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Yi-Fan Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Yi-Fan Zhang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

PRM-as-a-Judge 1.5: A Toolkit for Robot Process Assessment

Fine-grained robotic evaluation matters for understanding embodied models, going beyond binary success rates and rule-based process scores. We present PRM-as-a-Judge 1.5, a toolkit for robot process assessment that turns rollout videos into dense progress curves and derives multiple fine metrics. PRM-as-a-Judge 1.5 introduces three metrics, building on version 1.0, that characterize failure-side progress, post-drawdown recovery, and success-side execution quality, helping users understand embodied model capability. Based on the rollout videos from benchmarks, we perform a comprehensive assessment of the embodied models, providing some fine-grained metric results and key findings. We further introduce RoboPulse++ to evaluate the reliability of process reward models (PRM), providing evaluators with a more accurate testing platform. Moreover, we release a user-friendly assessment suite, including the benchmark, metric implementation, and visualization tools, to support reproducible manipulation process evaluation. We call on the community to rethink how robots are evaluated and establish transparent, procedural, and reproducible assessment as a foundation for the next generation of embodied intelligence.

cs.RO

OmniVideo-100K: A Dataset for Audio-Visual Reasoning through Structured Scripts and Evidence Chains

Current automated pipelines for audio-visual Question Answering (QA) generally adopt a ``video-caption-QA'' paradigm. However, these methods typically segment videos into short clips and generate separate descriptions for audio and visual modalities. This decoupled processing severs inherent associations between sounds and their visual sources, while independent clip processing often causes inconsistent descriptions of the same entity across segments. Furthermore, coupling long-text comprehension and QA synthesis into a single step often restricts models to localized events, yielding questions lacking long-term temporal connections and deep cross-modal reasoning. To address these issues, we propose an automated data engine featuring two mechanisms: (1) \textbf{Entity-Anchored Video Scripting} transforms videos into structured scripts, comprising summaries, main entity lists, and segment-wise audio-visual descriptions. The entity list serves as a global prior to ensure cross-segment referential consistency and reconstruct audio-visual associations. (2) \textbf{Clue-Guided QA Generation} prompts models to first mine cross-segment, multimodal clues from the script, and subsequently generate QA pairs based on these high-value clues. Leveraging this pipeline, we construct the instruction-tuning dataset \textbf{OmniVideo-100K} and a human-verified test set, \textbf{OmniVideo-Test}. Fine-tuning VITA-1.5, Qwen2.5-Omni-7B and Qwen3-Omni-30B on OmniVideo-100K yields performance gains of up to 20.59% on OmniVideo-Test, demonstrating strong generalization (up to 12.64% improvements) across established benchmarks like Daily-Omni and JointAVBench.

cs.CV

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

Artifact-Bench: Evaluating MLLMs on Detecting and Assessing the Artifacts of AI-Generated Videos

Recent video generative models have greatly improved the realism of AI-generated videos, yet their outputs still exhibit artifacts such as temporal inconsistencies, structural distortions, and semantic incoherence. While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show strong visual understanding capabilities, their ability to perceive and reason about such artifacts remains unclear. Existing benchmarks often lack systematic evaluation of artifact-aware perception and fine-grained diagnostic reasoning, especially across diverse AI-generated video domains beyond photorealistic content. To address this gap, we introduce Artifact-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating MLLMs on AI-generated video artifact detection and analysis. We first establish a three-level hierarchical taxonomy of realism artifacts, covering photorealistic, animated, and CG-style videos. Based on this taxonomy, Artifact-Bench defines three complementary tasks: real vs. AI-generated video classification, pairwise realism comparison, and fine-grained artifact identification. Experiments on 19 leading MLLMs reveal substantial limitations in artifact perception and reasoning, with many models approaching random or even below-random performance in challenging settings. We further observe significant misalignment between MLLM judgments and human perceptual preferences, highlighting their limited reliability as general evaluators for AI-generated video realism.

cs.CV

Edit-Compass & EditReward-Compass: A Unified Benchmark for Image Editing and Reward Modeling

