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Aug 27

VSSD: Vision Mamba with Non-Casual State Space Duality

Vision transformers have significantly advanced the field of computer vision, offering robust modeling capabilities and global receptive field. However, their high computational demands limit their applicability in processing long sequences. To tackle this issue, State Space Models (SSMs) have gained prominence in vision tasks as they offer linear computational complexity. Recently, State Space Duality (SSD), an improved variant of SSMs, was introduced in Mamba2 to enhance model performance and efficiency. However, the inherent causal nature of SSD/SSMs restricts their applications in non-causal vision tasks. To address this limitation, we introduce Visual State Space Duality (VSSD) model, which has a non-causal format of SSD. Specifically, we propose to discard the magnitude of interactions between the hidden state and tokens while preserving their relative weights, which relieves the dependencies of token contribution on previous tokens. Together with the involvement of multi-scan strategies, we show that the scanning results can be integrated to achieve non-causality, which not only improves the performance of SSD in vision tasks but also enhances its efficiency. We conduct extensive experiments on various benchmarks including image classification, detection, and segmentation, where VSSD surpasses existing state-of-the-art SSM-based models. Code and weights are available at https://github.com/YuHengsss/VSSD.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 26, 2024 2

Effectively Modeling Time Series with Simple Discrete State Spaces

Time series modeling is a well-established problem, which often requires that methods (1) expressively represent complicated dependencies, (2) forecast long horizons, and (3) efficiently train over long sequences. State-space models (SSMs) are classical models for time series, and prior works combine SSMs with deep learning layers for efficient sequence modeling. However, we find fundamental limitations with these prior approaches, proving their SSM representations cannot express autoregressive time series processes. We thus introduce SpaceTime, a new state-space time series architecture that improves all three criteria. For expressivity, we propose a new SSM parameterization based on the companion matrix -- a canonical representation for discrete-time processes -- which enables SpaceTime's SSM layers to learn desirable autoregressive processes. For long horizon forecasting, we introduce a "closed-loop" variation of the companion SSM, which enables SpaceTime to predict many future time-steps by generating its own layer-wise inputs. For efficient training and inference, we introduce an algorithm that reduces the memory and compute of a forward pass with the companion matrix. With sequence length ell and state-space size d, we go from O(d ell) na\"ively to O(d + ell). In experiments, our contributions lead to state-of-the-art results on extensive and diverse benchmarks, with best or second-best AUROC on 6 / 7 ECG and speech time series classification, and best MSE on 14 / 16 Informer forecasting tasks. Furthermore, we find SpaceTime (1) fits AR(p) processes that prior deep SSMs fail on, (2) forecasts notably more accurately on longer horizons than prior state-of-the-art, and (3) speeds up training on real-world ETTh1 data by 73% and 80% relative wall-clock time over Transformers and LSTMs.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 16, 2023

Towards Transfer-Efficient Multi-modal Sequential Recommendation with State Space Duality

Sequential Recommendation (SR) models infer user preferences from interaction histories. While transferable Multi-modal SR models outperform traditional ID-based approaches, existing methods struggle with slow fine-tuning convergence due to complex optimization requirements and negative transfer effects. We propose MMM4Rec (Multi-Modal Mamba for Sequential Recommendation), a novel Multi-modal SR framework that incorporates a dedicated algebraic constraint mechanism for efficient transfer learning. By combining State Space Duality (SSD)'s temporal decay properties with a globally-aware temporal modeling design, our model dynamically prioritizes key modality information, overcoming limitations of Transformer-based approaches. The framework implements a constrained two-stage process: (1) sequence-level cross-modal alignment via shared projection matrices, followed by (2) temporal fusion using our newly designed Cross-SSD module and dual-channel Fourier adaptive filtering. This architecture maintains semantic consistency while suppressing noise propagation. MMM4Rec achieves rapid fine-tuning convergence with simple cross-entropy loss, significantly improving Multi-modal recommendation accuracy while maintaining strong transferability. Extensive experiments demonstrate MMM4Rec's state-of-the-art performance, achieving strong multi-modal retrieval capability and exhibiting 10x faster average convergence speed when transferring to large-scale downstream datasets. The implementation is available at https://github.com/AlwaysFHao/MMM4Rec .

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 3, 2025

Spatial-Mamba: Effective Visual State Space Models via Structure-aware State Fusion

Selective state space models (SSMs), such as Mamba, highly excel at capturing long-range dependencies in 1D sequential data, while their applications to 2D vision tasks still face challenges. Current visual SSMs often convert images into 1D sequences and employ various scanning patterns to incorporate local spatial dependencies. However, these methods are limited in effectively capturing the complex image spatial structures and the increased computational cost caused by the lengthened scanning paths. To address these limitations, we propose Spatial-Mamba, a novel approach that establishes neighborhood connectivity directly in the state space. Instead of relying solely on sequential state transitions, we introduce a structure-aware state fusion equation, which leverages dilated convolutions to capture image spatial structural dependencies, significantly enhancing the flow of visual contextual information. Spatial-Mamba proceeds in three stages: initial state computation in a unidirectional scan, spatial context acquisition through structure-aware state fusion, and final state computation using the observation equation. Our theoretical analysis shows that Spatial-Mamba unifies the original Mamba and linear attention under the same matrix multiplication framework, providing a deeper understanding of our method. Experimental results demonstrate that Spatial-Mamba, even with a single scan, attains or surpasses the state-of-the-art SSM-based models in image classification, detection and segmentation. Source codes and trained models can be found at https://github.com/EdwardChasel/Spatial-Mamba.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 19, 2024

Chronos: A Physics-Informed Full-History Framework for Non-Markovian Long-Horizon Manipulation

General-purpose robot policies should be modeled as dynamical systems, yet many VLA and generative imitation policies still rely on present observations or short windows. This Markovian shortcut fails in memory-dependent manipulation: identical observations can demand different actions after different histories. We present Chronos, a physics-informed full-history framework for non-Markovian long-horizon manipulation. The key idea is to elevate observation history from auxiliary context to the latent state of the policy dynamics. At each physical control step, Chronos forms one state-representative token by fusing observation and proprioception, so the token sequence is aligned one-to-one with physical time. A selective state space model propagates this causal historical state, which conditions a multimodal coarse action prior through implicit maximum likelihood estimation (IMLE). This prior is then refined by a second-order Schrodinger-inspired bridge that predicts acceleration fields, yielding smoother and more physically grounded robot motion. Across 16 simulated tasks and 4 real-world experiments, Chronos is evaluated on precision insertion, general manipulation, and memory-dependent long-horizon control. On RMBench, where success requires remembering task phase, Chronos achieves 73.6% average success, outperforming Markovian VLA baseline pi0.5 by +62.4 percentage points, a 6.6x relative gain, while using 10x fewer parameters. It also surpasses the memory VLA Mem-0 by 22.8 points while using over 30x fewer parameters. In real-world dual-arm experiments using a single RGB camera, Chronos achieves 78% average success over four tasks, including 72% on the three memory-dependent tasks, whereas pi0.5 achieves 7% overall and 0% on the memory-dependent subset. These results suggest that history should not be treated as auxiliary context, but as the latent state of the manipulation policy.

  • 12 authors
·
Jun 28

SpaceTimePilot: Generative Rendering of Dynamic Scenes Across Space and Time

We present SpaceTimePilot, a video diffusion model that disentangles space and time for controllable generative rendering. Given a monocular video, SpaceTimePilot can independently alter the camera viewpoint and the motion sequence within the generative process, re-rendering the scene for continuous and arbitrary exploration across space and time. To achieve this, we introduce an effective animation time-embedding mechanism in the diffusion process, allowing explicit control of the output video's motion sequence with respect to that of the source video. As no datasets provide paired videos of the same dynamic scene with continuous temporal variations, we propose a simple yet effective temporal-warping training scheme that repurposes existing multi-view datasets to mimic temporal differences. This strategy effectively supervises the model to learn temporal control and achieve robust space-time disentanglement. To further enhance the precision of dual control, we introduce two additional components: an improved camera-conditioning mechanism that allows altering the camera from the first frame, and CamxTime, the first synthetic space-and-time full-coverage rendering dataset that provides fully free space-time video trajectories within a scene. Joint training on the temporal-warping scheme and the CamxTime dataset yields more precise temporal control. We evaluate SpaceTimePilot on both real-world and synthetic data, demonstrating clear space-time disentanglement and strong results compared to prior work. Project page: https://zheninghuang.github.io/Space-Time-Pilot/ Code: https://github.com/ZheningHuang/spacetimepilot

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 31, 2025 2

Anatomy of a Lie: A Multi-Stage Diagnostic Framework for Tracing Hallucinations in Vision-Language Models

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) frequently "hallucinate" - generate plausible yet factually incorrect statements - posing a critical barrier to their trustworthy deployment. In this work, we propose a new paradigm for diagnosing hallucinations, recasting them from static output errors into dynamic pathologies of a model's computational cognition. Our framework is grounded in a normative principle of computational rationality, allowing us to model a VLM's generation as a dynamic cognitive trajectory. We design a suite of information-theoretic probes that project this trajectory onto an interpretable, low-dimensional Cognitive State Space. Our central discovery is a governing principle we term the geometric-information duality: a cognitive trajectory's geometric abnormality within this space is fundamentally equivalent to its high information-theoretic surprisal. Hallucination detection is counts as a geometric anomaly detection problem. Evaluated across diverse settings - from rigorous binary QA (POPE) and comprehensive reasoning (MME) to unconstrained open-ended captioning (MS-COCO) - our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance. Crucially, it operates with high efficiency under weak supervision and remains highly robust even when calibration data is heavily contaminated. This approach enables a causal attribution of failures, mapping observable errors to distinct pathological states: perceptual instability (measured by Perceptual Entropy), logical-causal failure (measured by Inferential Conflict), and decisional ambiguity (measured by Decision Entropy). Ultimately, this opens a path toward building AI systems whose reasoning is transparent, auditable, and diagnosable by design.

