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Harold Haodong Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Harold Haodong Chen.

18 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

The Past Frames the Future: Memory for Autoregressive Video Generation

Advances in generative models have improved video fidelity, enabling long-horizon generation, interactive world modeling, and evolving visual environments. Autoregressive (AR) video generation extends visual sequences through causal rollouts. However, a fundamental bottleneck emerges: as the generated sequence expands, practical models must operate under strictly bounded context windows, storage, and computational limits. Consequently, critical historical information, e.g., entity identities, dynamic states, and intervention-induced causal changes, often leaves the active context long before its relevance diminishes. Overcoming this limitation and maintaining temporal persistence constitutes a fundamental memory problem. We present a systematic and comprehensive review of memory mechanisms in AR video generation. We formulate memory operationally as persistent historical information maintained across outer AR steps, capable of influencing future generation even after the originating evidence is no longer locally accessible. Building upon this unified framework, we organize the literature through five complementary perspectives: (I) Forms, the representational carriers of history; (II) Functions, the specific semantic and physical information requiring preservation; (III) Operations, the lifecycle of writing, reading, updating, managing, and integrating memory; (IV) Learning, the optimization of memory behaviors under closed-loop rollouts; and (V) Evaluation, the paradigms for diagnosing genuine memory capabilities. We conclude by synthesizing open challenges, including composable and resource-aware memory architectures, trustworthy state updating, self-rollout learning, and standardized evaluation. By bridging representations, mechanisms, and learning paradigms, this paper establishes a structured foundation for developing reliable, memory-conditioned video generation systems.

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arXiv2026

GenRouter: Unified Workflow Routing for Agentic Image Generation

The rapid evolution of text-to-image (T2I) generation models has effectively solved the foundational challenge of raw pixel synthesis, shifting the community's focus toward fulfilling increasingly intricate user requests. While recent agentic image generation workflows enhance static inference with advanced capabilities like external knowledge retrieval and iterative reasoning, they mostly operate in isolated silos with fixed ``one-size-fits-all" topologies. This inevitably leads to severe compute-mismatch, where simple queries are forced through computationally heavy pipelines. To bridge this gap, we present GenRouter, the first unified workflow routing framework for agentic image generation. We first formulate GenCanvas, standardizing diverse agentic pipelines into a universal set of foundational primitives and executable templates. Operating over this unified space, GenRouter adaptively routes heterogeneous prompts to their optimal workflows via (i) demand profiling, (ii) experience matching, and (iii) Pareto filtering. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that GenRouter achieves superior visual alignment while reducing execution costs by over 95% and latency by 65% compared to heavyweight static pipelines. Furthermore, the system continuously self-evolves via accumulated experience, enabling robust zero-shot generalization that boosts performance and halves computational overhead.

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arXiv2026

No Place to Hide: Benchmarking Video Hallucination with Background-Controlled Pairs

We introduce VidPair-Halluc, a new benchmark for evaluating video hallucination in large video models (LVMs) under rigorous and controlled conditions. Unlike previous benchmarks that primarily rely on text-based perturbations or adversarial questions while neglecting the consistency of visual backgrounds, VidPair-Halluc features video pairs with highly similar backgrounds but distinctly different foreground semantics, enabling precise attribution of model errors to genuine hallucination rather than background variation. The benchmark is constructed through PairFlow, a pipeline that leverages recent advances in text-to-image and video generation to systematically compose stories, generate coherent video clips, and assemble them into adversarial pairs. Covering both spatial and temporal reasoning across ten semantic aspects, VidPair-Halluc comprises 1K high-quality adversarial video pairs and 11K spatio-temporal QA pairs with control over background and foreground variations. Evaluations on mainstream LVMs show persistent difficulty with robust fine-grained video understanding in adversarial settings, and code and data are available at the https://jethrojames.github.io/VidPair-Halluc/.

