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Tingting Gao

Publications and source records attributed to Tingting Gao.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
arXiv2026

SpatialFlow-GRPO: Where Spatial Credit Drives Image Editing

Recent online reinforcement learning has substantially improved image editing quality. However, existing Flow-GRPO-style methods usually rely on a single whole-image reward, which makes fine-grained editing optimization difficult. We observe that a key obstacle in image editing is this spatial uniformity assumption: a whole-image reward cannot distinguish how different spatial regions contribute to image quality. To address this issue, we propose SpatialFlow-GRPO, a training framework that introduces spatially fine-grained reward feedback. The framework converts region-aware rewards into semantic-region-level optimization signals and aligns region advantages with the corresponding latent positions during policy updates. We also train a region-aware reward model, SFReward, construct SFReward-14K with region-annotated editing samples, and introduce MultiEditBench to evaluate multi-region editing ability. On OmniGen2 and FLUX.2-klein-4B, SpatialFlow-GRPO outperforms Flow-GRPO on GEdit-Bench, ImgEdit-Bench, and MultiEditBench. The results show that SpatialFlow-GRPO converts local feedback into spatially aligned update signals and improves editing quality.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

DELTAVID: Enhancing Fine-Grained Spatiotemporal Perception with Cross-Video Differences

Video multimodal large language models have made strong progress on open-ended video understanding, but they still lack precise local spatiotemporal perception. When two videos share almost the same global semantics and differ only in a short time span or a small region, current models often fail to find the change and provide reliable evidence. We propose DELTAVID, a verifiable proxy-task framework that enhances fine-grained spatiotemporal perception with cross-video differences. The key idea is to turn cross-video spot-the-difference into a trainable perception signal, where a model identifies local changes, judges temporal boundaries, and organizes spatial evidence by comparing similar videos. To make this signal scalable to train and reliable to evaluate, we further introduce DELTAVID-10K and DELTAVID-Bench, which convert controllable local differences in real videos into evidence-labeled training and test samples. Experiments show that DELTAVID substantially improves performance on cross-video difference understanding and transfers the learned local evidence ability to general video understanding benchmarks, including MMVU, MLVU, Video-MME, VideoHolmes, VideoMMMU, LVBench, TempCompass, and LongVideoBench. These results show that cross-video differences are not only an effective way to diagnose fine-grained perception failures, but also a scalable proxy supervision that moves Video MLLMs from coarse semantic understanding toward fine-grained spatiotemporal evidence reasoning.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Kwai Keye-VL-2.0 Technical Report

We introduce Kwai Keye-VL-2.0-30B-A3B, an open-source Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) multimodal foundation model designed to advance long-video understanding and agentic intelligence. To address the challenges of ultra-long contexts, information redundancy, and prohibitive computational costs inherent in hour-level videos, Keye-VL-2.0 is the first to adapt DeepSeek Sparse Attention (DSA) to GQA-based multimodal architectures, enabling lossless 256K context processing while capturing critical frames and long-range temporal dependencies. This architecture is underpinned by a highly optimized training and inference infrastructure, including scalable video I/O, heterogeneous ViT-LM parallelism, and custom DSA kernels that significantly maximize throughput and minimize computational overhead. Furthermore, to overcome the algorithmic dilemma of catastrophic forgetting during multi-task alignment, we introduce Cross-Modal Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation (MOPD) paired with Context-RL and Video-RL. By distilling dense token-level teacher feedback from on-policy rollouts back into the MoE backbone, which activates only 3B parameters, Keye-VL-2.0 natively empowers advanced agent collaboration across Code, Tool, and Search scenarios with multimodal self-correction. Extensive evaluations across video understanding, temporal grounding, reasoning, STEM, and agent benchmarks demonstrate that Keye-VL-2.0-30B-A3B achieves state-of-the-art performance among models of similar scale, particularly excelling in fine-grained temporal localization on TimeLens and long-video comprehension on Video-MME-v2 and LongVideoBench. We release our model checkpoints to accelerate community progress toward scalable and robust multimodal agentic applications.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