A Programming Paradigm for Spatiotemporal Composability

Modern software -- from plugin systems to self-evolving agent harnesses -- increasingly requires dynamic composition, yet its formal foundations remain underdeveloped. We identify two orthogonal dimensions of the problem: temporal composability, the ability to completely revert a component's side effects upon removal, and spatial composability, the ability to declare and reactively manage inter-component dependencies. We address the two dimensions by lifting classical effect and coeffect concepts to runtime mechanisms. In particular, we formalize revertible effects, in which every context transformation carries an inverse that the runtime holds, establishing temporal composability local to one component. We formalize reactive coeffects, in which every context change is classified against a component's coeffect specification to drive its activation and deactivation, establishing spatial composability local to one component. We then unify the effect context and the coeffect context into a single context type and mediate every effect and coeffect through it, yielding a discipline we call the context paradigm; the mediation induces an observational equivalence up to which the effects of distinct components interleave without disturbing one another. Combining these mechanisms into the notion of a component, we give a calculus of dynamic composition whose metatheory carries spatiotemporal composability from a single component to a whole system of interleaved components. We implement these ideas in Cordis, a meta-framework of spatiotemporal composability that provides a core library with effect tracking and coeffect resolution, as well as a declarative component loader with configuration reconciliation and hot module replacement.

deepseek-ai DeepSeek
·
Aug 25

Gather-Scatter Mamba: Accelerating Propagation with Efficient State Space Model

State Space Models (SSMs)-most notably RNNs-have historically played a central role in sequential modeling. Although attention mechanisms such as Transformers have since dominated due to their ability to model global context, their quadratic complexity and limited scalability make them less suited for long sequences. Video super-resolution (VSR) methods have traditionally relied on recurrent architectures to propagate features across frames. However, such approaches suffer from well-known issues including vanishing gradients, lack of parallelism, and slow inference speed. Recent advances in selective SSMs like Mamba offer a compelling alternative: by enabling input-dependent state transitions with linear-time complexity, Mamba mitigates these issues while maintaining strong long-range modeling capabilities. Despite this potential, Mamba alone struggles to capture fine-grained spatial dependencies due to its causal nature and lack of explicit context aggregation. To address this, we propose a hybrid architecture that combines shifted window self-attention for spatial context aggregation with Mamba-based selective scanning for efficient temporal propagation. Furthermore, we introduce Gather-Scatter Mamba (GSM), an alignment-aware mechanism that warps features toward a center anchor frame within the temporal window before Mamba propagation and scatters them back afterward, effectively reducing occlusion artifacts and ensuring effective redistribution of aggregated information across all frames. The official implementation is provided at: https://github.com/Ko-Lani/GSMamba.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 1, 2025

Modeling Inter-Dependence Between Time and Mark in Multivariate Temporal Point Processes

Temporal Point Processes (TPP) are probabilistic generative frameworks. They model discrete event sequences localized in continuous time. Generally, real-life events reveal descriptive information, known as marks. Marked TPPs model time and marks of the event together for practical relevance. Conditioned on past events, marked TPPs aim to learn the joint distribution of the time and the mark of the next event. For simplicity, conditionally independent TPP models assume time and marks are independent given event history. They factorize the conditional joint distribution of time and mark into the product of individual conditional distributions. This structural limitation in the design of TPP models hurt the predictive performance on entangled time and mark interactions. In this work, we model the conditional inter-dependence of time and mark to overcome the limitations of conditionally independent models. We construct a multivariate TPP conditioning the time distribution on the current event mark in addition to past events. Besides the conventional intensity-based models for conditional joint distribution, we also draw on flexible intensity-free TPP models from the literature. The proposed TPP models outperform conditionally independent and dependent models in standard prediction tasks. Our experimentation on various datasets with multiple evaluation metrics highlights the merit of the proposed approach.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 27, 2022

Convolutional State Space Models for Long-Range Spatiotemporal Modeling

Effectively modeling long spatiotemporal sequences is challenging due to the need to model complex spatial correlations and long-range temporal dependencies simultaneously. ConvLSTMs attempt to address this by updating tensor-valued states with recurrent neural networks, but their sequential computation makes them slow to train. In contrast, Transformers can process an entire spatiotemporal sequence, compressed into tokens, in parallel. However, the cost of attention scales quadratically in length, limiting their scalability to longer sequences. Here, we address the challenges of prior methods and introduce convolutional state space models (ConvSSM) that combine the tensor modeling ideas of ConvLSTM with the long sequence modeling approaches of state space methods such as S4 and S5. First, we demonstrate how parallel scans can be applied to convolutional recurrences to achieve subquadratic parallelization and fast autoregressive generation. We then establish an equivalence between the dynamics of ConvSSMs and SSMs, which motivates parameterization and initialization strategies for modeling long-range dependencies. The result is ConvS5, an efficient ConvSSM variant for long-range spatiotemporal modeling. ConvS5 significantly outperforms Transformers and ConvLSTM on a long horizon Moving-MNIST experiment while training 3X faster than ConvLSTM and generating samples 400X faster than Transformers. In addition, ConvS5 matches or exceeds the performance of state-of-the-art methods on challenging DMLab, Minecraft and Habitat prediction benchmarks and enables new directions for modeling long spatiotemporal sequences.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 30, 2023

OpenSTL: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Spatio-Temporal Predictive Learning

Spatio-temporal predictive learning is a learning paradigm that enables models to learn spatial and temporal patterns by predicting future frames from given past frames in an unsupervised manner. Despite remarkable progress in recent years, a lack of systematic understanding persists due to the diverse settings, complex implementation, and difficult reproducibility. Without standardization, comparisons can be unfair and insights inconclusive. To address this dilemma, we propose OpenSTL, a comprehensive benchmark for spatio-temporal predictive learning that categorizes prevalent approaches into recurrent-based and recurrent-free models. OpenSTL provides a modular and extensible framework implementing various state-of-the-art methods. We conduct standard evaluations on datasets across various domains, including synthetic moving object trajectory, human motion, driving scenes, traffic flow and weather forecasting. Based on our observations, we provide a detailed analysis of how model architecture and dataset properties affect spatio-temporal predictive learning performance. Surprisingly, we find that recurrent-free models achieve a good balance between efficiency and performance than recurrent models. Thus, we further extend the common MetaFormers to boost recurrent-free spatial-temporal predictive learning. We open-source the code and models at https://github.com/chengtan9907/OpenSTL.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 19, 2023

How to Train Your HiPPO: State Space Models with Generalized Orthogonal Basis Projections

Linear time-invariant state space models (SSM) are a classical model from engineering and statistics, that have recently been shown to be very promising in machine learning through the Structured State Space sequence model (S4). A core component of S4 involves initializing the SSM state matrix to a particular matrix called a HiPPO matrix, which was empirically important for S4's ability to handle long sequences. However, the specific matrix that S4 uses was actually derived in previous work for a particular time-varying dynamical system, and the use of this matrix as a time-invariant SSM had no known mathematical interpretation. Consequently, the theoretical mechanism by which S4 models long-range dependencies actually remains unexplained. We derive a more general and intuitive formulation of the HiPPO framework, which provides a simple mathematical interpretation of S4 as a decomposition onto exponentially-warped Legendre polynomials, explaining its ability to capture long dependencies. Our generalization introduces a theoretically rich class of SSMs that also lets us derive more intuitive S4 variants for other bases such as the Fourier basis, and explains other aspects of training S4, such as how to initialize the important timescale parameter. These insights improve S4's performance to 86% on the Long Range Arena benchmark, with 96% on the most difficult Path-X task.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 23, 2022

Spatial-TTT: Streaming Visual-based Spatial Intelligence with Test-Time Training

Humans perceive and understand real-world spaces through a stream of visual observations. Therefore, the ability to streamingly maintain and update spatial evidence from potentially unbounded video streams is essential for spatial intelligence. The core challenge is not simply longer context windows but how spatial information is selected, organized, and retained over time. In this paper, we propose Spatial-TTT towards streaming visual-based spatial intelligence with test-time training (TTT), which adapts a subset of parameters (fast weights) to capture and organize spatial evidence over long-horizon scene videos. Specifically, we design a hybrid architecture and adopt large-chunk updates parallel with sliding-window attention for efficient spatial video processing. To further promote spatial awareness, we introduce a spatial-predictive mechanism applied to TTT layers with 3D spatiotemporal convolution, which encourages the model to capture geometric correspondence and temporal continuity across frames. Beyond architecture design, we construct a dataset with dense 3D spatial descriptions, which guides the model to update its fast weights to memorize and organize global 3D spatial signals in a structured manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Spatial-TTT improves long-horizon spatial understanding and achieves state-of-the-art performance on video spatial benchmarks. Project page: https://liuff19.github.io/Spatial-TTT.