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arXiv2026

OmniCoT: A Benchmark for Global and Multi-Step Panoramic Reasoning

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated promising spatial reasoning capabilities, while these abilities remain underexplored in the emerging visual modality of panoramic imagery. The full 360°$\times$180° field of view of panoramas essentially supports complex global multi-step reasoning, which is also the fundamental advantage of panoramas in applications such as embodied intelligence. However, existing panoramic benchmarks largely focus on simplistic queries that rely on local cues or single-/few-step reasoning, thereby ignoring the fundamental advantage of panoramas and failing to fully exploit their potential. To address this gap, we introduce OmniCoT, a panoramic spatial reasoning suite designed to enable MLLMs to use global evidence and perform multi-step inference across viewpoints. It includes OmniCoT-B (6.7K data) for evaluation, which measures both answer accuracy and reasoning quality, OmniCoT-Real (1K data) as a manually annotated real-world subset to quantify the Sim-to-Real gap. For training, OmniCoT-T (14.3K data) is purpose-built with structured stepwise Chain-of-Thought annotations that explicitly link intermediate reasoning steps to panoramic evidence. Based on OmniCoT-T, we introduce OmniCoT-R1 and adopt a two-stage training strategy tailored to the geometrically complex panoramic space, where Supervised Fine-tuning (SFT) anchors reasoning to panoramic evidence (e.g., bearings, proximity) and GRPO penalizes geometrically incoherent paths to consolidate global 360° spatial consistency. Through OmniCoT, we aim to recalibrate the difficulty of panoramic spatial reasoning to better align with the intrinsic capabilities of panoramic imagery, thereby fostering meaningful progress in this research area.

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arXiv2026

ScalingAR: Scaling Confidence for Autoregressive Image Generation

Test-time strategies have shown remarkable success in improving large language models, but their application to next-token prediction (NTP) autoregressive (AR) image generation remains largely underexplored. Existing test-time scaling (TTS) methods for visual autoregressive models (VAR) rely on frequent partial decoding and external reward models, which are inefficient and often ineffective for NTP-based image generation due to the inherent instability of intermediate decoding results. To address these limitations, we propose ScalingAR, a novel test-time scaling framework tailored for NTP-based AR image generation. ScalingAR introduces token entropy as a confidence signal and operates at two complementary levels: (i) Profile Level, integrates intrinsic uncertainty and conditional utilization into a unified confidence state, and (ii) Policy Level, leverages this state for adaptive trajectory pruning and dynamic guidance scheduling. Without requiring early decoding or auxiliary rewards, ScalingAR achieves significant improvements across diverse benchmarks. Experiments show that ScalingAR (I) improves base models by $12.5\%$ on GenEval and $15.2\%$ on TIIF-Bench, (II) reduces visual token consumption by $62.0\%$ while outperforming baselines, and (III) enhances robustness, mitigating performance degradation by $26.0\%$ in challenging scenarios. These results establish ScalingAR as a robust and efficient test-time scaling solution for autoregressive image generation.

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arXiv2026

RoboEvolve: Co-Evolving Planner-Simulator for Robotic Manipulation with Limited Data

The scalability of robotic manipulation is fundamentally bottlenecked by the scarcity of task-aligned physical interaction data. While vision-language models (VLMs) and video generation models (VGMs) hold promise for autonomous data synthesis, they suffer from semantic-spatial misalignment and physical hallucinations, respectively. To bridge this gap, we introduce RoboEvolve, a novel framework that couples a VLM planner and a VGM simulator into a mutually reinforcing co-evolutionary loop. Operating purely on unlabeled seed images, RoboEvolve leverages a cognitive-inspired dual-phase mechanism: (i) daytime exploration fosters physically grounded behavioral discovery through a semantic-controlled multi-granular reward, and (ii) nighttime consolidation mines "near-miss" failures to stabilize policy optimization. Guided by an autonomous progressive curriculum, the system naturally scales from simple atomic actions to complex tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RoboEvolve (I) achieves superior effectiveness, elevating base planners by 30 absolute points and amplifying simulator success by 48% on average; (II) exhibits extreme data efficiency, surpassing fully supervised baselines with merely 500 unlabeled seeds--a 50x reduction; and (III) demonstrates robust continual learning without catastrophic forgetting.

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arXiv2026

Panoramic Affordance Prediction

Affordance prediction serves as a critical bridge between perception and action in embodied AI. However, existing research is confined to pinhole camera models, which suffer from narrow Fields of View (FoV) and fragmented observations, often missing critical holistic environmental context. In this paper, we present the first exploration into Panoramic Affordance Prediction, utilizing 360-degree imagery to capture global spatial relationships and holistic scene understanding. To facilitate this novel task, we first introduce PAP-12K, a large-scale benchmark dataset containing over 1,000 ultra-high-resolution (12k, 11904 x 5952) panoramic images with over 12k carefully annotated QA pairs and affordance masks. Furthermore, we propose PAP, a training-free, coarse-to-fine pipeline inspired by the human foveal visual system to tackle the ultra-high resolution and severe distortion inherent in panoramic images. PAP employs recursive visual routing via grid prompting to progressively locate targets, applies an adaptive gaze mechanism to rectify local geometric distortions, and utilizes a cascaded grounding pipeline to extract precise instance-level masks. Experimental results on PAP-12K reveal that existing affordance prediction methods designed for standard perspective images suffer severe performance degradation and fail due to the unique challenges of panoramic vision. In contrast, PAP framework effectively overcomes these obstacles, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art baselines and highlighting the immense potential of panoramic perception for robust embodied intelligence.

