arXiv subjects

Zhijie Deng

Publications and source records attributed to Zhijie Deng.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2026

LifeSide: Benchmarking Agents as Lifelong Digital Companions

Lifelong digital companions must integrate cross-session cues, continually update their understanding of users, and adapt to shifting privacy boundaries. Existing evaluations fail to capture this, testing memory recall and short-term empathy in isolation. To bridge this gap, we introduce \benchmark, a benchmark centered on multi-session \textit{Memory-Emotion-Environment} loops. By modeling users as persistent worlds with layered profiles and event trajectories, \benchmark uses multi-agent simulation to project environmental dynamics into dialogue, preserving the critical gap between latent thoughts and observable expressions. Evaluating 2,000 personas and 111K tasks across memory tracking, user understanding, privacy control, and emotional companionship, our experiment results reveal a stark reality: even models that saturate current memory benchmarks fail to sustain accurate user understanding and true companionship over long horizons.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

ProductWebGen: Benchmarking Multimodal Product Webpage Generation

Crafting a product display webpage from a source product image, along with layout and visual content instructions, holds significant practical value for domains such as marketing, advertising, and E-commerce. Intuitively, this task demands strict visual consistency across product displays and high-fidelity instruction following to jointly generate renderable HTML code. These requirements on controllability and instruction-following are closely aligned with the core features of advanced multimodal generative models, such as image editing models and unified models. To this end, this paper introduces ProductWebGen to systematically benchmark the product webpage generation capacities of these models. We organize ProductWebGen with 500 test samples covering 13 product categories; each sample consists of a source image, a visual content instruction, and a webpage instruction. The task is to generate a product showcase webpage including multiple consistent images in accordance with the source image and instructions. Given the mixed-modality input-output nature of the task, we design and systematically compare two workflows for evaluation -- one uses large language models and image editing models to separately generate HTML code and images (editing-based), while the other relies on a single UM to generate both, with image generation conditioned on the preceding multimodal context (UM-based). Empirical results show that editing-based approaches achieve leading results in webpage instruction following and content appeal, while UM-based ones may display more advantages in fulfilling visual content instructions. We also construct a supervised fine-tuning dataset, ProductWebGen-1k, with 1,000 groups of real product images and LLM-generated HTML code. We verify its effectiveness on the open-source UM BAGEL. The data and code are available at https://github.com/SJTU-DENG-Lab/ProductWebGen.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

AdvDMD: Adversarial Reward Meets DMD For High-Quality Few-Step Generation

Diffusion models offer superior generation quality at the expense of extensive sampling steps. Distillation methods, with Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) as a popular example, can mitigate this issue, but performance degradation remains pronounced when sampling steps are limited. Reinforcement learning (RL) has been leveraged to improve the few-step generation quality during distillation, with the potential to even surpass the performance of the teacher model. However, existing approaches are combinatorial in nature, merely integrating an RL process with the distillation process, which introduces unnecessary complexities. To address this gap, we propose AdvDMD, a method that seamlessly unifies DMD distillation and RL. Specifically, AdvDMD employs the adversarially trained discriminator from DMD2 as the reward model, which assigns low scores to generated images and high scores to real ones. It is trained on both intermediate and final states of the denoising process and updated online with the distilled model, enabling a holistic supervision of the sampling trajectories and mitigating reward hacking. We adopt a unified SDE backward simulation and a different training schedule for DMD and RL to enable a more stable and efficient training. Experimental results demonstrate that the 4-step AdvDMD outperforms the original 40-step model for SD3.5 on DPG-Bench, while achieving significant performance gains for SD3 on the GenEval. On Qwen-Image, our 2-step AdvDMD achieves superior performance over TwinFlow.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

LatentUM: Unleashing the Potential of Interleaved Cross-Modal Reasoning via a Latent-Space Unified Model

Unified models (UMs) hold promise for their ability to understand and generate content across heterogeneous modalities. Compared to merely generating visual content, the use of UMs for interleaved cross-modal reasoning is more promising and valuable, e.g., for solving understanding problems that require dense visual thinking, improving visual generation through self-reflection, or modeling visual dynamics of the physical world guided by stepwise action interventions. However, existing UMs necessitate pixel decoding as a bridge due to their disjoint visual representations for understanding and generation, which is both ineffective and inefficient. In this paper, we introduce LatentUM, a novel unified model that represents all modalities within a shared semantic latent space, eliminating the need for pixel-space mediation between visual understanding and generation. This design naturally enables flexible interleaved cross-modal reasoning and generation. Beyond improved computational efficiency, the shared representation substantially alleviates codec bias and strengthens cross-modal alignment, allowing LatentUM to achieve state-of-the-art performance on the Visual Spatial Planning benchmark, push the limits of visual generation through self-reflection, and support world modeling by predicting future visual states within the shared semantic latent space.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Mantis: A Versatile Vision-Language-Action Model with Disentangled Visual Foresight