Recent image editing models have achieved remarkable progress in instruction following, multimodal understanding, and complex visual editing. However, existing benchmarks often fail to faithfully reflect human judgment, especially for strong frontier models, due to limited task difficulty and coarse-grained evaluation protocols. In parallel, reward models have become increasingly important for RL-based image editing optimization, yet existing reward model benchmarks still rely on unrealistic evaluation settings that deviate from practical RL scenarios. These limitations hinder reliable assessment of both image editing models and reward models. To address these challenges, we introduce Edit-Compass and EditReward-Compass, a unified evaluation suite for image editing and reward modeling. Edit-Compass contains 2,388 carefully annotated instances spanning six progressively challenging task categories, covering capabilities such as world knowledge reasoning, visual reasoning, and multi-image editing. Beyond broad task coverage, Edit-Compass adopts a fine-grained multidimensional evaluation framework based on structured reasoning and carefully designed scoring rubrics. In parallel, EditReward-Compass contains 2,251 preference pairs that simulate realistic reward modeling scenarios during RL optimization.

cs.CV

Video-MME-v2: Towards the Next Stage in Benchmarks for Comprehensive Video Understanding

With the rapid advancement of video understanding, existing benchmarks are becoming increasingly saturated, exposing a critical discrepancy between inflated leaderboard scores and real-world model capabilities. To address this widening gap, we introduce Video-MME-v2, a comprehensive benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate the robustness and faithfulness of video understanding. To systematically evaluate model capabilities, we design a \textbf{progressive tri-level hierarchy} that incrementally increases the complexity of video comprehension, ranging from multi-point visual information aggregation, to temporal dynamics modeling, and ultimately to complex multimodal reasoning. Besides, in contrast to conventional per-question accuracy, we propose a \textbf{group-based non-linear evaluation} strategy that enforces both consistency across related queries and coherence in multi-step reasoning. It penalizes fragmented or guess-based correctness and assigns credit only to answers supported by valid reasoning. To guarantee data quality, Video-MME-v2 is constructed through a rigorously controlled human annotation pipeline, involving 12 annotators and 50 independent reviewers. Backed by \textbf{3,300 human-hours} and up to \textbf{5 rounds} of quality assurance, Video-MME-v2 aims to serve as one of the most authoritative video benchmarks. Extensive experiments reveal a substantial gap between current best model Gemini-3-Pro and human experts, and uncover a clear hierarchical bottleneck where errors in visual information aggregation and temporal modeling propagate to limit high-level reasoning. We further find that thinking-based reasoning is highly dependent on textual cues, improving performance with subtitles but sometimes degrading it in purely visual settings. By exposing these limitations, Video-MME-v2 establishes a demanding new testbed for the development of next-generation video MLLMs.

cs.CV

Agentic-MME: What Agentic Capability Really Brings to Multimodal Intelligence?

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are evolving from passive observers into active agents, solving problems through Visual Expansion (invoking visual tools) and Knowledge Expansion (open-web search). However, existing evaluations fall short: they lack flexible tool integration, test visual and search tools separately, and evaluate primarily by final answers. Consequently, they cannot verify if tools were actually invoked, applied correctly, or used efficiently. To address this, we introduce Agentic-MME, a process-verified benchmark for Multimodal Agentic Capabilities. It contains 418 real-world tasks across 6 domains and 3 difficulty levels to evaluate capability synergy, featuring over 2,000 stepwise checkpoints that average 10+ person-hours of manual annotation per task. Each task includes a unified evaluation framework supporting sandboxed code and APIs, alongside a human reference trajectory annotated with stepwise checkpoints along dual-axis: S-axis and V-axis. To enable true process-level verification, we audit fine-grained intermediate states rather than just final answers, and quantify efficiency via an overthinking metric relative to human trajectories. Experimental results show the best model, Gemini3-pro, achieves 56.3% overall accuracy, which falls significantly to 23.0% on Level-3 tasks, underscoring the difficulty of real-world multimodal agentic problem solving.

cs.AI

Does Unification Come at a Cost? Uni-SafeBench: A Safety Benchmark for Unified Multimodal Large Models

Unified Multimodal Large Models (UMLMs) integrate understanding and generation capabilities within a single architecture. While unified architectures expand multimodal capabilities, their safety implications remain important yet underexplored. Existing safety benchmarks predominantly focus on isolated understanding or generation tasks, failing to evaluate the holistic safety of UMLMs when handling diverse tasks under a unified framework. To address this, we introduce Uni-SafeBench, a comprehensive benchmark featuring a taxonomy of six major safety categories across seven task types. To ensure rigorous assessment, we develop Uni-Judger, a framework that effectively decouples contextual safety from intrinsic safety. Based on comprehensive evaluations across Uni-SafeBench, we find that the original safety alignment of the underlying LLM is not consistently preserved in current unified models. Moreover, open-source UMLMs exhibit much lower safety performance than multimodal large models specialized for either generation or understanding tasks, particularly on the generation side.