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arXiv2026

DVD: Deterministic Video Depth Estimation with Generative Priors

Existing video depth estimation faces a fundamental trade-off: generative models suffer from stochastic geometric hallucinations and scale drift, while discriminative models demand massive labeled datasets to resolve semantic ambiguities. To break this impasse, we present DVD, the first framework to deterministically adapt pre-trained video diffusion models into single-pass depth regressors. Specifically, DVD features three core designs: (i) repurposing the diffusion timestep as a structural anchor to balance global stability with high-frequency details; (ii) latent manifold rectification (LMR) to mitigate regression-induced over-smoothing, enforcing differential constraints to restore sharp boundaries and coherent motion; and (iii) global affine coherence, an inherent property bounding inter-window divergence, which enables seamless long-video inference without requiring complex temporal alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DVD achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance across benchmarks. Furthermore, DVD successfully unlocks the profound geometric priors implicit in video foundation models using 163x less task-specific data than leading baselines. Notably, we fully release our pipeline, providing the whole training suite for SOTA video depth estimation to benefit the open-source community.

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arXiv2026

LoopViT: Scaling Visual ARC with Looped Transformers

Recent advances in visual reasoning have leveraged vision transformers to tackle the ARC-AGI benchmark. However, we argue that the feed-forward architecture, where computational depth is strictly bound to parameter size, falls short of capturing the iterative, algorithmic nature of human induction. In this work, we propose a recursive architecture called Loop-ViT, which decouples reasoning depth from model capacity through weight-tied recurrence. Loop-ViT iterates a weight-tied Hybrid Block, combining local convolutions and global attention, to form a latent chain of thought. Crucially, we introduce a parameter-free Dynamic Exit mechanism based on predictive entropy: the model halts inference when its internal state ``crystallizes" into a low-uncertainty attractor. Empirical results on the ARC-AGI-1 benchmark validate this perspective: our 18M model achieves 65.8% accuracy, outperforming massive 73M-parameter ensembles. These findings demonstrate that adaptive iterative computation offers a far more efficient scaling axis for visual reasoning than simply increasing network width. The code is available at https://github.com/WenjieShu/LoopViT.

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arXiv2026

Show, Don't Tell: Morphing Latent Reasoning into Image Generation

Text-to-image (T2I) generation has achieved remarkable progress, yet existing methods often lack the ability to dynamically reason and refine during generation--a hallmark of human creativity. Current reasoning-augmented paradigms most rely on explicit thought processes, where intermediate reasoning is decoded into discrete text at fixed steps with frequent image decoding and re-encoding, leading to inefficiencies, information loss, and cognitive mismatches. To bridge this gap, we introduce LatentMorph, a novel framework that seamlessly integrates implicit latent reasoning into the T2I generation process. At its core, LatentMorph introduces four lightweight components: (i) a condenser for summarizing intermediate generation states into compact visual memory, (ii) a translator for converting latent thoughts into actionable guidance, (iii) a shaper for dynamically steering next image token predictions, and (iv) an RL-trained invoker for adaptively determining when to invoke reasoning. By performing reasoning entirely in continuous latent spaces, LatentMorph avoids the bottlenecks of explicit reasoning and enables more adaptive self-refinement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LatentMorph (I) enhances the base model Janus-Pro by $16\%$ on GenEval and $25\%$ on T2I-CompBench; (II) outperforms explicit paradigms (e.g., TwiG) by $15\%$ and $11\%$ on abstract reasoning tasks like WISE and IPV-Txt, (III) while reducing inference time by $44\%$ and token consumption by $51\%$; and (IV) exhibits $71\%$ cognitive alignment with human intuition on reasoning invocation.

