement learning. V-Thinker comprises two key components: (1) a Data Evolution Flywheel that automatically synthesizes, evolves, and verifies interactive reasoning datasets across three dimensions-diversity, quality, and difficulty; and (2) a Visual Progressive Training Curriculum that first aligns perception via point-level supervision, then integrates interactive reasoning through a two-stage reinforcement learning framework. Furthermore, we introduce VTBench, an expert-verified benchmark targeting vision-centric interactive reasoning tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that V-Thinker consistently outperforms strong LMM-based baselines in both general and interactive reasoning scenarios, providing valuable insights for advancing image-interactive reasoning applications.

    21 min
  3. -2 H

    Scaling Agent Learning via Experience Synthesis

    🤗 Upvotes: 51 | cs.AI Authors: Zhaorun Chen, Zhuokai Zhao, Kai Zhang, Bo Liu, Qi Qi, Yifan Wu, Tarun Kalluri, Sara Cao, Yuanhao Xiong, Haibo Tong, Huaxiu Yao, Hengduo Li, Jiacheng Zhu, Xian Li, Dawn Song, Bo Li, Jason Weston, Dat Huynh Title: Scaling Agent Learning via Experience Synthesis Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2511.03773v1 Abstract: While reinforcement learning (RL) can empower large language model (LLM) agents by enabling self-improvement through interaction, its practical adoption remains challenging due to costly rollouts, limited task diversity, unreliable reward signals, and infrastructure complexity, all of which obstruct the collection of scalable experience data. To address these challenges, we introduce DreamGym, the first unified framework designed to synthesize diverse experiences with scalability in mind to enable effective online RL training for autonomous agents. Rather than relying on expensive real-environment rollouts, DreamGym distills environment dynamics into a reasoning-based experience model that derives consistent state transitions and feedback signals through step-by-step reasoning, enabling scalable agent rollout collection for RL. To improve the stability and quality of transitions, DreamGym leverages an experience replay buffer initialized with offline real-world data and continuously enriched with fresh interactions to actively support agent training. To improve knowledge acquisition, DreamGym adaptively generates new tasks that challenge the current agent policy, enabling more effective online curriculum learning. Experiments across diverse environments and agent backbones demonstrate that DreamGym substantially improves RL training, both in fully synthetic settings and in sim-to-real transfer scenarios. On non-RL-ready tasks like WebArena, DreamGym outperforms all baselines by over 30%. And in RL-ready but costly settings, it matches GRPO and PPO performance using only synthetic interactions. When transferring a policy trained purely on synthetic experiences to real-environment RL, DreamGym yields significant additional performance gains while requiring far fewer real-world interactions, providing a scalable warm-start strategy for general-purpose RL.

    23 min
  4. -1 J

    LEGO-Eval: Towards Fine-Grained Evaluation on Synthesizing 3D Embodied Environments with Tool Augmentation

    🤗 Upvotes: 39 | cs.CL Authors: Gyeom Hwangbo, Hyungjoo Chae, Minseok Kang, Hyeonjong Ju, Soohyun Oh, Jinyoung Yeo Title: LEGO-Eval: Towards Fine-Grained Evaluation on Synthesizing 3D Embodied Environments with Tool Augmentation Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2511.03001v1 Abstract: Despite recent progress in using Large Language Models (LLMs) for automatically generating 3D scenes, generated scenes often lack realistic spatial layouts and object attributes found in real-world environments. As this problem stems from insufficiently detailed, coarse-grained instructions, advancing 3D scene synthesis guided by more detailed, fine-grained instructions that reflect real-world environments becomes crucial. Without such realistic scenes, training embodied agents in unrealistic environments can lead them to learn priors that diverge significantly from real-world physics and semantics, degrading their performance when deployed. Thus, verifying the alignment between the fine-grained instruction and the generated scene is essential for effective learning. However, current evaluation methods, such as CLIPScore and vision-language models (VLMs), often fail to reliably assess such alignment. This shortcoming arises primarily from their shallow understanding of 3D scenes, which often leads to improperly grounded scene components. To address this, we introduce LEGO-Eval, an evaluation framework equipped with diverse tools designed to explicitly ground scene components, enabling more accurate alignment assessments. We also present LEGO-Bench, a benchmark of detailed instructions that specify complex layouts and attributes of real-world environments. Experiments demonstrate that LEGO-Eval outperforms VLM-as-a-judge by 0.41 F1 score in assessing scene-instruction alignment. Benchmarking with LEGO-Bench reveals significant limitations in current generation methods. Across all evaluated approaches, success rates reached at most 10% in generating scenes that fully align with fine-grained instructions.