Recent advances in Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models demonstrate that visual signals can effectively complement sparse action supervisions. However, letting VLA directly predict high-dimensional visual states can distribute model capacity and incur prohibitive training cost, while compressing visual states into more compact supervisory signals inevitably incurs information bottlenecks. Moreover, existing methods often suffer from poor comprehension and reasoning capabilities due to the neglect of language supervision. This paper introduces Mantis, a novel framework featuring a Disentangled Visual Foresight (DVF) to tackle these issues. Specifically, Mantis decouples visual foresight prediction from the backbone with the combination of meta queries and a diffusion Transformer (DiT) head. With the current visual state provided to the DiT via a residual connection, a simple next-state prediction objective enables the meta queries to automatically capture the latent actions that delineate the visual trajectory, and hence boost the learning of explicit actions. The disentanglement reduces the burden of the VLA backbone, enabling it to maintain comprehension and reasoning capabilities through language supervision. Empirically, pretrained on human manipulation videos, robot demonstrations, and image-text pairs, Mantis achieves a 96.7% success rate on LIBERO benchmark after fine-tuning, surpassing powerful baselines while exhibiting high convergence speed. Real-world evaluations show that Mantis outperforms $π_{0.5}$, a leading open-source VLA model, particularly in instruction-following capability, generalization to unseen instructions, and reasoning ability. Code and weights are released to support the open-source community.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Think-Then-Generate: Reasoning-Aware Text-to-Image Diffusion with LLM Encoders

Recent progress in text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models (DMs) has enabled high-quality visual synthesis from diverse textual prompts. Yet, most existing T2I DMs, even those equipped with large language model (LLM)-based text encoders, remain text-pixel mappers -- they employ LLMs merely as text encoders, without leveraging their inherent reasoning capabilities to infer what should be visually depicted given the textual prompt. To move beyond such literal generation, we propose the think-then-generate (T2G) paradigm, where the LLM-based text encoder is encouraged to reason about and rewrite raw user prompts; the states of the rewritten prompts then serve as diffusion conditioning. To achieve this, we first activate the think-then-rewrite pattern of the LLM encoder with a lightweight supervised fine-tuning process. Subsequently, the LLM encoder and diffusion backbone are co-optimized to ensure faithful reasoning about the context and accurate rendering of the semantics via Dual-GRPO. In particular, the text encoder is reinforced using image-grounded rewards to infer and recall world knowledge, while the diffusion backbone is pushed to produce semantically consistent and visually coherent images. Experiments show substantial improvements in factual consistency, semantic alignment, and visual realism across reasoning-based image generation and editing benchmarks, achieving 0.79 on WISE score, nearly on par with GPT-4. Our results constitute a promising step toward next-generation unified models with reasoning, expression, and demonstration capacities.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

OFFSIDE: Benchmarking Unlearning Misinformation in Multimodal Large Language Models

Advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) intensify concerns about data privacy, making Machine Unlearning (MU), the selective removal of learned information, a critical necessity. However, existing MU benchmarks for MLLMs are limited by a lack of image diversity, potential inaccuracies, and insufficient evaluation scenarios, which fail to capture the complexity of real-world applications. To facilitate the development of MLLMs unlearning and alleviate the aforementioned limitations, we introduce OFFSIDE, a novel benchmark for evaluating misinformation unlearning in MLLMs based on football transfer rumors. This manually curated dataset contains 15.68K records for 80 players, providing a comprehensive framework with four test sets to assess forgetting efficacy, generalization, utility, and robustness. OFFSIDE supports advanced settings like selective unlearning and corrective relearning, and crucially, unimodal unlearning (forgetting only text data). Our extensive evaluation of multiple baselines reveals key findings: (1) Unimodal methods (erasing text-based knowledge) fail on multimodal rumors; (2) Unlearning efficacy is largely driven by catastrophic forgetting; (3) All methods struggle with "visual rumors" (rumors appear in the image); (4) The unlearned rumors can be easily recovered and (5) All methods are vulnerable to prompt attacks. These results expose significant vulnerabilities in current approaches, highlighting the need for more robust multimodal unlearning solutions. The code is available at https://github.com/zh121800/OFFSIDE

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

LiveTalk: Real-Time Multimodal Interactive Video Diffusion via Improved On-Policy Distillation