cs.AI

Unify-Agent: A Unified Multimodal Agent for World-Grounded Image Synthesis

Unified multimodal models provide a natural and promising architecture for understanding diverse and complex real-world knowledge while generating high-quality images. However, they still rely primarily on frozen parametric knowledge, which makes them struggle with real-world image generation involving long-tail and knowledge-intensive concepts. Inspired by the broad success of agents on real-world tasks, we explore agentic modeling to address this limitation. Specifically, we present Unify-Agent, a unified multimodal agent for world-grounded image synthesis, which reframes image generation as an agentic pipeline consisting of prompt understanding, multimodal evidence searching, grounded recaptioning, and final synthesis. To train our model, we construct a tailored multimodal data pipeline and curate 143K high-quality agent trajectories for world-grounded image synthesis, enabling effective supervision over the full agentic generation process. We further introduce FactIP, a benchmark covering 12 categories of culturally significant and long-tail factual concepts that explicitly requires external knowledge grounding. Extensive experiments show that our proposed Unify-Agent substantially improves over its base unified model across diverse benchmarks and real world generation tasks, while approaching the world knowledge capabilities of the strongest closed-source models. As an early exploration of agent-based modeling for world-grounded image synthesis, our work highlights the value of tightly coupling reasoning, searching, and generation for reliable open-world agentic image synthesis.

cs.CV

Can MLLMs Read Students' Minds? Unpacking Multimodal Error Analysis in Handwritten Math

Assessing student handwritten scratchwork is crucial for personalized educational feedback but presents unique challenges due to diverse handwriting, complex layouts, and varied problem-solving approaches. Existing educational NLP primarily focuses on textual responses and neglects the complexity and multimodality inherent in authentic handwritten scratchwork. Current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) excel at visual reasoning but typically adopt an "examinee perspective", prioritizing generating correct answers rather than diagnosing student errors. To bridge these gaps, we introduce ScratchMath, a novel benchmark specifically designed for explaining and classifying errors in authentic handwritten mathematics scratchwork. Our dataset comprises 1,720 mathematics samples from Chinese primary and middle school students, supporting two key tasks: Error Cause Explanation (ECE) and Error Cause Classification (ECC), with seven defined error types. The dataset is meticulously annotated through rigorous human-machine collaborative approaches involving multiple stages of expert labeling, review, and verification. We systematically evaluate 16 leading MLLMs on ScratchMath, revealing significant performance gaps relative to human experts, especially in visual recognition and logical reasoning. Proprietary models notably outperform open-source models, with large reasoning models showing strong potential for error explanation. All evaluation data and frameworks are publicly available to facilitate further research.

cs.AI

VisBrowse-Bench: Benchmarking Visual-Native Search for Multimodal Browsing Agents

The rapid advancement of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has enabled browsing agents to acquire and reason over multimodal information in the real world. But existing benchmarks suffer from two limitations: insufficient evaluation of visual reasoning ability and the neglect of native visual information of web pages in the reasoning chains. To address these challenges, we introduce a new benchmark for visual-native search, VisBrowse-Bench. It contains 169 VQA instances covering multiple domains and evaluates the models' visual reasoning capabilities during the search process through multimodal evidence cross-validation via text-image retrieval and joint reasoning. These data were constructed by human experts using a multi-stage pipeline and underwent rigorous manual verification. We additionally propose an agent workflow that can effectively drive the browsing agent to actively collect and reason over visual information during the search process. We comprehensively evaluated both open-source and closed-source models in this workflow. Experimental results show that even the best-performing model, Claude-4.6-Opus only achieves an accuracy of 47.6%, while the proprietary Deep Research model, o3-deep-research only achieves an accuracy of 41.1%. The code and data can be accessed at: https://github.com/ZhengboZhang/VisBrowse-Bench

cs.CV

OmniEarth-Bench: Towards Holistic Evaluation of Earth's Six Spheres and Cross-Spheres Interactions with Multimodal Observational Earth Data