IGenBench: Benchmarking the Reliability of Text-to-Infographic Generation

Infographics are composite visual artifacts that combine data visualizations with textual and illustrative elements to communicate information. While recent text-to-image (T2I) models can generate aesthetically appealing images, their reliability in generating infographics remains unclear. Generated infographics may appear correct at first glance but contain easily overlooked issues, such as distorted data encoding or incorrect textual content. We present IGENBENCH, the first benchmark for evaluating the reliability of text-to-infographic generation, comprising 600 curated test cases spanning 30 infographic types. We design an automated evaluation framework that decomposes reliability verification into atomic yes/no questions based on a taxonomy of 10 question types. We employ multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to verify each question, yielding question-level accuracy (Q-ACC) and infographic-level accuracy (I-ACC). We comprehensively evaluate 10 state-of-the-art T2I models on IGENBENCH. Our systematic analysis reveals key insights for future model development: (i) a three-tier performance hierarchy with the top model achieving Q-ACC of 0.90 but I-ACC of only 0.49; (ii) data-related dimensions emerging as universal bottlenecks (e.g., Data Completeness: 0.21); and (iii) the challenge of achieving end-to-end correctness across all models. We release IGENBENCH at https://igen-bench.vercel.app/.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

OneReason Technical Report

Generative recommendation models in the OneRec family have been widely deployed in many real-world services, such as short-video, live-streaming, advertising, and e-commerce. However, these generative models can only benefit from the scaling advantage, while their reasoning ability is hard to activate, since we cannot construct meaningful Chain-of-Thought (CoT) sequences consisting of itemic tokens only. Inspired by the success of the reasoning-style ``think before answer'' paradigm in the LLM field, we conduct preliminary studies (i.e., OneRec-Think, OpenOneRec) to explore reasoning capability in generative recommendation. Nevertheless, we notice an unexpected phenomenon: the thinking mode does not show advantages over the non-thinking mode. Drawing insights from recent findings on CoT robustness in multi-modal language models, we argue that effective reasoning in recommendation rests on two factors: perception, the ability to ground itemic tokens in their underlying language semantics, and cognition, the ability to reorganize a user's behavior sequence into coherent latent interest points. We therefore propose OneReason, which includes: (1) strong itemic token perception in pre-training, (2) a three-level cognition-enhanced CoT format for recommendation tasks in SFT, and (3) a specialize-then-unify training recipe in RL to enhance the thinking ability.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

ROVER: Routing Object-Centric Visual Evidence for Grounded Multi-Image Reasoning

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have increasingly localized and interleaved visual evidence for deliberative reasoning. Grounding-based approaches typically focus on regions of interest (RoIs) by injecting cropped image patches or RoI-specific features into the reasoning context. However, such designs can weaken holistic scene understanding and inter-object relations, while incurring decoding costs that scale with the number and size of RoIs. Alternatively, adaptive visual feature selection often requires fine-grained supervision or complex heuristics. To address these limitations, we propose ROVER (Routing Object-centric Visual Evidence for grounded multi-image Reasoning), a lightweight, learnable plugin for efficient global visual evidence routing. Upon each object grounding prediction, ROVER injects a step-specific token triplet to synergistically: (i) aggregate the ongoing reasoning context, (ii) distill intra-image cues into a visual working space via object-centric differential attention, and (iii) route and integrate history-aware evidence across objects and images within this space for subsequent reasoning. We integrate ROVER into Qwen2.5-VL-7B and develop an interleaved SFT-to-GRPO training pipeline. Strictly adhering to the original datasets and evaluation protocols, our method achieves the best performance on MM-GCoT (+4.8% answer accuracy, +14.6% grounding accuracy) and VideoEspresso (+8.6% answer accuracy). The VideoEspresso-trained model demonstrates strong transferability, outperforming the base model by +4.7% on average across diverse benchmarks.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

VCap: Hypergeometric Rewards for Weak-to-Strong Visual Captioning

Visual captioning requires models to capture visual content faithfully while minimizing both omission and hallucination. As the dominant paradigm for captioning, MLLMs have achieved strong performance through scaling and high-quality data. Recently, RL has emerged as a key route to driving MLLMs toward higher precision and broader coverage, however, existing reward designs for captioning fail to provide fine-grained and reliable signals for factual verification, limiting their effectiveness. To address this, we propose VCap, a Witness-Adjudicator reward that pairs the reference caption (a witness) with the visual signal (an adjudicator). By explicitly verifying factual consistency between the reference and policy-generated captions grounded in the visual signal, VCap delivers a reward signal with hypergeometric-distribution-level precision for caption quality verification. This design enables effective learning even from imperfect references, facilitating weak-to-strong generalization in RL training. In our experiments, an 8B model trained with VCap outperforms open- and closed-source SOTA models on multiple image and video captioning benchmarks. Human evaluation further confirms its strong alignment with factual correctness. Additionally, VCap improves MLLM perceptual capability, generalizes across tasks, and surpasses best-of-N distillation, challenging prior assumptions about RLVR.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

