#01Oct 27, 2026
cs.CV
MoI-Bench: A Benchmark for Image Generation and Editing on Mobile Devices
Kailai Feng, Haoxiang Rao, Yuxiang Wei and 5 more
Developing on-device image models requires considering practical user needs, task types and device resource constraints. However, existing benchmarks provide limited guidance on identifying capability gaps between on-device models and server-side models. We introduce MoI-Bench, a benchmark grounded in mobile user needs, comprising 64 subtasks and 1150 samples. It defines 16 operations, such as removal and replacement, and eight visual target categories covering content such as portraits and text. These form two orthogonal axes whose applicable combinations define specific tasks, such as removing facial makeup. To better guide model improvement, we further propose MoI-Eval, which introduces task-specific criteria covering instruction following, visual quality and detail preservation. We further construct sample-level evaluation questions and aggregate their scores into overall quality and capability profiles along the operation, target and criteria axes. We evaluate representative on-device and server-side models and measure mobile deployment costs. Results show that this decoupled Operation x Target design provides finer-grained guidance for improving compact models. For example, it highlights the need to prioritize specific capability gaps (e.g., text-replacement) over broad application-level goals (e.g., improving text editing). Unlike conventional benchmarks that rank models using a single score, we introduce a two-dimensional Quality-Deployability capability map to assess models for practical mobile use. The map shows that current on-device models can achieve efficient generation or editing but expanding their task coverage deserves greater attention than further improving deployment efficiency. Further progress requires improving editing quality, particularly identity preservation and text rendering, while broadening task coverage.
#02Oct 27, 2026
cs.CL
Metacognitive Decoding: Efficient Inference for Diffusion Language Agents
Mingyu Zhao, Shuhang Lin, Ligong Han and 5 more
Diffusion language models offer a promising path to efficient agents through parallel token generation. However, efficient interaction requires adapting both where computation is spent and how much text is generated. We introduce a metacognitive controller that guides diffusion generation according to the needs of the current response and the agent's interaction with the environment. It learns when to finalize tokens and how far generation should extend, reducing overall computation within responses. Our controller, a lightweight plug-in for the diffusion backbone, is trained on agent trajectories to balance correctness and generation cost. This approach connects the agent's generation process to the interaction the agent serves. Experiments across five benchmarks demonstrate that our approach reduces inference FLOPs by 20.6% on average compared with the most efficient baseline, while maintaining competitive task accuracy. Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of our approach.
#03Oct 27, 2026
cs.CV
Can Discrete Tokens Serve as Semantically Lossless Representations of Visual Signals?
Jialv Zou, Xiaotong Li, Zhengrong Yue and 6 more
Discrete visual tokens represent vision in a discrete form analogous to language, offering a native interface for multimodal modeling under a shared next-token prediction objective. However, quantization error is widely assumed to cause unavoidable semantic loss, fundamentally limiting the semantic fidelity of discrete visual tokens and positioning continuous visual representations as an intrinsic upper bound. Using multimodal understanding as a proxy for semantic fidelity, we revisit this assumption and find quantization error unreliable, as discrete representations with substantially larger errors can achieve better understanding. Instead, the effective bit budget of discrete indices emerges as a key determinant of downstream performance. However, existing quantizers eventually saturate as additional codebooks contribute progressively less semantic information. As one approach to alleviating this saturation, we introduce Factorized Vector Quantization, which quantizes complementary, fixed-dimensional views of the visual feature with symmetric parallel codebooks. It continues to improve at larger bit budgets, ultimately matching continuous visual representations in multimodal understanding. Trained on industrial-scale multimodal data, our model achieves state-of-the-art performance among discrete-representation models, outperforming UniAR and Emu3-Chat by 22.8% and 59.2%, respectively, on a nine-metric average. To our knowledge, it is also the first discrete-representation model competitive with strong continuous-representation models such as Qwen3-VL, including on fine-grained OCR tasks. We further identify the key principles and a practical recipe enabling this competitiveness. These results and insights support the potential of discrete visual representations to underpin large-scale native multimodal foundation models. Code and models are available at https://github.com/hustvl/FVQ
#04Oct 27, 2026
cs.CL
Can LLMs Uncover Hidden Physical Laws through Free Exploration?
Zhen Yang, Wen Wang, Xander Xu and 1 more
Scientific discovery often begins with an unexpected observation that prompts a new research question. In a world with altered physical laws, can large language models (LLMs) notice unexpected behavior, such as heavier objects falling more slowly, and discover the law through experiments without being told what to investigate? To evaluate this ability, we introduce LongChang, an automated framework that creates simulated worlds with altered physics, where one or more laws differ from ordinary physics. The evaluated LLMs act as explorers, manipulating objects and building tools to investigate their own questions without research tasks or hints about these laws. Separate LLM agents generate and review scenes, review tool designs, and evaluate reports for correctness and experimental support using the altered physical laws and exploration records. These records guide scene evolution for further exploration, allowing the full cycle to run without human intervention. Among 12 LLMs, GPT-6-Astra achieves a discovery rate of 16.7%, while the other 11 score 0%. The exploration records reveal uninvestigated anomalies and only partial identification of the altered physical laws.
#05Oct 27, 2026
cs.RO
ThinkWorld: World Imagination Reinforces Chain-of-Dynamics Reasoning
Chaehyun Kim, Chi-Pin Huang, Jisoo Kim and 4 more
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have made substantial progress in robotic manipulation, but their generalization remains constrained by the diversity and coverage of action-labeled robot demonstrations. Human videos provide much broader behavioral and environmental experience, while learning from them faces a fundamental trade-off between scalable data and explicit action grounding. We introduce ThinkWorld, a VLA learning framework that grounds action reasoning in world dynamics and strengthens it through reinforcement learning with world imagination. ThinkWorld represents each action thought as a Chain-of-Dynamics (CoD), a sequence of discrete motion tokens that captures the intermediate dynamics connecting the current world to a future state and serves as a common action representation across embodiments. We first initialize CoD with action-labeled demonstrations, then predict the future induced by each CoD and reinforce those whose predictions better match the observed outcome. This enables videos without action annotations to provide direct supervision from observed state transitions, allowing human and robot experience to refine the same reasoning space. Experiments in simulation and on real robots demonstrate effective human-to-robot transfer and strong generalization to unseen tasks and environments.