How Different from the Past? Spatio-Temporal Time Series Forecasting with Self-Supervised Deviation Learning

Spatio-temporal forecasting is essential for real-world applications such as traffic management and urban computing. Although recent methods have shown improved accuracy, they often fail to account for dynamic deviations between current inputs and historical patterns. These deviations contain critical signals that can significantly affect model performance. To fill this gap, we propose ST-SSDL, a Spatio-Temporal time series forecasting framework that incorporates a Self-Supervised Deviation Learning scheme to capture and utilize such deviations. ST-SSDL anchors each input to its historical average and discretizes the latent space using learnable prototypes that represent typical spatio-temporal patterns. Two auxiliary objectives are proposed to refine this structure: a contrastive loss that enhances inter-prototype discriminability and a deviation loss that regularizes the distance consistency between input representations and corresponding prototypes to quantify deviation. Optimized jointly with the forecasting objective, these components guide the model to organize its hidden space and improve generalization across diverse input conditions. Experiments on six benchmark datasets show that ST-SSDL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across multiple metrics. Visualizations further demonstrate its ability to adaptively respond to varying levels of deviation in complex spatio-temporal scenarios. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/Jimmy-7664/ST-SSDL.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 6, 2025

DrivingWorld: Constructing World Model for Autonomous Driving via Video GPT

Recent successes in autoregressive (AR) generation models, such as the GPT series in natural language processing, have motivated efforts to replicate this success in visual tasks. Some works attempt to extend this approach to autonomous driving by building video-based world models capable of generating realistic future video sequences and predicting ego states. However, prior works tend to produce unsatisfactory results, as the classic GPT framework is designed to handle 1D contextual information, such as text, and lacks the inherent ability to model the spatial and temporal dynamics essential for video generation. In this paper, we present DrivingWorld, a GPT-style world model for autonomous driving, featuring several spatial-temporal fusion mechanisms. This design enables effective modeling of both spatial and temporal dynamics, facilitating high-fidelity, long-duration video generation. Specifically, we propose a next-state prediction strategy to model temporal coherence between consecutive frames and apply a next-token prediction strategy to capture spatial information within each frame. To further enhance generalization ability, we propose a novel masking strategy and reweighting strategy for token prediction to mitigate long-term drifting issues and enable precise control. Our work demonstrates the ability to produce high-fidelity and consistent video clips of over 40 seconds in duration, which is over 2 times longer than state-of-the-art driving world models. Experiments show that, in contrast to prior works, our method achieves superior visual quality and significantly more accurate controllable future video generation. Our code is available at https://github.com/YvanYin/DrivingWorld.

  • 8 authors
·
Dec 27, 2024

UniTS: Unified Time Series Generative Model for Remote Sensing

One of the primary objectives of satellite remote sensing is to capture the complex dynamics of the Earth environment, which encompasses tasks such as reconstructing continuous cloud-free time series images, detecting land cover changes, and forecasting future surface evolution. However, existing methods typically require specialized models tailored to different tasks, lacking unified modeling of spatiotemporal features across multiple time series tasks. In this paper, we propose a Unified Time Series Generative Model (UniTS), a general framework applicable to various time series tasks, including time series reconstruction, time series cloud removal, time series semantic change detection, and time series forecasting. Based on the flow matching generative paradigm, UniTS constructs a deterministic evolution path from noise to targets under the guidance of task-specific conditions, achieving unified modeling of spatiotemporal representations for multiple tasks. The UniTS architecture consists of a diffusion transformer with spatio-temporal blocks, where we design an Adaptive Condition Injector (ACor) to enhance the model's conditional perception of multimodal inputs, enabling high-quality controllable generation. Additionally, we design a Spatiotemporal-aware Modulator (STM) to improve the ability of spatio-temporal blocks to capture complex spatiotemporal dependencies. Furthermore, we construct two high-quality multimodal time series datasets, TS-S12 and TS-S12CR, filling the gap of benchmark datasets for time series cloud removal and forecasting tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniTS exhibits exceptional generative and cognitive capabilities in both low-level and high-level time series tasks. It significantly outperforms existing methods, particularly when facing challenges such as severe cloud contamination, modality absence, and forecasting phenological variations.

  • 11 authors
·
Dec 4, 2025

4DThinker: Thinking with 4D Imagery for Dynamic Spatial Understanding

Dynamic spatial reasoning from monocular video is essential for bridging visual intelligence and the physical world, yet remains challenging for vision-language models (VLMs). Prior approaches either verbalize spatial-temporal reasoning entirely as text, which is inherently verbose and imprecise for complex dynamics, or rely on external geometric modules that increase inference complexity without fostering intrinsic model capability. In this paper, we present 4DThinker, the first framework that enables VLMs to "think with 4D" through dynamic latent mental imagery, i.e., internally simulating how scenes evolve within the continuous hidden space. Specifically, we first introduce a scalable, annotation-free data generation pipeline that synthesizes 4D reasoning data from raw videos. We then propose Dynamic-Imagery Fine-Tuning (DIFT), which jointly supervises textual tokens and 4D latents to ground the model in dynamic visual semantics. Building on this, 4D Reinforcement Learning (4DRL) further tackles complex reasoning tasks via outcome-based rewards, restricting policy gradients to text tokens to ensure stable optimization. Extensive experiments across multiple dynamic spatial reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that 4DThinker consistently outperforms strong baselines and offers a new perspective toward 4D reasoning in VLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhangquanchen/4DThinker.

ODEWorld: A Continuous Predictive Architecture via Physical-Time Flow

In the physical world we inhabit, space and time are fundamentally continuous. However, existing machine learning paradigms for world modeling are largely confined to discrete-time prediction, thereby exhibiting significant inefficiency in capturing the dynamics of physical world. We introduce Physical-Time Flow (PT-Flow), a novel approach that learns a continuous latent velocity field operating in physical time. Crucially, the underlying dynamics of sequential data are parameterized by an ordinary differential equation (ODE) embedded in a well-structured representation space. Under this paradigm, the prediction of future can be recast as temporal integration via an ODE solver in the compressed latent space. Building upon PT-Flow, we construct ODEWorld, a continuous-time latent world model that is both efficient and versatile. By extracting time-variant features and enforcing ODE properties on both the dynamical representation space and the latent velocity field, ODEWorld effectively addresses the long-standing representation collapse issue in latent world model literature. This also enables high-quality image reconstruction even after long-horizon prediction. Moreover, its continuous nature allows for arbitrary temporal resolution and even backward prediction, which is impossible for most discrete-time models. Lastly, ODEWorld can provide rich planning-oriented information to facilitate downstream policy learning. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that ODEWorld successfully reconciles planning-conducive dynamics abstraction with visual realism, excelling in both video generation and robotic control. https://dstate.github.io/odeworld_website/{Project Website}.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 29 2

Looped SSMs: Depth-Recurrence and Input Reshaping for Time Series Classification

State Space Models (SSMs) are inherently recurrent along the sequence dimension, yet depth-recurrence - reusing the same block repeatedly across layers, as recently applied in looped transformers - has not been explored in this model family. We show that a looped SSM with k parameters iterated L times consistently closely matches or outperforms a standard SSM with k cdot L independent parameters across four architectures (LRU, S5, LinOSS, LrcSSM) and six time series classification benchmarks, despite operating within a strictly smaller hypothesis space, as we formally establish. Since the larger model contains the looped model as a special case, this dominance cannot be explained by expressivity and instead points to parameter sharing across depth as a beneficial inductive bias that simplifies optimization. These results demonstrate that depth-recurrence is orthogonal to sequence-recurrence and independently beneficial. We further show that input reshaping is an equally neglected design axis: concatenating timesteps for low-dimensional inputs, or flattening and rechunking the joint feature-time dimension for high-dimensional ones, yields accuracy gains of 1-6% across all models, confirmed over 5 random seeds. Both techniques provide standalone improvements that compound when combined, suggesting that depth and input reshaping are two independent and underexplored design axes for SSMs on time series.

  • 4 authors
·
May 14

TiM4Rec: An Efficient Sequential Recommendation Model Based on Time-Aware Structured State Space Duality Model

The Sequential Recommendation modeling paradigm is shifting from Transformer to Mamba architecture, which comprises two generations: Mamba1, based on the State Space Model (SSM), and Mamba2, based on State Space Duality (SSD). Although SSD offers superior computational efficiency compared to SSM, it suffers performance degradation in sequential recommendation tasks, especially in low-dimensional scenarios that are critical for these tasks. Considering that time-aware enhancement methods are commonly employed to mitigate performance loss, our analysis reveals that the performance decline of SSD can similarly be fundamentally compensated by leveraging mechanisms in time-aware methods. Thus, we propose integrating time-awareness into the SSD framework to address these performance issues. However, integrating current time-aware methods, modeled after TiSASRec, into SSD faces the following challenges: 1) the complexity of integrating these transformer-based mechanisms with the SSD architecture, and 2) the computational inefficiency caused by the need for dimensionality expansion of time-difference modeling. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a novel Time-aware Structured Masked Matrix that efficiently incorporates time-aware capabilities into SSD. Building on this, we propose Time-Aware Mamba for Recommendation (TiM4Rec), which mitigates performance degradation in low-dimensional SSD contexts while preserving computational efficiency. This marks the inaugural application of a time-aware enhancement method specifically tailored for the Mamba architecture within the domain of sequential recommendation. Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach. The code for our model is accessible at https://github.com/AlwaysFHao/TiM4Rec.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 24, 2024

Theory of Space: Can Foundation Models Construct Spatial Beliefs through Active Exploration?

