#01Aug 3, 2026
cs.CV
WorldExam: Benchmarking World Models from Apparent Appearance to Inherent Reactivity
Yuxue Yang, Shuyao Shang, Jiahe Wang and 13 more
Controllable video generation models are increasingly being developed as world models. Accordingly, evaluating them in this role extends beyond the apparent appearance of generated videos to the inherent reactivity of the worlds they depict: the ability to infer from the scene state how the world should react and to generate plausible consequences not explicitly described in the input. Yet existing benchmarks mainly assess visual quality or explicit instruction fulfillment by checking whether requested actions and interaction outcomes are realized, leaving inherent reactivity underexamined. We introduce WorldExam, a hierarchical diagnostic benchmark spanning four levels: Visual Quality, Control Adherence, Spatial Consistency, and World Reactivity. It comprises 1,474 cases across eight dedicated tasks and supports unified evaluation of camera-, action-, and language-driven model paradigms. The World Reactivity level evaluates scene-conditioned reactions and goal-directed behaviors beyond what is explicitly specified in the input. Evaluation of 20 representative models reveals a clear capability split. Camera-driven models excel at camera control, but their interfaces do not support dynamic interaction; action-driven models control subjects more precisely but often leave the world unresponsive; and language-driven models perform better on interaction but follow complex controls less faithfully. No model combines broad task coverage with consistently strong performance, showing that high visual quality and explicit instruction fulfillment do not guarantee inherent reactivity.
#02Aug 3, 2026
cs.CL
AURORA-LM: Autoencoding Unified Representation for Continuous-Latent Diffusion Language Modeling
Jiajun Liang, Yucheng Liao, Yukang Cao and 12 more
Language remains an outlier in generative modeling: while images, video, and audio are increasingly modeled in continuous latent spaces, text generation still relies predominantly on discrete tokens. Existing continuous language models either inherit embedding spaces not designed for joint generation and decoding, or compress autoencoded latents to ease diffusion, sacrificing token-level fidelity. Instead of simplifying the representation to suit the generative model, we preserve a high-capacity, decodable text latent and design the diffusion model to learn its distribution directly. We introduce AURORA-LM, a continuous-latent diffusion language model that separates the construction of a decodable text representation from the modeling of its distribution. A Query-based Encoder-Decoder organizes text into a high-capacity, prefix-aligned latent sequence, and a Block-causal Diffusion Transformer learns its distribution through flow matching, generating blocks left to right while denoising positions within each block in parallel. Because such a latent is harder for diffusion to model, AURORA-LM restricts only the noisy-input pathway while retaining the full clean-latent prediction target, accommodating full-width latents without reducing decoder-facing capacity. We further calibrate the noise-level distribution to the latent width, and introduce self-trajectory consistency to bridge independently sampled training noise and iterative denoising at inference. AURORA-LM achieves the strongest performance among evaluated continuous and diffusion-based language models on OpenWebText free generation and XSum summarization. Scaling to 1B parameters with about 1500 EFLOPs of total compute yields further gains, surpassing a larger publicly released latent-diffusion language model under a matched evaluation protocol. All experiments are conducted on Ascend NPUs.
#03Aug 3, 2026
eess.SY
Bridging Artificial Intelligence and Power Systems Education Using a Hands-On Executable Framework
Junjie Yin, Buxin She, Xinyu Feng and 2 more
Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly central to power and energy systems, supporting modeling, forecasting, optimization, and control. Yet most existing works emphasize specialized applications and offer little reusable material for newcomers or interdisciplinary learners, who increasingly rely on large language models rather than building their own. This gap points to a need for engineering-grounded AI (EGAI), in which AI workflows follow established engineering and power-system domain rules rather than acting as task-agnostic black boxes. Motivated by a community survey of researchers and practitioners, which shows 92% report at least one barrier before running an AI model and 94% want a power-specific hands-on course. This paper presents a framework consisting of open, executable module library that lowers the entry barrier for AI in power systems. The modules follow a progressive difficulty ladder that maps core AI concepts onto representative power-system tasks: (i) foundational deep neural network (DNN) templates for function approximation and load-curve fitting; (ii) a domain-coupled convolutional neural network (CNN) power-flow surrogate for a 5-bus system; and (iii) frontier modules on DNN-assisted optimization, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) for battery storage control, and physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) for the swing equation. All modules are released as Jupyter notebooks that run locally or on Google Colab and are delivered through an IEEE online course and IEEE Power & Energy Society (PES) webinar series. The webinar drew more than 590 live attendees, which is among the ten most-attended IEEE PES webinars, and over 344 repository visits within two weeks, reinforcing the survey-based motivation.
#04Aug 3, 2026
cs.CV
VR3D: View-Robust 3D Representation Learning for Aerial-Ground Person Re-Identification
Chao Ji, Shiyu Xuan, Zechao Li
Aerial-ground person re-identification is a challenging task due to cross-platform viewpoint variations, which cause severe occlusion and geometric deformation. Existing methods attempt to learn view-invariant representations exclusively within the 2D image space, where drastic viewpoint variations cause the learned features to remain coupled with viewpoint bias. To address this, we propose VR3D, a View-Robust 3D Representation Learning framework that maps images into a unified 3D coordinate space to achieve view-independent feature interaction. Specifically, we introduce View-Robust 3D Representation Interaction, which leverages 3D priors extracted from single 2D observations to lift 2D appearance features into a canonical 3D space. VR3I employs 3D Geometry-Semantic Attention to establish interactions between 2D patches and 3D voxels from corresponding body parts based on their 3D spatial locations, effectively grounding 2D semantics within a 3D framework. In addition, as the reliability of these representations varies across samples due to viewpoint changes and 3D reconstruction errors, we introduce Reliability-Aware Fusion, which estimates sample-specific reliability and adaptively aggregates the multi-source representations. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets (CARGO, AG-ReID.v1, and AG-ReID.v2) demonstrate that VR3D outperforms recent methods. For example, it achieves a 5.63% improvement in Rank-1 on CARGO. Our code will be released.
#05Aug 3, 2026
cs.LG
onepot-Bench 0: towards lab-aware in silico chemistry benchmarks
Brandon Wang, Andrei S. Tyrin, Daniil A. Boiko
Language models are playing an increasingly important role in laboratory science, performing tasks such as experiment planning, execution, and post-hoc analysis. However, precisely measuring their abilities is difficult, as scientific capabilities require a mixture of both problem-solving skills and domain-specific intuition. Existing evaluations rarely measure the capabilities required to make reliable decisions in a physical laboratory and often rely on public data that may have appeared in model training corpora. We introduce onepot-Bench 0, a proprietary benchmark suite for evaluating language models on synthetic chemistry capabilities relevant to wet-lab execution. onepot-Bench 0 comprises three complementary evaluations: ChemAbacus measures tool-free cheminformatics literacy and numerical reasoning; SynthRefusal characterizes safety and refusal behavior across a variety of benign, controlled, and designer-drug targets; and SynthBench evaluates reaction-outcome prediction and catalyst selection using private experimental data generated in our laboratory. Together, these evaluations probe basic competency, reliability, and deeper knowledge, all skills which are required for reliable performance in the lab.