MetaphorVU: Towards Metaphorical Video Understanding

Metaphorical videos are prevalent across various real-world scenarios to convey complex ideas, and understanding them typically requires high-order cognitive capabilities. The lack of systematic studies on metaphorical video understanding not only constrains the real-world applicability of MLLMs but also impedes the thorough assessment of their high-order cognitive capabilities. To bridge this gap, we propose MetaphorVU-Bench, the first systematic and comprehensive benchmark dedicated to metaphorical video understanding. Through experiments, we find current MLLMs struggle with accurate metaphorical video understanding, lagging far behind human level, primarily due to defective cross-domain mapping. Motivated by this finding, we construct a metaphor knowledge graph as mapping augmentation and propose MetaphorBoost, an inference-time enhancement framework achieving consistent performance improvement. Our benchmark, analysis, and method provide useful insights and a foundation for future research on advancing MLLMs.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

VideoTemp-o3: Harmonizing Temporal Grounding and Video Understanding in Agentic Thinking-with-Videos

In long-video understanding, conventional uniform frame sampling often fails to capture key visual evidence, leading to degraded performance and increased hallucinations. To address this, recent agentic thinking-with-videos paradigms have emerged, adopting a localize-clip-answer pipeline in which the model actively identifies relevant video segments, performs dense sampling within those clips, and then produces answers. However, existing methods remain inefficient, suffer from weak localization, and adhere to rigid workflows. To solve these issues, we propose VideoTemp-o3, a unified agentic thinking-with-videos framework that jointly models video grounding and question answering. VideoTemp-o3 exhibits strong localization capability, supports on-demand clipping, and can refine inaccurate localizations. Specifically, in the supervised fine-tuning stage, we design a unified masking mechanism that encourages exploration while preventing noise. For reinforcement learning, we introduce dedicated rewards to mitigate reward hacking. Besides, from the data perspective, we develop an effective pipeline to construct high-quality long video grounded QA data, along with a corresponding benchmark for systematic evaluation across various video durations. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves remarkable performance on both long video understanding and grounding.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

SpatialReward: Bridging the Perception Gap in Online RL for Image Editing via Explicit Spatial Reasoning

Online Reinforcement Learning (RL) offers a promising avenue for complex image editing but is currently constrained by the scarcity of reliable and fine-grained reward signals. Existing evaluators frequently struggle with a critical perception gap we term "Attention Collapse," where models neglect cross-image comparisons and fail to capture fine-grained details, resulting in inaccurate perception and miscalibrated scores. To address these limitations, we propose SpatialReward, a reward model that enforces precise verification via explicit spatial reasoning. By anchoring reasoning to predicted edit regions, SpatialReward grounds semantic judgments in pixel-level evidence, significantly enhancing evaluative accuracy. Trained on a curated 260k spatial-aware dataset, our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on MMRB2 and EditReward-Bench, and outperforms proprietary evaluators on our proposed MultiEditReward-Bench. Furthermore, SpatialReward serves as a robust signal in online RL, boosting OmniGen2 by +0.90 on GEdit-Bench--surpassing the leading discriminative model and doubling the gain of GPT-4.1 (+0.45). These results demonstrate that spatial reasoning is essential for unlocking effective alignment in image editing.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Compressing then Matching: An Efficient Pre-training Paradigm for Multimodal Embedding

Multimodal Large Language Models advance multimodal representation learning by acquiring transferable semantic embeddings, thereby substantially enhancing performance across a range of vision-language tasks, including cross-modal retrieval, clustering, and classification. An effective embedding is expected to comprehensively preserve the semantic content of the input while simultaneously emphasizing features that are discriminative for downstream tasks. Recent approaches demonstrate that MLLMs can be adapted into competitive embedding models via large-scale contrastive learning, enabling the simultaneous optimization of two complementary objectives. We argue that the two aforementioned objectives can be decoupled: a comprehensive understanding of the input enables the embedding model to achieve superior performance on downstream tasks via contrastive learning. In this paper, we propose CoMa, a compressed pre-training phase, which serves as a warm-up stage for contrastive learning. Experiments demonstrate that with only a small amount of pre-training data, we can transform an MLLM into a competitive embedding model. CoMa achieves new state-of-the-art results among MLLMs of comparable size on the MMEB, realizing optimization in both efficiency and effectiveness. Our project is available at https://github.com/Trustworthy-Information-Access/CoMa.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Unlocking Exploration in RLVR: Uncertainty-aware Advantage Shaping for Deeper Reasoning

