arXiv subjects

Shicheng Zheng

Publications and source records attributed to Shicheng Zheng.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Mage-VL: An Efficient Codec-Native Streaming Multimodal Foundation Model

Standard vision-language models (VLMs) suffer from Moravec's paradox: they excel at complex offline visual reasoning but struggle with simple streaming perception tasks and process them inefficiently. We present Mage-VL, an efficient codec-native streaming foundation model for real-time multimodal understanding and interaction. At its core, our custom tokenizer, Mage-ViT, replaces uniform frame sampling by selectively encoding dynamic, entropy-rich regions using motion vectors and residual energy across sparse anchor (I) and predicted (P) frames. Operating at a 16 x 16 patch level, this reduces visual token consumption by over 75% while preserving spatiotemporal context. Trained from scratch on approximately 560M unlabeled images and 100M unlabeled video frames, Mage-ViT matches or outperforms flagship encoders trained on billions of image-text pairs. We establish AI4AI data pipelines encompassing prompt-code joint optimization for multimodal captioning and AI-driven performance diagnosis to guide training recipes. Furthermore, through a bio-inspired dual-system architecture - a lightweight System 1 event gate and a causal System 2 decoder - Mage-VL enables proactive streaming perception. Extensive evaluations show that Mage-VL-4B matches Qwen3-VL-4B on static tasks while achieving strong gains in video understanding and 2D/3D spatial reasoning, with up to a 3.5x wall-clock inference speedup, and comprehensively surpasses the 15B Phi-4-reasoning-vision baseline. Beyond model artifacts, we deliver seven key empirical findings covering pre-training data efficiency, variable-resolution scaling, codec system acceleration, VideoQA SFT redundancy, motion-spatial synergy, AI4AI data pipelines, and Zero-Vision SFT for multimodal RL.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Mage-Flow: An Efficient Native-Resolution Foundation Model for Image Generation and Editing

Large-scale visual generators are increasingly capable but costly to train, fine-tune, and deploy. We introduce Mage-Flow, a compact 4B-scale generative stack for efficient text-to-image generation and instruction-based image editing. The stack is built from two co-designed components: Mage-VAE, a lightweight high-fidelity latent tokenizer, and a Native-Resolution Multimodal Diffusion Transformer trained with rectified flow matching. Mage-VAE uses one-step diffusion-style encoding and decoding with anchor-latent regularization, preserving the reconstruction quality of strong public VAEs while reducing tokenization cost by more than an order of magnitude. Together with native-resolution packing and stack-level CUDA kernel fusion, the stack supports flexible-resolution training and improves end-to-end training throughput by about $2.5\times$. Built on this foundation, we develop a complete model family with Base, RL-aligned, and Turbo variants for both generation and editing. Diffusion-NFT improves prompt following, text rendering, aesthetic quality, and editing fidelity, while few-step distillation with adversarial perceptual guidance produces 4-step Turbo models for low-latency inference. Despite its compact scale, Mage-Flow and Mage-Flow-Edit achieves competitive performance across standard generation and editing benchmarks. More importantly, the Turbo variants make high-resolution generation and editing practical for interactive use: at $1024^2$ resolution on a single NVIDIA A100 GPU, Mage-Flow-Turbo generates an image in 0.59s, and Mage-Flow-Edit-Turbo edits an image in 1.02s, while maintaining a small memory footprint. These results show that careful tokenizer--backbone--system co-design can deliver strong high-resolution generation and editing within an efficient 4B model family.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

VidGuard-R1: AI-Generated Video Detection and Explanation via Reasoning MLLMs and RL

The rapid proliferation of AI-generated video necessitates robust detection tools that offer both high accuracy and human-interpretable explanations. While existing MLLM-based detectors rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or direct preference optimization (DPO), these methods are often bottlenecked by static, pre-labeled datasets that fail to capture the evolving, multi-step physical inconsistencies of modern generative models. To bridge this gap, we introduce VidGuard-R1, the first video authenticity detector to utilize group relative policy optimization (GRPO). Moving beyond passive preference matching, VidGuard-R1 employs a reinforcement learning framework that encourages the model to explore and rank multiple reasoning paths. By introducing specialized reward models for temporal stability and diffusion-aware complexity, we incentivize the model to discover 'physics-grounded' artifacts. Our contributions include: (1) a curated dataset of 140,000 challenging real/fake video pairs; (2) a GRPO-based training paradigm that achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance; and (3) a reasoning-first architecture that provides precise, verifiable rationales for its forensic judgments. Project website: https://vidguard-r1.github.io/.

cs.CV↗