Spatial embodied intelligence requires agents to act to acquire information under partial observability. While multimodal foundation models excel at passive perception, their capacity for active, self-directed exploration remains understudied. We propose Theory of Space, defined as an agent's ability to actively acquire information through self-directed, active exploration and to construct, revise, and exploit a spatial belief from sequential, partial observations. We evaluate this through a benchmark where the goal is curiosity-driven exploration to build an accurate cognitive map. A key innovation is spatial belief probing, which prompts models to reveal their internal spatial representations at each step. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art models reveals several critical bottlenecks. First, we identify an Active-Passive Gap, where performance drops significantly when agents must autonomously gather information. Second, we find high inefficiency, as models explore unsystematically compared to program-based proxies. Through belief probing, we diagnose that while perception is an initial bottleneck, global beliefs suffer from instability that causes spatial knowledge to degrade over time. Finally, using a false belief paradigm, we uncover Belief Inertia, where agents fail to update obsolete priors with new evidence. This issue is present in text-based agents but is particularly severe in vision-based models. Our findings suggest that current foundation models struggle to maintain coherent, revisable spatial beliefs during active exploration.

  • 14 authors
·
Feb 4 2

Bayesian Bi-clustering of Neural Spiking Activity with Latent Structures

Modern neural recording techniques allow neuroscientists to obtain spiking activity of multiple neurons from different brain regions over long time periods, which requires new statistical methods to be developed for understanding structure of the large-scale data. In this paper, we develop a bi-clustering method to cluster the neural spiking activity spatially and temporally, according to their low-dimensional latent structures. The spatial (neuron) clusters are defined by the latent trajectories within each neural population, while the temporal (state) clusters are defined by (populationally) synchronous local linear dynamics shared with different periods. To flexibly extract the bi-clustering structure, we build the model non-parametrically, and develop an efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm to sample the posterior distributions of model parameters. Validating our proposed MCMC algorithm through simulations, we find the method can recover unknown parameters and true bi-clustering structures successfully. We then apply the proposed bi-clustering method to multi-regional neural recordings under different experiment settings, where we find that simultaneously considering latent trajectories and spatial-temporal clustering structures can provide us with a more accurate and interpretable result. Overall, the proposed method provides scientific insights for large-scale (counting) time series with elongated recording periods, and it can potentially have application beyond neuroscience.

  • 1 authors
·
Sep 5, 2023

Thinking in Dynamics: How Multimodal Large Language Models Perceive, Track, and Reason Dynamics in Physical 4D World

Humans inhabit a physical 4D world where geometric structure and semantic content evolve over time, constituting a dynamic 4D reality (spatial with temporal dimension). While current Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel in static visual understanding, can they also be adept at "thinking in dynamics", i.e., perceive, track and reason about spatio-temporal dynamics in evolving scenes? To systematically assess their spatio-temporal reasoning and localized dynamics perception capabilities, we introduce Dyn-Bench, a large-scale benchmark built from diverse real-world and synthetic video datasets, enabling robust and scalable evaluation of spatio-temporal understanding. Through multi-stage filtering from massive 2D and 4D data sources, Dyn-Bench provides a high-quality collection of dynamic scenes, comprising 1k videos, 7k visual question answering (VQA) pairs, and 3k dynamic object grounding pairs. We probe general, spatial and region-level MLLMs to express how they think in dynamics both linguistically and visually, and find that existing models cannot simultaneously maintain strong performance in both spatio-temporal reasoning and dynamic object grounding, often producing inconsistent interpretations of motion and interaction. Notably, conventional prompting strategies (e.g., chain-of-thought or caption-based hints) provide limited improvement, whereas structured integration approaches, including Mask-Guided Fusion and Spatio-Temporal Textual Cognitive Map (ST-TCM), significantly enhance MLLMs' dynamics perception and spatio-temporal reasoning in the physical 4D world. Code and benchmark are available at https://dyn-bench.github.io/.

  • 17 authors
·
Mar 13

ABC: Any-Subset Autoregression via Non-Markovian Diffusion Bridges in Continuous Time and Space

Generating continuous-time, continuous-space stochastic processes (e.g., videos, weather forecasts) conditioned on partial observations (e.g., first and last frames) is a fundamental challenge. Existing approaches, (e.g., diffusion models), suffer from key limitations: (1) noise-to-data evolution fails to capture structural similarity between states close in physical time and has unstable integration in low-step regimes; (2) random noise injected is insensitive to the physical process's time elapsed, resulting in incorrect dynamics; (3) they overlook conditioning on arbitrary subsets of states (e.g., irregularly sampled timesteps, future observations). We propose ABC: Any-Subset Autoregressive Models via Non-Markovian Diffusion Bridges in Continuous Time and Space. Crucially, we model the process with one continual SDE whose time variable and intermediate states track the real time and process states. This has provable advantages: (1) the starting point for generating future states is the already-close previous state, rather than uninformative noise; (2) random noise injection scales with physical time elapsed, encouraging physically plausible dynamics with similar time-adjacent states. We derive SDE dynamics via changes-of-measure on path space, yielding another advantage: (3) path-dependent conditioning on arbitrary subsets of the state history and/or future. To learn these dynamics, we derive a path- and time-dependent extension of denoising score matching. Our experiments show ABC's superiority to competing methods on multiple domains, including video generation and weather forecasting.

  • 6 authors
·
May 4

POST: Prior-Observation Adversarial Learning of Spatio-Temporal Associations for Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection

Existing Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection (MTSAD) frameworks increasingly rely on integrating Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) with sequence models to capture complex spatio-temporal dependencies. However, less attention is paid to the spatial over-generalization problem, where unconstrained structural modeling indiscriminately reconstructs anomalies, inevitably degrading detection recall. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel framework that unifies spatio-temporal modeling through a joint prior-observation adversarial learning paradigm. In the spatial dimension, the model alternately learns adjacency matrices as structural prior and models the association discrepancy between prior and data-driven observation in a minimax manner during training. Such adversarial optimization not only improves the model sensitivity for time-wise detection, but also enables the model to localize anomalies to specific channels. To systematically evaluate this anomaly localization capability, we further construct a synthetic benchmark equipped with precise channel-wise annotations. Extensive experiments across public datasets and our dedicated benchmark demonstrate that the proposed framework establishes a new state-of-the-art in both time-wise detection and spatial localization tasks. Our code, pre-trained models, and benchmark are publicly available at https://github.com/anocodetest1/POST.

  • 3 authors
·
May 17

On the Parameterization and Initialization of Diagonal State Space Models

State space models (SSM) have recently been shown to be very effective as a deep learning layer as a promising alternative to sequence models such as RNNs, CNNs, or Transformers. The first version to show this potential was the S4 model, which is particularly effective on tasks involving long-range dependencies by using a prescribed state matrix called the HiPPO matrix. While this has an interpretable mathematical mechanism for modeling long dependencies, it introduces a custom representation and algorithm that can be difficult to implement. On the other hand, a recent variant of S4 called DSS showed that restricting the state matrix to be fully diagonal can still preserve the performance of the original model when using a specific initialization based on approximating S4's matrix. This work seeks to systematically understand how to parameterize and initialize such diagonal state space models. While it follows from classical results that almost all SSMs have an equivalent diagonal form, we show that the initialization is critical for performance. We explain why DSS works mathematically, by showing that the diagonal restriction of S4's matrix surprisingly recovers the same kernel in the limit of infinite state dimension. We also systematically describe various design choices in parameterizing and computing diagonal SSMs, and perform a controlled empirical study ablating the effects of these choices. Our final model S4D is a simple diagonal version of S4 whose kernel computation requires just 2 lines of code and performs comparably to S4 in almost all settings, with state-of-the-art results for image, audio, and medical time-series domains, and averaging 85\% on the Long Range Arena benchmark.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 23, 2022

FourierGNN: Rethinking Multivariate Time Series Forecasting from a Pure Graph Perspective

Multivariate time series (MTS) forecasting has shown great importance in numerous industries. Current state-of-the-art graph neural network (GNN)-based forecasting methods usually require both graph networks (e.g., GCN) and temporal networks (e.g., LSTM) to capture inter-series (spatial) dynamics and intra-series (temporal) dependencies, respectively. However, the uncertain compatibility of the two networks puts an extra burden on handcrafted model designs. Moreover, the separate spatial and temporal modeling naturally violates the unified spatiotemporal inter-dependencies in real world, which largely hinders the forecasting performance. To overcome these problems, we explore an interesting direction of directly applying graph networks and rethink MTS forecasting from a pure graph perspective. We first define a novel data structure, hypervariate graph, which regards each series value (regardless of variates or timestamps) as a graph node, and represents sliding windows as space-time fully-connected graphs. This perspective considers spatiotemporal dynamics unitedly and reformulates classic MTS forecasting into the predictions on hypervariate graphs. Then, we propose a novel architecture Fourier Graph Neural Network (FourierGNN) by stacking our proposed Fourier Graph Operator (FGO) to perform matrix multiplications in Fourier space. FourierGNN accommodates adequate expressiveness and achieves much lower complexity, which can effectively and efficiently accomplish the forecasting. Besides, our theoretical analysis reveals FGO's equivalence to graph convolutions in the time domain, which further verifies the validity of FourierGNN. Extensive experiments on seven datasets have demonstrated our superior performance with higher efficiency and fewer parameters compared with state-of-the-art methods.