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has shown significant promise for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, prevailing algorithms like GRPO broadcast a uniform advantage signal across all tokens in a sequence. This coarse-grained approach overlooks the pivotal role of uncertain, high-stakes decisions during reasoning, leading to inefficient exploration and the well-documented problem of entropy collapse. To address this, we introduce UnCertainty-aware Advantage Shaping (UCAS), a model-free method that refines credit assignment by leveraging the model's internal uncertainty signals. UCAS operates in two stages: it first modulates the response-level advantage using a logit-space self-confidence proxy, and then applies an asymmetric token-level penalty based on raw logit certainty. This dual mechanism encourages exploration of high-uncertainty paths that yield correct answers while penalizing overconfident yet erroneous reasoning, effectively balancing the exploration-exploitation trade-off. Extensive experiments on five mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that UCAS significantly outperforms strong RLVR baselines across multiple model scales, including 1.5B and 7B. Our analysis confirms that UCAS not only achieves higher rewards but also promotes greater reasoning diversity and successfully mitigates entropy collapse. Code is available at https://github.com/xvolcano02/UCAS.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

OmniDiT: Extending Diffusion Transformer to Omni-VTON Framework

Despite the rapid advancement of Virtual Try-On (VTON) and Try-Off (VTOFF) technologies, existing VTON methods face challenges with fine-grained detail preservation, generalization to complex scenes, complicated pipeline, and efficient inference. To tackle these problems, we propose OmniDiT, an omni Virtual Try-On framework based on the Diffusion Transformer, which combines try-on and try-off tasks into one unified model. Specifically, we first establish a self-evolving data curation pipeline to continuously produce data, and construct a large VTON dataset Omni-TryOn, which contains over 380k diverse and high-quality garment-model-tryon image pairs and detailed text prompts. Then, we employ the token concatenation and design an adaptive position encoding to effectively incorporate multiple reference conditions. To relieve the bottleneck of long sequence computation, we are the first to introduce Shifted Window Attention into the diffusion model, thus achieving a linear complexity. To remedy the performance degradation caused by local window attention, we utilize multiple timestep prediction and an alignment loss to improve generation fidelity. Experiments reveal that, under various complex scenes, our method achieves the best performance in both the model-free VTON and VTOFF tasks and a performance comparable to current SOTA methods in the model-based VTON task.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

DIVA-GRPO: Enhancing Multimodal Reasoning through Difficulty-Adaptive Variant Advantage

Reinforcement learning (RL) with group relative policy optimization (GRPO) has become a widely adopted approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). While GRPO enables long-chain reasoning without a critic, it often suffers from sparse rewards on difficult problems and advantage vanishing when group-level rewards are too consistent for overly easy or hard problems. Existing solutions (sample expansion, selective utilization, and indirect reward design) often fail to maintain enough variance in within-group reward distributions to yield clear optimization signals. To address this, we propose DIVA-GRPO, a difficulty-adaptive variant advantage method that adjusts variant difficulty distributions from a global perspective. DIVA-GRPO dynamically assesses problem difficulty, samples variants with appropriate difficulty levels, and calculates advantages across local and global groups using difficulty-weighted and normalized scaling. This alleviates reward sparsity and advantage vanishing while improving training stability. Extensive experiments on six reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that DIVA-GRPO outperforms existing approaches in training efficiency and reasoning performance. Code: https://github.com/Siaaaaaa1/DIVA-GRPO

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

ContextRL: Enhancing MLLM's Knowledge Discovery Efficiency with Context-Augmented RL