Existing benchmarks for multimodal learning in Earth science offer limited, siloed coverage of Earth's spheres and their cross-sphere interactions, typically restricting evaluation to the human-activity sphere of atmosphere and to at most 16 tasks. These limitations: narrow-source heterogeneity (single/few data sources), constrained scientific granularity, and limited-sphere extensibility. Therefore, we introduce OmniEarth-Bench, the first multimodal benchmark that systematically spans all six spheres: atmosphere, lithosphere, oceanosphere, cryosphere, biosphere, and human-activity sphere, and cross-spheres. Built with a scalable, modular-topology data inference framework and native multi-observation sources and expert-in-the-loop curation, OmniEarth-Bench produces 29,855 standardized, expert-curated annotations. All annotations are organized into a four-level hierarchy (Sphere, Scenario, Ability, Task), encompassing 109 expert-curated evaluation tasks. Experiments on 9 state-of-the-art MLLMs reveal that even the most advanced models struggle with our benchmarks, where none of them reach 35% accuracy, revealing systematic gaps in Earth-system cognitive ability. The dataset and evaluation code were released at OmniEarth-Bench (https://anonymous.4open.science/r/OmniEarth-Bench-B1BD).

cs.CV

Spatial Chain-of-Thought: Bridging Understanding and Generation Models for Spatial Reasoning Generation

While diffusion models have shown exceptional capabilities in aesthetic image synthesis, they often struggle with complex spatial understanding and reasoning. Existing approaches resort to Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to enhance this capability. However, they either incur high computational costs through joint training or suffer from spatial information loss when relying solely on textual prompts. To alleviate these limitations, we propose a Spatial Chain-of-Thought (SCoT) framework, a plug-and-play approach that effectively bridges the reasoning capabilities of MLLMs with the generative power of diffusion models. Specifically, we first enhance the diffusion model's layout awareness by training it on an interleaved text-coordinate instruction format. We then leverage state-of-the-art MLLMs as planners to generate comprehensive layout plans, transferring their spatial planning capabilities directly to the generation process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on image generation benchmarks and significantly outperforms baselines on complex reasoning tasks, while also showing strong efficacy in image editing scenarios.

cs.CV

MME-Emotion: A Holistic Evaluation Benchmark for Emotional Intelligence in Multimodal Large Language Models

Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have catalyzed transformative progress in affective computing, enabling models to exhibit emergent emotional intelligence. Despite substantial methodological progress, current emotional benchmarks remain limited, as it is still unknown: (a) the generalization abilities of MLLMs across distinct scenarios, and (b) their reasoning capabilities to identify the triggering factors behind emotional states. To bridge these gaps, we present \textbf{MME-Emotion}, a systematic benchmark that assesses both emotional understanding and reasoning capabilities of MLLMs, enjoying \textit{scalable capacity}, \textit{diverse settings}, and \textit{unified protocols}. As the largest emotional intelligence benchmark for MLLMs, MME-Emotion contains over 6,000 curated video clips with task-specific questioning-answering (QA) pairs, spanning broad scenarios to formulate eight emotional tasks. It further incorporates a holistic evaluation suite with hybrid metrics for emotion recognition and reasoning, analyzed through a multi-agent system framework. Through a rigorous evaluation of 20 advanced MLLMs, we uncover both their strengths and limitations, yielding several key insights: \ding{182} Current MLLMs exhibit unsatisfactory emotional intelligence, with the best-performing model achieving only $39.3\%$ recognition score and $56.0\%$ Chain-of-Thought (CoT) score on our benchmark. \ding{183} Generalist models (\emph{e.g.}, Gemini-2.5-Pro) derive emotional intelligence from generalized multimodal understanding capabilities, while specialist models (\emph{e.g.}, R1-Omni) can achieve comparable performance through domain-specific post-training adaptation. By introducing MME-Emotion, we hope that it can serve as a foundation for advancing MLLMs' emotional intelligence in the future.

cs.CV

The effect of surface quenching coefficients of $O_2(a^{1}Δg)$ and $O_2(b^{1}Σg^{+})$ on capacitively coupled $Ar$/$O_2$ discharge: A global/equivalent circuit model study