    26 min
  5. -1 J

    UniAVGen: Unified Audio and Video Generation with Asymmetric Cross-Modal Interactions

    🤗 Upvotes: 39 | cs.CV Authors: Guozhen Zhang, Zixiang Zhou, Teng Hu, Ziqiao Peng, Youliang Zhang, Yi Chen, Yuan Zhou, Qinglin Lu, Limin Wang Title: UniAVGen: Unified Audio and Video Generation with Asymmetric Cross-Modal Interactions Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2511.03334v1 Abstract: Due to the lack of effective cross-modal modeling, existing open-source audio-video generation methods often exhibit compromised lip synchronization and insufficient semantic consistency. To mitigate these drawbacks, we propose UniAVGen, a unified framework for joint audio and video generation. UniAVGen is anchored in a dual-branch joint synthesis architecture, incorporating two parallel Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) to build a cohesive cross-modal latent space. At its heart lies an Asymmetric Cross-Modal Interaction mechanism, which enables bidirectional, temporally aligned cross-attention, thus ensuring precise spatiotemporal synchronization and semantic consistency. Furthermore, this cross-modal interaction is augmented by a Face-Aware Modulation module, which dynamically prioritizes salient regions in the interaction process. To enhance generative fidelity during inference, we additionally introduce Modality-Aware Classifier-Free Guidance, a novel strategy that explicitly amplifies cross-modal correlation signals. Notably, UniAVGen's robust joint synthesis design enables seamless unification of pivotal audio-video tasks within a single model, such as joint audio-video generation and continuation, video-to-audio dubbing, and audio-driven video synthesis. Comprehensive experiments validate that, with far fewer training samples (1.3M vs. 30.1M), UniAVGen delivers overall advantages in audio-video synchronization, timbre consistency, and emotion consistency.

    23 min
  6. -2 J

    Don't Blind Your VLA: Aligning Visual Representations for OOD Generalization

    🤗 Upvotes: 71 | cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.RO Authors: Nikita Kachaev, Mikhail Kolosov, Daniil Zelezetsky, Alexey K. Kovalev, Aleksandr I. Panov Title: Don't Blind Your VLA: Aligning Visual Representations for OOD Generalization Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2510.25616v1 Abstract: The growing success of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models stems from the promise that pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can endow agents with transferable world knowledge and vision-language (VL) grounding, laying a foundation for action models with broader generalization. Yet when these VLMs are adapted to the action modality, it remains unclear to what extent their original VL representations and knowledge are preserved. In this work, we conduct a systematic study of representation retention during VLA fine-tuning, showing that naive action fine-tuning leads to degradation of visual representations. To characterize and measure these effects, we probe VLA's hidden representations and analyze attention maps, further, we design a set of targeted tasks and methods that contrast VLA models with their counterpart VLMs, isolating changes in VL capabilities induced by action fine-tuning. We further evaluate a range of strategies for aligning visual representations and introduce a simple yet effective method that mitigates degradation and yields improved generalization to out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. Taken together, our analysis clarifies the trade-off between action fine-tuning and the degradation of VL representations and highlights practical approaches to recover inherited VL capabilities. Code is publicly available: https://blind-vla-paper.github.io

    28 min
  7. -2 J

    VCode: a Multimodal Coding Benchmark with SVG as Symbolic Visual Representation

    🤗 Upvotes: 65 | cs.CV, cs.CL Authors: Kevin Qinghong Lin, Yuhao Zheng, Hangyu Ran, Dantong Zhu, Dongxing Mao, Linjie Li, Philip Torr, Alex Jinpeng Wang Title: VCode: a Multimodal Coding Benchmark with SVG as Symbolic Visual Representation Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2511.02778v1 Abstract: Code has emerged as a precise and executable medium for reasoning and action in the agent era. Yet, progress has largely focused on language-centric tasks such as program synthesis and debugging, leaving visual-centric coding underexplored. Inspired by how humans reason over sketches, we advocate SVG code as a compact, interpretable, and executable visual representation. We introduce VCode, a benchmark that reframes multimodal understanding as code generation: given an image, a model must produce SVG that preserves symbolic meaning for downstream reasoning. VCode covers three domains - general commonsense (MM-Vet), professional disciplines (MMMU), and visual-centric perception (CV-Bench). To assess symbolic fidelity, we propose CodeVQA, a novel evaluation protocol in which a policy model answers questions over rendered SVGs; correct answers indicate faithful symbolic preservation. Empirically, frontier VLMs struggle to generate faithful SVGs, revealing a persistent gap between language-centric and visual-centric coding. To close this gap, we introduce VCoder, an agentic framework that augments VLMs along two axes: (i) Thinking with Revision, which iteratively analyzes discrepancies and refines SVG code; and (ii) Acting with Visual Tools, where detectors and parsers supply structured cues such as objects, shapes, and text beyond the model's intrinsic capacity. Across benchmarks, frontier VLMs with strong reasoning capabilities score well overall yet remain limited in professional knowledge and 3D reasoning. VCoder delivers a 12.3-point overall gain over the top-performing Claude-4-Opus. Human studies show that both humans and VLMs perform worse on rendered SVGs, their consistency reveals the promise of symbolic visual representation. The benchmark and code are available at https://github.com/CSU-JPG/VCode.

    22 min

À propos

We update every weekday to discuss highest-voted papers from Huggingface Daily Paper (https://huggingface.co/papers). Both the podcast scripts and audio are generated by AI. Feedback and suggestions are welcome! Email us: dailypapercast.ai@gmail.com Creator: Jingwen Liang, 3D ML, https://www.linkedin.com/in/jingwen-liang/ Gengyu Wang, LLM ML, http://wanggengyu.com Listen on: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/21nrhmdaA8qoBiH8q03NXL Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/daily-paper-cast/id1777620236 Cover Image by Kawen Kuang https://kawen.art