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arXiv2025

TiViBench: Benchmarking Think-in-Video Reasoning for Video Generative Models

The rapid evolution of video generative models has shifted their focus from producing visually plausible outputs to tackling tasks requiring physical plausibility and logical consistency. However, despite recent breakthroughs such as Veo 3's chain-of-frames reasoning, it remains unclear whether these models can exhibit reasoning capabilities similar to large language models (LLMs). Existing benchmarks predominantly evaluate visual fidelity and temporal coherence, failing to capture higher-order reasoning abilities. To bridge this gap, we propose TiViBench, a hierarchical benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of image-to-video (I2V) generation models. TiViBench systematically assesses reasoning across four dimensions: i) Structural Reasoning & Search, ii) Spatial & Visual Pattern Reasoning, iii) Symbolic & Logical Reasoning, and iv) Action Planning & Task Execution, spanning 24 diverse task scenarios across 3 difficulty levels. Through extensive evaluations, we show that commercial models (e.g., Sora 2, Veo 3.1) demonstrate stronger reasoning potential, while open-source models reveal untapped potential that remains hindered by limited training scale and data diversity. To further unlock this potential, we introduce VideoTPO, a simple yet effective test-time strategy inspired by preference optimization. By performing LLM self-analysis on generated candidates to identify strengths and weaknesses, VideoTPO significantly enhances reasoning performance without requiring additional training, data, or reward models. Together, TiViBench and VideoTPO pave the way for evaluating and advancing reasoning in video generation models, setting a foundation for future research in this emerging field.

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arXiv2025

A4-Agent: An Agentic Framework for Zero-Shot Affordance Reasoning

Affordance prediction, which identifies interaction regions on objects based on language instructions, is critical for embodied AI. Prevailing end-to-end models couple high-level reasoning and low-level grounding into a single monolithic pipeline and rely on training over annotated datasets, which leads to poor generalization on novel objects and unseen environments. In this paper, we move beyond this paradigm by proposing A4-Agent, a training-free agentic framework that decouples affordance prediction into a three-stage pipeline. Our framework coordinates specialized foundation models at test time: (1) a $\textbf{Dreamer}$ that employs generative models to visualize $\textit{how}$ an interaction would look; (2) a $\textbf{Thinker}$ that utilizes large vision-language models to decide $\textit{what}$ object part to interact with; and (3) a $\textbf{Spotter}$ that orchestrates vision foundation models to precisely locate $\textit{where}$ the interaction area is. By leveraging the complementary strengths of pre-trained models without any task-specific fine-tuning, our zero-shot framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art supervised methods across multiple benchmarks and demonstrates robust generalization to real-world settings.

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arXiv2025

DualCamCtrl: Dual-Branch Diffusion Model for Geometry-Aware Camera-Controlled Video Generation

This paper presents DualCamCtrl, a novel end-to-end diffusion model for camera-controlled video generation. Recent works have advanced this field by representing camera poses as ray-based conditions, yet they often lack sufficient scene understanding and geometric awareness. DualCamCtrl specifically targets this limitation by introducing a dual-branch framework that mutually generates camera-consistent RGB and depth sequences. To harmonize these two modalities, we further propose the Semantic Guided Mutual Alignment (SIGMA) mechanism, which performs RGB-depth fusion in a semantics-guided and mutually reinforced manner. These designs collectively enable DualCamCtrl to better disentangle appearance and geometry modeling, generating videos that more faithfully adhere to the specified camera trajectories. Additionally, we analyze and reveal the distinct influence of depth and camera poses across denoising stages and further demonstrate that early and late stages play complementary roles in forming global structure and refining local details. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DualCamCtrl achieves more consistent camera-controlled video generation, with over 40\% reduction in camera motion errors compared with prior methods. Our project page: https://soyouthinkyoucantell.github.io/dualcamctrl-page/

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arXiv2025

Structure-Aware Prototype Guided Trusted Multi-View Classification

Trustworthy multi-view classification (TMVC) addresses the challenge of achieving reliable decision-making in complex scenarios where multi-source information is heterogeneous, inconsistent, or even conflicting. Existing TMVC approaches predominantly rely on globally dense neighbor relationships to model intra-view dependencies, leading to high computational costs and an inability to directly ensure consistency across inter-view relationships. Furthermore, these methods typically aggregate evidence from different views through manually assigned weights, lacking guarantees that the learned multi-view neighbor structures are consistent within the class space, thus undermining the trustworthiness of classification outcomes. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel TMVC framework that introduces prototypes to represent the neighbor structures of each view. By simplifying the learning of intra-view neighbor relations and enabling dynamic alignment of intra- and inter-view structure, our approach facilitates more efficient and consistent discovery of cross-view consensus. Extensive experiments on multiple public multi-view datasets demonstrate that our method achieves competitive downstream performance and robustness compared to prevalent TMVC methods.