  • 9 authors
·
Nov 9, 2023

MambaMixer: Efficient Selective State Space Models with Dual Token and Channel Selection

Recent advances in deep learning have mainly relied on Transformers due to their data dependency and ability to learn at scale. The attention module in these architectures, however, exhibits quadratic time and space in input size, limiting their scalability for long-sequence modeling. Despite recent attempts to design efficient and effective architecture backbone for multi-dimensional data, such as images and multivariate time series, existing models are either data independent, or fail to allow inter- and intra-dimension communication. Recently, State Space Models (SSMs), and more specifically Selective State Space Models, with efficient hardware-aware implementation, have shown promising potential for long sequence modeling. Motivated by the success of SSMs, we present MambaMixer, a new architecture with data-dependent weights that uses a dual selection mechanism across tokens and channels, called Selective Token and Channel Mixer. MambaMixer connects selective mixers using a weighted averaging mechanism, allowing layers to have direct access to early features. As a proof of concept, we design Vision MambaMixer (ViM2) and Time Series MambaMixer (TSM2) architectures based on the MambaMixer block and explore their performance in various vision and time series forecasting tasks. Our results underline the importance of selective mixing across both tokens and channels. In ImageNet classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation tasks, ViM2 achieves competitive performance with well-established vision models and outperforms SSM-based vision models. In time series forecasting, TSM2 achieves outstanding performance compared to state-of-the-art methods while demonstrating significantly improved computational cost. These results show that while Transformers, cross-channel attention, and MLPs are sufficient for good performance in time series forecasting, neither is necessary.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 28, 2024 1

SpaceVLLM: Endowing Multimodal Large Language Model with Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding Capability

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made remarkable progress in either temporal or spatial localization. However, they struggle to perform spatio-temporal video grounding. This limitation stems from two major challenges. Firstly, it is difficult to extract accurate spatio-temporal information of each frame in the video. Secondly, the substantial number of visual tokens makes it challenging to precisely map visual tokens of each frame to their corresponding spatial coordinates. To address these issues, we introduce SpaceVLLM, a MLLM endowed with spatio-temporal video grounding capability. Specifically, we adopt a set of interleaved Spatio-Temporal Aware Queries to capture temporal perception and dynamic spatial information. Moreover, we propose a Query-Guided Space Decoder to establish a corresponding connection between the queries and spatial coordinates. Additionally, due to the lack of spatio-temporal datasets, we construct the Unified Spatio-Temporal Grounding (Uni-STG) dataset, comprising 480K instances across three tasks. This dataset fully exploits the potential of MLLM to simultaneously facilitate localization in both temporal and spatial dimensions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SpaceVLLM achieves the state-of-the-art performance across 11 benchmarks covering temporal, spatial, spatio-temporal and video understanding tasks, highlighting the effectiveness of our approach. Our code, datasets and model will be released at https://github.com/Jayce1kk/SpaceVLLM.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 18, 2025

Persistent-Transient Duality: A Multi-mechanism Approach for Modeling Human-Object Interaction

Humans are highly adaptable, swiftly switching between different modes to progressively handle different tasks, situations and contexts. In Human-object interaction (HOI) activities, these modes can be attributed to two mechanisms: (1) the large-scale consistent plan for the whole activity and (2) the small-scale children interactive actions that start and end along the timeline. While neuroscience and cognitive science have confirmed this multi-mechanism nature of human behavior, machine modeling approaches for human motion are trailing behind. While attempted to use gradually morphing structures (e.g., graph attention networks) to model the dynamic HOI patterns, they miss the expeditious and discrete mode-switching nature of the human motion. To bridge that gap, this work proposes to model two concurrent mechanisms that jointly control human motion: the Persistent process that runs continually on the global scale, and the Transient sub-processes that operate intermittently on the local context of the human while interacting with objects. These two mechanisms form an interactive Persistent-Transient Duality that synergistically governs the activity sequences. We model this conceptual duality by a parent-child neural network of Persistent and Transient channels with a dedicated neural module for dynamic mechanism switching. The framework is trialed on HOI motion forecasting. On two rich datasets and a wide variety of settings, the model consistently delivers superior performances, proving its suitability for the challenge.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 24, 2023

Multi-Temporal Relationship Inference in Urban Areas

Finding multiple temporal relationships among locations can benefit a bunch of urban applications, such as dynamic offline advertising and smart public transport planning. While some efforts have been made on finding static relationships among locations, little attention is focused on studying time-aware location relationships. Indeed, abundant location-based human activities are time-varying and the availability of these data enables a new paradigm for understanding the dynamic relationships in a period among connective locations. To this end, we propose to study a new problem, namely multi-Temporal relationship inference among locations (Trial for short), where the major challenge is how to integrate dynamic and geographical influence under the relationship sparsity constraint. Specifically, we propose a solution to Trial with a graph learning scheme, which includes a spatially evolving graph neural network (SEENet) with two collaborative components: spatially evolving graph convolution module (SEConv) and spatially evolving self-supervised learning strategy (SE-SSL). SEConv performs the intra-time aggregation and inter-time propagation to capture the multifaceted spatially evolving contexts from the view of location message passing. In addition, SE-SSL designs time-aware self-supervised learning tasks in a global-local manner with additional evolving constraint to enhance the location representation learning and further handle the relationship sparsity. Finally, experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method over several state-of-the-art approaches.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 15, 2023

INSPATIO-WORLD: A Real-Time 4D World Simulator via Spatiotemporal Autoregressive Modeling

Building world models with spatial consistency and real-time interactivity remains a fundamental challenge in computer vision. Current video generation paradigms often struggle with a lack of spatial persistence and insufficient visual realism, making it difficult to support seamless navigation in complex environments. To address these challenges, we propose INSPATIO-WORLD, a novel real-time framework capable of recovering and generating high-fidelity, dynamic interactive scenes from a single reference video. At the core of our approach is a Spatiotemporal Autoregressive (STAR) architecture, which enables consistent and controllable scene evolution through two tightly coupled components: Implicit Spatiotemporal Cache aggregates reference and historical observations into a latent world representation, ensuring global consistency during long-horizon navigation; Explicit Spatial Constraint Module enforces geometric structure and translates user interactions into precise and physically plausible camera trajectories. Furthermore, we introduce Joint Distribution Matching Distillation (JDMD). By using real-world data distributions as a regularizing guide, JDMD effectively overcomes the fidelity degradation typically caused by over-reliance on synthetic data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that INSPATIO-WORLD significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) models in spatial consistency and interaction precision, ranking first among real-time interactive methods on the WorldScore-Dynamic benchmark, and establishing a practical pipeline for navigating 4D environments reconstructed from monocular videos.

  • 23 authors
·
Apr 7 2

S-Agent: Spatial Tool-Use Elicits Reasoning for Spatial Intelligence

Real-world spatial intelligence requires reasoning over a continuous and evolving 3D world, yet existing VLMs and tool-augmented agents largely remain tied to static, stateless inference from isolated visual observations. We introduce \textsc{S-Agent}, a spatial tool-use agentic paradigm for understanding and reasoning over continuous multi-view images and videos. By formulating spatial reasoning as spatio-temporal evidence accumulation rather than isolated frame-level prediction, S-Agent reshapes spatial perception into scene-centric understanding beyond frame-centric recognition. Specifically, S-Agent casts the VLM as a semantic planner that decides what evidence is needed, while a hierarchy of spatial tools and experts grounds objects in 2D, lifts them into 3D geometric evidence, and aggregates this evidence into high-level spatial knowledge (e.g., counting, measurement, orientation, and relative position). Additionally, a temporal memory mechanism, including Scene Memory for maintaining the evolving scene state and Agent Memory for accumulating reasoning context, enables evidence integration across frames and reasoning steps. Comprehensive experiments on multi-view and video spatial reasoning benchmarks show that S-Agent consistently improves both open-source and closed-source VLMs in a training-free manner. Beyond inference-time augmentation, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on S-Agent-generated spatial trajectories S-300K yields S-Agent-8B, a compact spatial agent that significantly surpasses similar-scale baselines (e.g., Qwen3-VL-8B) and performs comparably to advanced closed-source models (e.g., GPT-5.4 and Gemini 3).

ropedia-ai Ropedia
·
Jun 17 3

Time-Evolving Dynamical System for Learning Latent Representations of Mouse Visual Neural Activity

Seeking high-quality representations with latent variable models (LVMs) to reveal the intrinsic correlation between neural activity and behavior or sensory stimuli has attracted much interest. In the study of the biological visual system, naturalistic visual stimuli are inherently high-dimensional and time-dependent, leading to intricate dynamics within visual neural activity. However, most work on LVMs has not explicitly considered neural temporal relationships. To cope with such conditions, we propose Time-Evolving Visual Dynamical System (TE-ViDS), a sequential LVM that decomposes neural activity into low-dimensional latent representations that evolve over time. To better align the model with the characteristics of visual neural activity, we split latent representations into two parts and apply contrastive learning to shape them. Extensive experiments on synthetic datasets and real neural datasets from the mouse visual cortex demonstrate that TE-ViDS achieves the best decoding performance on naturalistic scenes/movies, extracts interpretable latent trajectories that uncover clear underlying neural dynamics, and provides new insights into differences in visual information processing between subjects and between cortical regions. In summary, TE-ViDS is markedly competent in extracting stimulus-relevant embeddings from visual neural activity and contributes to the understanding of visual processing mechanisms. Our codes are available at https://github.com/Grasshlw/Time-Evolving-Visual-Dynamical-System.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 14, 2024

Time Blindness: Why Video-Language Models Can't See What Humans Can?

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have made impressive strides in understanding spatio-temporal relationships in videos. However, when spatial information is obscured, these models struggle to capture purely temporal patterns. We introduce SpookyBench, a benchmark where information is encoded solely in temporal sequences of noise-like frames, mirroring natural phenomena from biological signaling to covert communication. Interestingly, while humans can recognize shapes, text, and patterns in these sequences with over 98% accuracy, state-of-the-art VLMs achieve 0% accuracy. This performance gap highlights a critical limitation: an over-reliance on frame-level spatial features and an inability to extract meaning from temporal cues. Furthermore, when trained in data sets with low spatial signal-to-noise ratios (SNR), temporal understanding of models degrades more rapidly than human perception, especially in tasks requiring fine-grained temporal reasoning. Overcoming this limitation will require novel architectures or training paradigms that decouple spatial dependencies from temporal processing. Our systematic analysis shows that this issue persists across model scales and architectures. We release SpookyBench to catalyze research in temporal pattern recognition and bridge the gap between human and machine video understanding. Dataset and code has been made available on our project website: https://timeblindness.github.io/.