Capacitively coupled discharges operated in mixtures of $Ar$ and $O_2$ are extensively utilized in plasma etching and deposition processes due to the oxidative properties and precursor functionality of the reactive species produced in the discharge. In $Ar$/$O_2$ discharges, the surface quenching coefficient of $O_2(a^{1}Δg)$ is known to affect this metastable density, which, in turn, affects the electronegativity and other important plasma characteristics. In this work, in addition to $O_2(a^{1}Δg)$, $O_2(b^{1}Σg^{+})$ and its associated reactions are incorporated into a global/equivalent circuit model of an $Ar$/$O_2$ discharge. By independently adjusting the quenching coefficients of both metastable species, changes of these surface coefficients are found to significantly affect the discharge characteristics, indicating that the role of $O_2(b^{1}Σg^{+})$ cannot be neglected. The effects of their respective surface quenching coefficients of these metastables based on various wall materials on the discharge are revealed including their effects on different particle species densities, plasma impedance, voltage drops across the sheaths, as well as plasma power absorption.

physics.plasm-ph

Long-VITA: Scaling Large Multi-modal Models to 1 Million Tokens with Leading Short-Context Accuracy

We introduce Long-VITA, a simple yet effective large multi-modal model for long-context visual-language understanding tasks. It is adept at concurrently processing and analyzing modalities of image, video, and text over 4K frames or 1M tokens while delivering advanced performances on short-context multi-modal tasks. We propose an effective multi-modal training schema that starts with large language models and proceeds through vision-language alignment, general knowledge learning, and two sequential stages of long-sequence fine-tuning. We further implement context-parallelism distributed inference and logits-masked language modeling head to scale Long-VITA to infinitely long inputs of images and texts during model inference. Regarding training data, Long-VITA is built on a mix of 17M samples from public datasets only and demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on various multi-modal benchmarks, compared against recent cutting-edge models with internal data. Long-VITA is fully open-source and reproducible.. By leveraging our inference designs, Long-VITA models achieve a remarkable 2x prefill speedup and 4x context length extension in a single node with 8 GPUs. We hope Long-VITA can serve as a competitive baseline and offer valuable insights for the open-source community in advancing long-context multi-modal understanding.

cs.CV

VITA-1.5: Towards GPT-4o Level Real-Time Vision and Speech Interaction

Recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have typically focused on integrating visual and textual modalities, with less emphasis placed on the role of speech in enhancing interaction. However, speech plays a crucial role in multimodal dialogue systems, and implementing high-performance in both vision and speech tasks remains a significant challenge due to the fundamental modality differences. In this paper, we propose a carefully designed multi-stage training methodology that progressively trains LLM to understand both visual and speech information, ultimately enabling fluent vision and speech interaction. Our approach not only preserves strong vision-language capacity, but also enables efficient speech-to-speech dialogue capabilities without separate ASR and TTS modules, significantly accelerating multimodal end-to-end response speed. By comparing our method against state-of-the-art counterparts across benchmarks for image, video, and speech tasks, we demonstrate that our model is equipped with both strong visual and speech capabilities, making near real-time vision and speech interaction. Code has been released at https://github.com/VITA-MLLM/VITA.

cs.CV

VITA-E: Natural Embodied Interaction with Concurrent Seeing, Hearing, Speaking, and Acting

Current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are often constrained by a rigid, static interaction paradigm, which lacks the ability to see, hear, speak, and act concurrently as well as handle real-time user interruptions dynamically. This hinders seamless embodied collaboration, resulting in an inflexible and unresponsive user experience. To address these limitations, we introduce VITA-E, a novel embodied interaction framework designed for both behavioral concurrency and nearly real-time interruption. The core of our approach is a dual-model architecture where two parallel VLA instances operate as an ``Active Model'' and a ``Standby Model'', allowing the embodied agent to observe its environment, listen to user speech, provide verbal responses, and execute actions, all concurrently and interruptibly, mimicking human-like multitasking capabilities. We further propose a ``model-as-controller'' paradigm, where we fine-tune the VLM to generate special tokens that serve as direct system-level commands, coupling the model's reasoning with the system's behavior. Experiments conducted on a physical humanoid platform demonstrate that VITA-E can reliably handle complex interactive scenarios. Our framework is compatible with various dual-system VLA models, achieving an extremely high success rate on emergency stops and speech interruptions while also successfully performing concurrent speech and action. This represents a significant step towards more natural and capable embodied assistants.

cs.RO