We propose ContextRL, a novel framework that leverages context augmentation to overcome these bottlenecks. Specifically, to enhance Identifiability, we provide the reward model with full reference solutions as context, enabling fine-grained process verification to filter out false positives (samples with the right answer but low-quality reasoning process). To improve Reachability, we introduce a multi-turn sampling strategy where the reward model generates mistake reports for failed attempts, guiding the policy to "recover" correct responses from previously all-negative groups. Experimental results on 11 perception and reasoning benchmarks show that ContextRL significantly improves knowledge discovery efficiency. Notably, ContextRL enables the Qwen3-VL-8B model to achieve performance comparable to the 32B model, outperforming standard RLVR baselines by a large margin while effectively mitigating reward hacking. Our in-depth analysis reveals the significant potential of contextual information for improving reward model accuracy and document the widespread occurrence of reward hacking, offering valuable insights for future RLVR research.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

CREM: Compression-Driven Representation Enhancement for Multimodal Retrieval and Comprehension

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable success in comprehension tasks such as visual description and visual question answering. However, their direct application to embedding-based tasks like retrieval remains challenging due to the discrepancy between output formats and optimization objectives. Previous approaches often employ contrastive fine-tuning to adapt MLLMs for retrieval, but at the cost of losing their generative capabilities. We argue that both generative and embedding tasks fundamentally rely on shared cognitive mechanisms, specifically cross-modal representation alignment and contextual comprehension. To this end, we propose CREM (Compression-driven Representation Enhanced Model), with a unified framework that enhances multimodal representations for retrieval while preserving generative ability. Specifically, we introduce a compression-based prompt design with learnable chorus tokens to aggregate multimodal semantics and a compression-driven training strategy that integrates contrastive and generative objectives through compression-aware attention. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CREM achieves state-of-the-art retrieval performance on MMEB while maintaining strong generative performance on multiple comprehension benchmarks. Our findings highlight that generative supervision can further improve the representational quality of MLLMs under the proposed compression-driven paradigm.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

UniRef-Image-Edit: Towards Scalable and Consistent Multi-Reference Image Editing

We present UniRef-Image-Edit, a high-performance multi-modal generation system that unifies single-image editing and multi-image composition within a single framework. Existing diffusion-based editing methods often struggle to maintain consistency across multiple conditions due to limited interaction between reference inputs. To address this, we introduce Sequence-Extended Latent Fusion (SELF), a unified input representation that dynamically serializes multiple reference images into a coherent latent sequence. During a dedicated training stage, all reference images are jointly constrained to fit within a fixed-length sequence under a global pixel-budget constraint. Building upon SELF, we propose a two-stage training framework comprising supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL). In the SFT stage, we jointly train on single-image editing and multi-image composition tasks to establish a robust generative prior. We adopt a progressive sequence length training strategy, in which all input images are initially resized to a total pixel budget of $1024^2$, and are then gradually increased to $1536^2$ and $2048^2$ to improve visual fidelity and cross-reference consistency. This gradual relaxation of compression enables the model to incrementally capture finer visual details while maintaining stable alignment across references. For the RL stage, we introduce Multi-Source GRPO (MSGRPO), to our knowledge the first reinforcement learning framework tailored for multi-reference image generation. MSGRPO optimizes the model to reconcile conflicting visual constraints, significantly enhancing compositional consistency. We will open-source the code, models, training data, and reward data for community research purposes.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Awakening Dormant Users: Generative Recommendation with Counterfactual Functional Role Reasoning

Awakening dormant users, who remain engaged but exhibit low conversion, is a pivotal driver for incremental GMV growth in large-scale e-commerce platforms. However, existing approaches often yield suboptimal results since they typically rely on single-step estimation of an item's intrinsic value (e.g., immediate click probability). This mechanism overlooks the instrumental effect of items, where specific interactions act as triggers to shape latent intent and drive subsequent decisions along a conversion trajectory. To bridge this gap, we propose RoleGen, a novel framework that synergizes a Conversion Trajectory Reasoner with a Generative Behavioral Backbone. Specifically, the LLM-based Reasoner explicitly models the context-dependent Functional Role of items to reconstruct intent evolution. It further employs counterfactual inference to simulate diverse conversion paths, effectively mitigating interest collapse. These reasoned candidate items are integrated into the generative backbone, which is optimized via a collaborative "Reasoning-Execution-Feedback-Reflection" closed-loop strategy to ensure grounded execution. Extensive offline experiments and online A/B testing on the Kuaishou e-commerce platform demonstrate that RoleGen achieves a 6.2% gain in Recall@1 and a 7.3% increase in online order volume, confirming its effectiveness in activating the dormant user base.

cs.IR↗