  • 4 authors
·
May 30, 2025 3

DSAR: Dual-Stream Autoregressive Modeling of Temporal Cloth Dynamics for Photorealistic Animatable Avatars

Creating photorealistic and temporally coherent animatable human avatars from RGB videos remains challenging. Current methods struggle to capture realistic cloth dynamics, producing over-smoothed appearance or severe artifacts on out-of-distribution poses. This limitation stems from a fundamental oversight: existing approaches neglect the temporal causality inherent in cloth physics, where current states emerge from previous states through temporal evolution rather than instantaneous skeletal configurations alone. Without explicit modeling of this causal structure, networks learn pose-appearance correlations instead of motion evolution, leading to poor generalization. We introduce a dual-stream autoregressive framework that explicitly models both observable geometric information and implicit internal state. The geometric stream propagates surface displacement from the previous frame, while the state stream fuses current features with historical states retrieved from a memory bank. Motion-adaptive aggregation handles spatially-varying dynamics, and adaptive regularization balances smoothness with flexibility. Experiments on challenging datasets demonstrate significant improvements in rendering quality, temporal consistency, and generalization to motion patterns beyond training distributions, validating that dual-stream temporal modeling enables realistic cloth dynamics.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 10 1

ST-VLM: Kinematic Instruction Tuning for Spatio-Temporal Reasoning in Vision-Language Models

Spatio-temporal reasoning is essential in understanding real-world environments in various fields, eg, autonomous driving and sports analytics. Recent advances have improved the spatial reasoning ability of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) by introducing large-scale data, but these models still struggle to analyze kinematic elements like traveled distance and speed of moving objects. To bridge this gap, we construct a spatio-temporal reasoning dataset and benchmark involving kinematic instruction tuning, referred to as STKit and STKit-Bench. They consist of real-world videos with 3D annotations, detailing object motion dynamics: traveled distance, speed, movement direction, inter-object distance comparisons, and relative movement direction. To further scale such data construction to videos without 3D labels, we propose an automatic pipeline to generate pseudo-labels using 4D reconstruction in real-world scale. With our kinematic instruction tuning data for spatio-temporal reasoning, we present ST-VLM, a VLM enhanced for spatio-temporal reasoning, which exhibits outstanding performance on STKit-Bench. Furthermore, we show that ST-VLM generalizes robustly across diverse domains and tasks, outperforming baselines on other spatio-temporal benchmarks (eg, ActivityNet, TVQA+). Finally, by integrating learned spatio-temporal reasoning with existing abilities, ST-VLM enables complex multi-step reasoning. Project page: https://ikodoh.github.io/ST-VLM.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 25, 2025 1

Tempo Adaptation in Non-stationary Reinforcement Learning

We first raise and tackle a ``time synchronization'' issue between the agent and the environment in non-stationary reinforcement learning (RL), a crucial factor hindering its real-world applications. In reality, environmental changes occur over wall-clock time (t) rather than episode progress (k), where wall-clock time signifies the actual elapsed time within the fixed duration t in [0, T]. In existing works, at episode k, the agent rolls a trajectory and trains a policy before transitioning to episode k+1. In the context of the time-desynchronized environment, however, the agent at time t_{k} allocates Δt for trajectory generation and training, subsequently moves to the next episode at t_{k+1}=t_{k}+Δt. Despite a fixed total number of episodes (K), the agent accumulates different trajectories influenced by the choice of interaction times (t_1,t_2,...,t_K), significantly impacting the suboptimality gap of the policy. We propose a Proactively Synchronizing Tempo (ProST) framework that computes a suboptimal sequence {t_1,t_2,...,t_K} (= { t_{1:K}}) by minimizing an upper bound on its performance measure, i.e., the dynamic regret. Our main contribution is that we show that a suboptimal {t_{1:K}} trades-off between the policy training time (agent tempo) and how fast the environment changes (environment tempo). Theoretically, this work develops a suboptimal {t_{1:K}} as a function of the degree of the environment's non-stationarity while also achieving a sublinear dynamic regret. Our experimental evaluation on various high-dimensional non-stationary environments shows that the ProST framework achieves a higher online return at suboptimal {t_{1:K}} than the existing methods.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 26, 2023

Strefer: Empowering Video LLMs with Space-Time Referring and Reasoning via Synthetic Instruction Data

Next-generation AI companions must go beyond general video understanding to resolve spatial and temporal references in dynamic, real-world environments. Existing Video Large Language Models (Video LLMs), while capable of coarse-level comprehension, struggle with fine-grained, spatiotemporal reasoning, especially when user queries rely on time-based event references for temporal anchoring, or gestural cues for spatial anchoring to clarify object references and positions. To bridge this critical gap, we introduce Strefer, a synthetic instruction data generation framework designed to equip Video LLMs with spatiotemporal referring and reasoning capabilities. Strefer produces diverse instruction-tuning data using a data engine that pseudo-annotates temporally dense, fine-grained video metadata, capturing rich spatial and temporal information in a structured manner, including subjects, objects, their locations as masklets, and their action descriptions and timelines. Our approach enhances the ability of Video LLMs to interpret spatial and temporal references, fostering more versatile, space-time-aware reasoning essential for real-world AI companions. Without using proprietary models, costly human annotation, or the need to annotate large volumes of new videos, experimental evaluations show that models trained with data produced by Strefer outperform baselines on tasks requiring spatial and temporal disambiguation. Additionally, these models exhibit enhanced space-time-aware reasoning, establishing a new foundation for perceptually grounded, instruction-tuned Video LLMs.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 3, 2025

Separable neural architectures as a primitive for unified predictive and generative intelligence

Intelligent systems across physics, language and perception often exhibit factorisable structure, yet are typically modelled by monolithic neural architectures that do not explicitly exploit this structure. The separable neural architecture (SNA) addresses this by formalising a representational class that unifies additive, quadratic and tensor-decomposed neural models. By constraining interaction order and tensor rank, SNAs impose a structural inductive bias that factorises high-dimensional mappings into low-arity components. Separability need not be a property of the system itself: it often emerges in the coordinates or representations through which the system is expressed. Crucially, this coordinate-aware formulation reveals a structural analogy between chaotic spatiotemporal dynamics and linguistic autoregression. By treating continuous physical states as smooth, separable embeddings, SNAs enable distributional modelling of chaotic systems. This approach mitigates the nonphysical drift characteristics of deterministic operators whilst remaining applicable to discrete sequences. The compositional versatility of this approach is demonstrated across four domains: autonomous waypoint navigation via reinforcement learning, inverse generation of multifunctional microstructures, distributional modelling of turbulent flow and neural language modelling. These results establish the separable neural architecture as a domain-agnostic primitive for predictive and generative intelligence, capable of unifying both deterministic and distributional representations.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 12

Spatial-Temporal Transformer Networks for Traffic Flow Forecasting

Traffic forecasting has emerged as a core component of intelligent transportation systems. However, timely accurate traffic forecasting, especially long-term forecasting, still remains an open challenge due to the highly nonlinear and dynamic spatial-temporal dependencies of traffic flows. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm of Spatial-Temporal Transformer Networks (STTNs) that leverages dynamical directed spatial dependencies and long-range temporal dependencies to improve the accuracy of long-term traffic forecasting. Specifically, we present a new variant of graph neural networks, named spatial transformer, by dynamically modeling directed spatial dependencies with self-attention mechanism to capture realtime traffic conditions as well as the directionality of traffic flows. Furthermore, different spatial dependency patterns can be jointly modeled with multi-heads attention mechanism to consider diverse relationships related to different factors (e.g. similarity, connectivity and covariance). On the other hand, the temporal transformer is utilized to model long-range bidirectional temporal dependencies across multiple time steps. Finally, they are composed as a block to jointly model the spatial-temporal dependencies for accurate traffic prediction. Compared to existing works, the proposed model enables fast and scalable training over a long range spatial-temporal dependencies. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves competitive results compared with the state-of-the-arts, especially forecasting long-term traffic flows on real-world PeMS-Bay and PeMSD7(M) datasets.