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arXiv2025

Hierarchical Fine-grained Preference Optimization for Physically Plausible Video Generation

Recent advancements in video generation have enabled the creation of high-quality, visually compelling videos. However, generating videos that adhere to the laws of physics remains a critical challenge for applications requiring realism and accuracy. In this work, we propose PhysHPO, a novel framework for Hierarchical Cross-Modal Direct Preference Optimization, to tackle this challenge by enabling fine-grained preference alignment for physically plausible video generation. PhysHPO optimizes video alignment across four hierarchical granularities: a) Instance Level, aligning the overall video content with the input prompt; b) State Level, ensuring temporal consistency using boundary frames as anchors; c) Motion Level, modeling motion trajectories for realistic dynamics; and d) Semantic Level, maintaining logical consistency between narrative and visuals. Recognizing that real-world videos are the best reflections of physical phenomena, we further introduce an automated data selection pipeline to efficiently identify and utilize "good data" from existing large-scale text-video datasets, thereby eliminating the need for costly and time-intensive dataset construction. Extensive experiments on both physics-focused and general capability benchmarks demonstrate that PhysHPO significantly improves physical plausibility and overall video generation quality of advanced models. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to explore fine-grained preference alignment and data selection for video generation, paving the way for more realistic and human-preferred video generation paradigms.

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arXiv2025

Temporal Regularization Makes Your Video Generator Stronger

Temporal quality is a critical aspect of video generation, as it ensures consistent motion and realistic dynamics across frames. However, achieving high temporal coherence and diversity remains challenging. In this work, we explore temporal augmentation in video generation for the first time, and introduce FluxFlow for initial investigation, a strategy designed to enhance temporal quality. Operating at the data level, FluxFlow applies controlled temporal perturbations without requiring architectural modifications. Extensive experiments on UCF-101 and VBench benchmarks demonstrate that FluxFlow significantly improves temporal coherence and diversity across various video generation models, including U-Net, DiT, and AR-based architectures, while preserving spatial fidelity. These findings highlight the potential of temporal augmentation as a simple yet effective approach to advancing video generation quality.

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arXiv2025

Beyond Generation: Unlocking Universal Editing via Self-Supervised Fine-Tuning

Recent advances in video generation have outpaced progress in video editing, which remains constrained by several limiting factors, namely: (a) the task's dependency on supervision severely limits generality, (b) an unnecessary artificial separation between the generation and editing task, and (c) the high computational costs of training a video model. In this work, we propose UES (Unlocking Universal Editing via Self-Supervision), a lightweight self-supervised fine-tuning strategy that transforms generation models into unified generation-editing systems through self-supervised semantic alignment. Our approach establishes a dual-conditioning mechanism where original video-text pairs jointly provide visual and textual semantics, enabling structured learning of intrinsic spatiotemporal correspondences. Key advantages include: (i) Universality through supervision-free adaptation to diverse editing tasks, (ii) Unification of generation and editing applicable to most text(+image)-to-video model, and (iii) Efficiency via lightweight fine-tune that reduces tunable parameters by 92.67%. To enable systematic evaluation, we introduce OmniBench-99, a comprehensive benchmark spanning 99 videos across humans/animals, environments, and objects, comprising 4 editing types and 8 scenarios. Extensive experiments show UES enables models without inherent editing capability to perform powerful and universal editing while preserving or even enhancing their original generation performance.

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arXiv2025

LightGen: Efficient Image Generation through Knowledge Distillation and Direct Preference Optimization

Recent advances in text-to-image generation have primarily relied on extensive datasets and parameter-heavy architectures. These requirements severely limit accessibility for researchers and practitioners who lack substantial computational resources. In this paper, we introduce \model, an efficient training paradigm for image generation models that uses knowledge distillation (KD) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Drawing inspiration from the success of data KD techniques widely adopted in Multi-Modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), LightGen distills knowledge from state-of-the-art (SOTA) text-to-image models into a compact Masked Autoregressive (MAR) architecture with only $0.7B$ parameters. Using a compact synthetic dataset of just $2M$ high-quality images generated from varied captions, we demonstrate that data diversity significantly outweighs data volume in determining model performance. This strategy dramatically reduces computational demands and reduces pre-training time from potentially thousands of GPU-days to merely 88 GPU-days. Furthermore, to address the inherent shortcomings of synthetic data, particularly poor high-frequency details and spatial inaccuracies, we integrate the DPO technique that refines image fidelity and positional accuracy. Comprehensive experiments confirm that LightGen achieves image generation quality comparable to SOTA models while significantly reducing computational resources and expanding accessibility for resource-constrained environments. Code is available at https://github.com/XianfengWu01/LightGen

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