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ML papers to read today.

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5 papers

#01Sep 3, 2026

cs.CV

Puffin-World: Scaling a Unified Multimodal Model with Native 3D World States

Kang Liao, Yihang Luo, Xiao-Ming Wu and 7 more

We propose Puffin-World, a unified multimodal architecture that integrates physical understanding, spatial simulation, and 3D world generation and reconstruction without relying on external offline modules. To reliably construct and interact with 3D worlds, our framework jointly models three native world states: physics (gravity field and latitude), geometry (depth), and appearance (image), together with a unified Omni-Camera representation that supports diverse tasks and flexible motions. Beyond modeling these states, we introduce a strategy for propagating physical dynamics across future frames. By grounding absolute camera properties in the real world, Puffin-World enables physically consistent and visually stable world generation. We further couple appearance and geometry within a single generative process, jointly synthesizing each future view and reconstructing its underlying geometry. This unified paradigm enables interleaved closed-loop applications requiring synergy across multiple tasks, including mimic and self-calibrated world exploration. To scale Puffin-World to complex scenarios, we construct Puffin-16M, comprising 15 million vision-language-camera triplets and 1 million trajectories featuring various and challenging motions. To foster further research in this area, we released the code, models, and datasets.

#02Sep 3, 2026

cs.RO

Adaptive Vision-Language Grasping via Composable Foundation Priors and Generalizable Grasp Synthesis

Sixu Yan, Shikang Wang, Binhua Huang and 11 more

This paper proposes AdaRoboVLG, a task-adaptive Vision-Language-Grasp (VLG) framework that supports generalizable grasp synthesis across different robotic hands. Unlike existing VLG methods that tightly couple foundation models with end-to-end grasp policies, AdaRoboVLG learns an efficient generalizable base policy that generates and evaluates physically feasible grasp candidates through explicit kinematic mapping and force-closure-based stability estimation, while offloading task-dependent understanding to specialized foundation-model modules. These modules provide composable priors that are integrated into the grasp synthesis process, enabling contextually adaptive grasp synthesis without retraining the underlying grasp policy. Through extensive simulation and real-world experiments, we demonstrate that (i) the base policy exhibits efficient learning and strong cross-hand generalization, (ii) the framework effectively incorporates spatial, cognitive, and temporal priors to address three representative grasping challenges without compromising grasp synthesis performance compared to state-of-the-art methods, and (iii) these priors can operate jointly to enable functional grasping in cluttered and dynamic environments. These results indicate that decoupling physical grasp synthesis from task-dependent understanding provides a scalable paradigm for robotic grasping, allowing future advances in foundation models to be directly translated into improved grasp capabilities without redesigning or retraining the underlying grasp policy. Supplementary videos are available at https://adarobovlg.github.io/

#03Sep 3, 2026

cs.CV

Temporal Self-Distillation: Learning Visual State Tracking in Videos Without Supervision

Shravan Venkatraman, Wenshuai Zhao, Mohammad Hassan Vali and 1 more

We introduce S$^3$T (Self-Supervised Self-Distillation over Time), which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first fully self-contained framework for continuous video state tracking. Our method treats temporal sampling density as privileged information, based on the hypothesis that a denser view of the same clip recovers the running state more accurately. This view serves as the teacher, while a sparse-view student with the same weights learns to match its next-token distribution. The model generates its own target, so training requires no labels, separate teacher, or reward signal, and adds no inference cost. On LLaVA-OneVision-2-8B, S$^3$T improves VSTAT accuracy by $+1.74$ as a single model, $+2.38$ with souping, and $+2.70$ with additional vision-encoder adaptation, while prior self-evolving methods leave state tracking largely unchanged. The capability learned from unlabeled synthetic clips transfers to real videos, improving performance by $+7.95$ on VSTAT-YouTube state-tracking questions and $+4.50$ on MVBench Action Count.

#04Sep 3, 2026

cs.CV

TokenMatch: 3D Mesh Correspondence Transformer with Curvature-Guided Tokenisation

Adeela Islam, Zorah Lähner, Vittorio Murino and 1 more

While data-driven 3D shape correspondence estimation has recently seen substantial progress, robust matching under partial observations and strong non-isometric deformations remains challenging. Existing learning-based approaches often rely on hand-crafted descriptors or template-based representations, whereas recent generative models over functional maps suffer from high inference cost, limited interpretability, and poor generalisation to partial shapes. In response to these limitations, this paper introduces TokenMatch, a new transformer-based unified model for estimating 3D shape correspondences. Our feed-forward approach trained exclusively on BeCoS, a challenging non-isometric partial-to-partial shape-matching dataset, can generalise to matching full shapes without retraining or fine-tuning. TokenMatch uses self- and cross-attention mechanisms to efficiently learn patch-level and point-level relations as well as dense correspondences between shape pairs. Our core insight is that meshes can be adaptively tokenised into patches using shape curvature guidance, enabling effective learning of shape-specific geometric descriptors for correspondence estimation. We evaluate TokenMatch on standard benchmarks for partial and full shape matching, including CP2P, PSMAL, BeCoS, FAUST, SCAPE, and SHREC'19. Our method achieves consistently high performance, in most cases outperforming existing methods for partial and full shape matching in the mean geodesic error and intersection-over-union metrics, while also running faster at sub-second inference speeds.

#05Sep 3, 2026

cs.CV

Editable Visual Design

Junyan Ye, Wei Liu, Dongzhi Jiang and 9 more

While diffusion base models such as GPT-Image-2 and Nano-Banana exhibit remarkable visual expressiveness, their end-to-end generation inherently yields flattened bitmaps with error-prone text, precluding layer-wise post-editing. Conversely, code-based visual generation via Coding Agents provides precise layout control and decoupled layers, yet remains constrained by a lack of global aesthetic intuition and the difficulty of coding complex visual assets. To address this, we propose Editable Visual Design, a new paradigm driven by a Coding Agent. We designate the VLM as the ``creative brain'' for requirement comprehension, task planning, and aesthetic judgment, while utilizing the image generation model as an on-demand ``visual world simulator'' to synthesize standalone visual assets. Operating under an ``imagine first, then act'' closed-loop workflow, the agent generates isolated assets, writes native HTML/CSS, and iteratively refines the design against visual rendering feedback. Furthermore, Agent Design Replay faithfully reproduces the creative and reasoning trajectory akin to that of professional human designers. Ultimately, the system delivers editable artifacts with decoupled layers and real text, enabling users to perform intuitive mouse dragging and layout adjustments on a graphical user interface. Validations on posters, infographics, and other scenarios show that this paradigm successfully achieves both refined aesthetics and production-grade editability.