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 9, 2020 1

DADP: Domain Adaptive Diffusion Policy

Learning domain adaptive policies that can generalize to unseen transition dynamics, remains a fundamental challenge in learning-based control. Substantial progress has been made through domain representation learning to capture domain-specific information, thus enabling domain-aware decision making. We analyze the process of learning domain representations through dynamical prediction and find that selecting contexts adjacent to the current step causes the learned representations to entangle static domain information with varying dynamical properties. Such mixture can confuse the conditioned policy, thereby constraining zero-shot adaptation. To tackle the challenge, we propose DADP (Domain Adaptive Diffusion Policy), which achieves robust adaptation through unsupervised disentanglement and domain-aware diffusion injection. First, we introduce Lagged Context Dynamical Prediction, a strategy that conditions future state estimation on a historical offset context; by increasing this temporal gap, we unsupervisedly disentangle static domain representations by filtering out transient properties. Second, we integrate the learned domain representations directly into the generative process by biasing the prior distribution and reformulating the diffusion target. Extensive experiments on challenging benchmarks across locomotion and manipulation demonstrate the superior performance, and the generalizability of DADP over prior methods. More visualization results are available on the https://outsider86.github.io/DomainAdaptiveDiffusionPolicy/.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 16

Spatially-Aware Transformer for Embodied Agents

Episodic memory plays a crucial role in various cognitive processes, such as the ability to mentally recall past events. While cognitive science emphasizes the significance of spatial context in the formation and retrieval of episodic memory, the current primary approach to implementing episodic memory in AI systems is through transformers that store temporally ordered experiences, which overlooks the spatial dimension. As a result, it is unclear how the underlying structure could be extended to incorporate the spatial axis beyond temporal order alone and thereby what benefits can be obtained. To address this, this paper explores the use of Spatially-Aware Transformer models that incorporate spatial information. These models enable the creation of place-centric episodic memory that considers both temporal and spatial dimensions. Adopting this approach, we demonstrate that memory utilization efficiency can be improved, leading to enhanced accuracy in various place-centric downstream tasks. Additionally, we propose the Adaptive Memory Allocator, a memory management method based on reinforcement learning that aims to optimize efficiency of memory utilization. Our experiments demonstrate the advantages of our proposed model in various environments and across multiple downstream tasks, including prediction, generation, reasoning, and reinforcement learning. The source code for our models and experiments will be available at https://github.com/junmokane/spatially-aware-transformer.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 23, 2024

Can Image Models Imagine Time? ImageTime: A Novel Benchmark for Probing Visual World Modeling Through Spatiotemporal Consistency

Image generation models now produce high-quality static images, yet their ability to represent how a visual world changes over time remains poorly understood. Practical workflows such as storyboarding, step-by-step illustration, reference-guided editing, and video previsualization require models to preserve identities, objects, spatial relations, and causal order across multiple visual states. Existing evaluations largely measure single-image correctness, compositional alignment, or video quality, leaving open whether an image model can coherently imagine a temporally ordered process. We introduce ImageTime, a diagnostic benchmark that uses spatiotemporal consistency as a behavioral probe of visual world modeling in image generation. Given an action instruction, and optionally a reference image specifying the initial state, a model must generate one image containing four ordered key states: initial state, action onset, transition state, and final state. This four-keyframe protocol is more temporally demanding than single-image generation while avoiding the confounds of dense video dynamics. ImageTime organizes tasks with a progressive capability hierarchy and decomposes each scenario into stage-wise state predicates, cross-frame temporal constraints, and forbidden causal violations. GPT-5.5 scores all generated images under a structured VLM-as-judge protocol, producing interpretable capability scores, diagnostic subscores, and failure labels. Through multi-family benchmarking, ImageTime reveals where current image generation systems succeed, fail, and drift when asked to maintain coherent visual world states over time.

  • 2 authors
·
Jun 9

Causality-Aware Temporal Projection for Video Understanding in Video-LLMs

Recent Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) have shown strong multimodal reasoning capabilities, yet remain challenged by video understanding tasks that require consistent temporal ordering and causal coherence. Many parameter-efficient Video-LLMs rely on unconstrained bidirectional projectors to model inter-frame interactions, which can blur temporal ordering by allowing later frames to influence earlier representations, without explicit architectural mechanisms to respect the directional nature of video reasoning. To address this limitation, we propose V-CORE, a parameter-efficient framework that introduces explicit temporal ordering constraints for video understanding. V-CORE consists of two key components: (1) Learnable Spatial Aggregation (LSA), which adaptively selects salient spatial tokens to reduce redundancy, and (2) a Causality-Aware Temporal Projector (CATP), which enforces structured unidirectional information flow via block-causal attention and a terminal dynamic summary token acting as a causal sink. This design preserves intra-frame spatial interactions while ensuring that temporal information is aggregated in a strictly ordered manner. With 4-bit QLoRA and a frozen LLM backbone, V-CORE can be trained efficiently on a single consumer GPU. Experiments show that V-CORE achieves strong performance on the challenging NExT-QA benchmark, reaching 61.2% accuracy, and remains competitive across MSVD-QA, MSRVTT-QA, and TGIF-QA, with gains concentrated in temporal and causal reasoning subcategories (+3.5% and +5.2% respectively), directly validating the importance of explicit temporal ordering constraints.

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 5

Benchmarking Spatiotemporal Reasoning in LLMs and Reasoning Models: Capabilities and Challenges

Spatiotemporal reasoning plays a key role in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). Despite advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), their capacity to reason about complex spatiotemporal signals remains underexplored. This paper proposes a hierarchical SpatioTemporal reAsoning benchmaRK, STARK, to systematically evaluate LLMs across three levels of reasoning complexity: state estimation (e.g., predicting field variables, localizing and tracking events in space and time), spatiotemporal reasoning over states (e.g., inferring spatial-temporal relationships), and world-knowledge-aware reasoning that integrates contextual and domain knowledge (e.g., intent prediction, landmark-aware navigation). We curate 26 distinct spatiotemporal tasks with diverse sensor modalities, comprising 14,552 challenges where models answer directly or by Python Code Interpreter. Evaluating 3 LRMs and 8 LLMs, we find LLMs achieve limited success in tasks requiring geometric reasoning (e.g., multilateration or triangulation), particularly as complexity increases. Surprisingly, LRMs show robust performance across tasks with various levels of difficulty, often competing or surpassing traditional first-principle-based methods. Our results show that in reasoning tasks requiring world knowledge, the performance gap between LLMs and LRMs narrows, with some LLMs even surpassing LRMs. However, the LRM o3 model continues to achieve leading performance across all evaluated tasks, a result attributed primarily to the larger size of the reasoning models. STARK motivates future innovations in model architectures and reasoning paradigms for intelligent CPS by providing a structured framework to identify limitations in the spatiotemporal reasoning of LLMs and LRMs.

  • 5 authors
·
May 16, 2025

MLLM-4D: Towards Visual-based Spatial-Temporal Intelligence

Humans are born with vision-based 4D spatial-temporal intelligence, which enables us to perceive and reason about the evolution of 3D space over time from purely visual inputs. Despite its importance, this capability remains a significant bottleneck for current multimodal large language models (MLLMs). To tackle this challenge, we introduce MLLM-4D, a comprehensive framework designed to bridge the gaps in training data curation and model post-training for spatiotemporal understanding and reasoning. On the data front, we develop a cost-efficient data curation pipeline that repurposes existing stereo video datasets into high-quality 4D spatiotemporal instructional data. This results in the MLLM4D-2M and MLLM4D-R1-30k datasets for Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT), alongside MLLM4D-Bench for comprehensive evaluation. Regarding model training, our post-training strategy establishes a foundational 4D understanding via SFT and further catalyzes 4D reasoning capabilities by employing Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with specialized Spatiotemporal Chain of Thought (ST-CoT) prompting and Spatiotemporal reward functions (ST-reward) without involving the modification of architecture. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MLLM-4D achieves state-of-the-art spatial-temporal understanding and reasoning capabilities from purely 2D RGB inputs. Project page: https://github.com/GVCLab/MLLM-4D.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 28

Disentangling Spatial and Temporal Learning for Efficient Image-to-Video Transfer Learning

Recently, large-scale pre-trained language-image models like CLIP have shown extraordinary capabilities for understanding spatial contents, but naively transferring such models to video recognition still suffers from unsatisfactory temporal modeling capabilities. Existing methods insert tunable structures into or in parallel with the pre-trained model, which either requires back-propagation through the whole pre-trained model and is thus resource-demanding, or is limited by the temporal reasoning capability of the pre-trained structure. In this work, we present DiST, which disentangles the learning of spatial and temporal aspects of videos. Specifically, DiST uses a dual-encoder structure, where a pre-trained foundation model acts as the spatial encoder, and a lightweight network is introduced as the temporal encoder. An integration branch is inserted between the encoders to fuse spatio-temporal information. The disentangled spatial and temporal learning in DiST is highly efficient because it avoids the back-propagation of massive pre-trained parameters. Meanwhile, we empirically show that disentangled learning with an extra network for integration benefits both spatial and temporal understanding. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks show that DiST delivers better performance than existing state-of-the-art methods by convincing gaps. When pre-training on the large-scale Kinetics-710, we achieve 89.7% on Kinetics-400 with a frozen ViT-L model, which verifies the scalability of DiST. Codes and models can be found in https://github.com/alibaba-mmai-research/DiST.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 14, 2023

LaST_{0}: Latent Spatio-Temporal Chain-of-Thought for Robotic Vision-Language-Action Model

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently shown strong generalization, with some approaches seeking to explicitly generate linguistic reasoning traces or predict future observations prior to execution. However, explicit reasoning typically incurs non-negligible inference latency, which constrains the temporal resolution required for robotic manipulation. Moreover, such reasoning is confined to the linguistic space, imposing a representational bottleneck that struggles to faithfully capture ineffable physical attributes. To mitigate these limitations, we propose LaST_0, a framework that enables efficient reasoning before acting through a Latent Spatio-Temporal Chain-of-Thought (CoT), capturing fine-grained physical and robotic dynamics that are often difficult to verbalize. Specifically, we introduce a token-efficient latent CoT space that models future visual dynamics, 3D structural information, and robot proprioceptive states, and further extends these representations across time to enable temporally consistent implicit reasoning trajectories. Furthermore, LaST_0 adopts a dual-system architecture implemented via a Mixture-of-Transformers design, where a reasoning expert conducts low-frequency latent inference and an acting expert generates high-frequency actions conditioned on robotics-oriented latent representations. To facilitate coordination, LaST_0 is trained with heterogeneous operation frequencies, enabling adaptive switching during deployment. Across 10 real-world tasks spanning tabletop, mobile, and dexterous hand manipulation, LaST_0 improves mean success rates by 13%, 14% and 14% over prior SOTA VLA methods, respectively.

  • 14 authors
·
Jan 8

Compiler-First State Space Duality and Portable O(1) Autoregressive Caching for Inference

State-space model releases are typically coupled to fused CUDA and Triton kernels, inheriting a hard dependency on NVIDIA hardware. We show that Mamba-2's state space duality algorithm -- diagonal state structure, chunkable recurrence, and einsum-dominated compute with static control flow -- maps cleanly onto what XLA's fusion and tiling passes actually optimise, making custom kernels optional rather than required. We implement the full inference path (prefill, cached autoregressive decoding) as shaped standard primitives under XLA, without hand-written kernels, and realise the architecture's theoretical O(1) state management as a compiled on-device cache requiring no host synchronisation during generation. The implementation runs unmodified on CPU, NVIDIA GPU, and Google Cloud TPU from a single JAX source. On TPU v6e across five model scales (130M--2.7B parameters), XLA-generated code reaches approximately 140 TFLOPS on single-stream prefill (15% MFU) and up to 64% bandwidth utilisation on decode. Greedy decoding matches the PyTorch/CUDA reference token-for-token across 64 steps, with hidden-state agreement within float32 rounding tolerance. The pattern transfers to any SSM recurrence satisfying the same structural conditions, on any platform with a mature XLA backend. The implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/CosmoNaught/mamba2-jax and merged into the Bonsai JAX model library.

A Comprehensive Survey on World Models for Embodied AI

Embodied AI requires agents that perceive, act, and anticipate how actions reshape future world states. World models serve as internal simulators that capture environment dynamics, enabling forward and counterfactual rollouts to support perception, prediction, and decision making. This survey presents a unified framework for world models in embodied AI. Specifically, we formalize the problem setting and learning objectives, and propose a three-axis taxonomy encompassing: (1) Functionality, Decision-Coupled vs. General-Purpose; (2) Temporal Modeling, Sequential Simulation and Inference vs. Global Difference Prediction; (3) Spatial Representation, Global Latent Vector, Token Feature Sequence, Spatial Latent Grid, and Decomposed Rendering Representation. We systematize data resources and metrics across robotics, autonomous driving, and general video settings, covering pixel prediction quality, state-level understanding, and task performance. Furthermore, we offer a quantitative comparison of state-of-the-art models and distill key open challenges, including the scarcity of unified datasets and the need for evaluation metrics that assess physical consistency over pixel fidelity, the trade-off between model performance and the computational efficiency required for real-time control, and the core modeling difficulty of achieving long-horizon temporal consistency while mitigating error accumulation. Finally, we maintain a curated bibliography at https://github.com/Li-Zn-H/AwesomeWorldModels.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 19, 2025

4D-VLA: Spatiotemporal Vision-Language-Action Pretraining with Cross-Scene Calibration

Leveraging diverse robotic data for pretraining remains a critical challenge. Existing methods typically model the dataset's action distribution using simple observations as inputs. However, these inputs are often incomplete, resulting in a dispersed conditional action distribution-an issue we refer to as coordinate system chaos and state chaos. This inconsistency significantly hampers pretraining efficiency. To address this, we propose 4D-VLA, a novel approach that effectively integrates 4D information into the input to mitigate these sources of chaos. Our model introduces depth and temporal information into visual features with sequential RGB-D inputs, aligning the coordinate systems of the robot and the scene. This alignment endows the model with strong spatiotemporal reasoning capabilities while minimizing training overhead. Additionally, we introduce memory bank sampling, a frame sampling strategy designed to extract informative frames from historical images, further improving effectiveness and efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that our pretraining method and architectural components substantially enhance model performance. In both simulated and real-world experiments, our model achieves a significant increase in success rate over OpenVLA. To further assess spatial perception and generalization to novel views, we introduce MV-Bench, a multi-view simulation benchmark. Our model consistently outperforms existing methods, demonstrating stronger spatial understanding and adaptability.

  • 11 authors
·
Jun 27, 2025

Echo-Memory: A Controlled Study of Memory in Action World Models

We present Echo-Memory, a controlled study of memory mechanisms in action-conditioned world models. These models generate multi-segment videos from a first frame, text prompt, and camera-action sequence, but their central failure is often memory rather than local image synthesis: after the camera leaves and returns, the scene or salient object may silently change. Existing memory designs are hard to compare because gains are entangled with backbone, training, retrieval, and evaluation differences. Echo-Memory fixes the action-to-video interface and varies only how history is stored and read by the generator. Under a shared video diffusion backbone, optimizer, camera-action representation, sampler, and evaluation pipeline, we compare raw context, compression-based memory, spatial summaries with different read-out paths, and state-space recurrence. This matched matrix separates four otherwise conflated axes: capacity, compression, read-out, and recurrence. We also evaluate memory through a three-branch protocol: replay quality, in-domain loop revisit, and open-domain return probes. The branches routinely disagree, showing that replay fidelity is not a sufficient proxy for remembering a world. Three findings follow. Raw context is a strong capacity baseline and improves open-domain return far more than it improves replay metrics. Compactness is not a free substitute for capacity: aggressive spatial and hybrid-compression memories lose the salient evidence needed for return. Finally, block-wise state-space recurrence is the strongest open-domain return mechanism in our matrix, showing that the structure of implicit memory matters as much as the decision to use it. These results provide a compact protocol for studying memory in action world models beyond isolated replay metrics.

  • 16 authors
·
Jun 7 3

ArrowGEV: Grounding Events in Video via Learning the Arrow of Time

Grounding events in videos serves as a fundamental capability in video analysis. While Vision Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly employed for this task, existing approaches predominantly train models to associate events with timestamps in the forward video only. This paradigm hinders VLMs from capturing the inherent temporal structure and directionality of events, thereby limiting robustness and generalization. To address this limitation, inspired by the arrow of time in physics, which characterizes the intrinsic directionality of temporal processes, we propose ArrowGEV, a reinforcement learning framework that explicitly models temporal directionality in events to improve both event grounding and temporal directionality understanding in VLMs. Specifically, we categorize events into time-sensitive (e.g., putting down a bag) and time-insensitive (e.g., holding a towel in the left hand). The former denote events whose reversal substantially alters their meaning, while the latter remain semantically unchanged under reversal. For time-sensitive events, ArrowGEV introduces a reward that encourages VLMs to discriminate between forward and backward videos, whereas for time-insensitive events, it enforces consistent grounding across both directions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ArrowGEV not only improves grounding precision and temporal directionality recognition, but also enhances general video understanding and reasoning ability.

tencent Tencent
·
Apr 15

VLA-4D: Embedding 4D Awareness into Vision-Language-Action Models for SpatioTemporally Coherent Robotic Manipulation

Vision-language-action (VLA) models show potential for general robotic tasks, but remain challenging in spatiotemporally coherent manipulation, which requires fine-grained representations. Typically, existing methods embed 3D positions into visual representations to enhance the spatial precision of actions. However, these methods struggle to achieve temporally coherent control over action execution. In this work, we propose VLA-4D, a general VLA model with 4D awareness for spatiotemporally coherent robotic manipulation. Our model is guided by two key designs: 1) 4D-aware visual representation. We extract visual features, embed 1D time into 3D positions for 4D embeddings, and fuse them into a unified visual representation via a cross-attention mechanism. 2) Spatiotemporal action representation. We extend conventional spatial action representations with temporal information to enable the spatiotemporal planning, and align the multimodal representations into the LLM for spatiotemporal action prediction. Within this unified framework, the designed visual and action representations jointly make robotic manipulation spatially-smooth and temporally-coherent. In addition, we extend the VLA dataset with temporal action annotations for fine-tuning our model. Extensive experiments have been conducted to verify the superiority of our method across different tasks of robotic manipulation.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 21, 2025 2

MemoryVLA++: Temporal Modeling via Memory and Imagination in Vision-Language-Action Models

Temporal modeling is essential for robotic manipulation, as effective control requires both memory of past interactions and imagination of future states. However, most VLA models rely primarily on the current observation and therefore struggle with long-horizon, temporally dependent tasks. Cognitive science suggests that humans rely on working memory to buffer short-lived context, the hippocampal system to preserve episodic memory of past experience, and internal models to imagine possible future state evolution. Inspired by these mechanisms, we propose MemoryVLA++, a full temporal modeling framework that equips VLA models with memory and imagination for robotic manipulation. A pretrained VLM encodes the current observation into perceptual and cognitive tokens, forming working memory. These tokens query a Perceptual-Cognitive Memory Bank to retrieve relevant historical context. This bank stores low-level details and high-level semantics from past interactions, and is updated through redundancy-aware consolidation. A world model imagines future states in a denoising latent space, and the imagined latents are integrated under memory guidance to form full temporal-aware tokens. The resulting tokens condition a diffusion action expert to predict temporally consistent action sequences. We conduct extensive experiments on 5 simulation benchmarks and 3 categories of real-robot tasks across 3 robots, covering general manipulation, long-horizon temporal tasks, robustness, and generalization. Our method achieves strong performance across Libero, SimplerEnv, Mikasa-Robo, Calvin, Libero-Plus, and diverse real-robot tasks, validating the effectiveness of full temporal modeling with memory and imagination. For example, on real robots, it achieves +9%, +26%, +28% gains on general, memory-dependent, and imagination-dependent tasks. Project Page: https://shihao1895.github.io/MemoryVLA-PP-Web

  • 9 authors
·
Jun 7