Real-time video generation via diffusion is essential for building general-purpose multimodal interactive AI systems. However, the simultaneous denoising of all video frames with bidirectional attention via an iterative process in diffusion models prevents real-time interaction. While existing distillation methods can make the model autoregressive and reduce sampling steps to mitigate this, they focus primarily on text-to-video generation, leaving the human-AI interaction unnatural and less efficient. This paper targets real-time interactive video diffusion conditioned on a multimodal context, including text, image, and audio, to bridge the gap. Given the observation that the leading on-policy distillation approach Self Forcing encounters challenges (visual artifacts like flickering, black frames, and quality degradation) with multimodal conditioning, we investigate an improved distillation recipe with emphasis on the quality of condition inputs as well as the initialization and schedule for the on-policy optimization. On benchmarks for multimodal-conditioned (audio, image, and text) avatar video generation including HDTF, AVSpeech, and CelebV-HQ, our distilled model matches the visual quality of the full-step, bidirectional baselines of similar or larger size with 20x less inference cost and latency. Further, we integrate our model with audio language models and long-form video inference technique Anchor-Heavy Identity Sinks to build LiveTalk, a real-time multimodal interactive avatar system. System-level evaluation on our curated multi-turn interaction benchmark shows LiveTalk outperforms state-of-the-art models (Sora2, Veo3) in multi-turn video coherence and content quality, while reducing response latency from 1 to 2 minutes to real-time generation, enabling seamless human-AI multimodal interaction.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

LoPA: Scaling dLLM Inference via Lookahead Parallel Decoding

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have demonstrated significant potential for high-speed inference. However, current confidence-driven decoding strategies are constrained by limited parallelism, typically achieving only 1--3 tokens per forward pass (TPF). In this work, we identify that the degree of parallelism during dLLM inference is highly sensitive to the Token Filling Order (TFO). Then, we introduce Lookahead PArallel Decoding LoPA, a training-free, plug-and-play algorithm, to identify a superior TFO and hence accelerate inference. LoPA concurrently explores distinct candidate TFOs via parallel branches, and selects the one with the highest potential for future parallelism based on branch confidence. We apply LoPA to the state-of-the-art D2F model and observe a substantial enhancement in decoding efficiency. Notably, LoPA increases the TPF of D2F-Dream to 10.1 on the GSM8K while maintaining performance superior to the Dream baseline. Furthermore, to facilitate this unprecedented degree of parallelism, we develop a specialized multi-device inference system featuring Branch Parallelism (BP), which achieves a single-sample throughput of 1073.9 tokens per second under multi-GPU deployment. The code is available at https://github.com/zhijie-group/LoPA.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

DEER: Draft with Diffusion, Verify with Autoregressive Models

Efficiency, as a critical practical challenge for LLM-driven agentic and reasoning systems, is increasingly constrained by the inherent latency of autoregressive (AR) decoding. Speculative decoding mitigates this cost through a draft-verify scheme, yet existing approaches rely on AR draft models (a.k.a., drafters), which introduce two fundamental issues: (1) step-wise uncertainty accumulation leads to a progressive collapse of trust between the target model and the drafter, and (2) inherently sequential decoding of AR drafters. Together, these factors cause limited speedups. In this paper, we show that a diffusion large language model (dLLM) drafters can naturally overcome these issues through its fundamentally different probabilistic modeling and efficient parallel decoding strategy. Building on this insight, we introduce DEER, an efficient speculative decoding framework that drafts with diffusion and verifies with AR models. To enable high-quality drafting, DEER employs a two-stage training pipeline to align the dLLM-based drafters with the target AR model, and further adopts single-step decoding to generate long draft segments. Experiments show DEER reaches draft acceptance lengths of up to 32 tokens, far surpassing the 10 tokens achieved by EAGLE-3. Moreover, on HumanEval with Qwen3-30B-A3B, DEER attains a 5.54x speedup, while EAGLE-3 achieves only 2.41x. Code, model, demo, etc, will be available at https://czc726.github.io/DEER/

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Fast and Accurate Causal Parallel Decoding using Jacobi Forcing

Multi-token generation has emerged as a promising paradigm for accelerating transformer-based large model inference. Recent efforts primarily explore diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) for parallel decoding to reduce inference latency. To achieve AR-level generation quality, many techniques adapt AR models into dLLMs to enable parallel decoding. However, they suffer from limited speedup compared to AR models due to a pretrain-to-posttrain mismatch. Specifically, the masked data distribution in post-training deviates significantly from the real-world data distribution seen during pretraining, and dLLMs rely on bidirectional attention, which conflicts with the causal prior learned during pretraining and hinders the integration of exact KV cache reuse. To address this, we introduce Jacobi Forcing, a progressive distillation paradigm where models are trained on their own generated parallel decoding trajectories, smoothly shifting AR models into efficient parallel decoders while preserving their pretrained causal inference property. The models trained under this paradigm, Jacobi Forcing Model, achieves 3.8x wall-clock speedup on coding and math benchmarks with minimal loss in performance. Based on Jacobi Forcing Models' trajectory characteristics, we introduce multi-block decoding with rejection recycling, which enables up to 4.5x higher token acceptance count per iteration and nearly 4.0x wall-clock speedup, effectively trading additional compute for lower inference latency. Our code is available at https://github.com/hao-ai-lab/JacobiForcing.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

TPS-Bench: Evaluating AI Agents' Tool Planning \& Scheduling Abilities in Compounding Tasks

Large language model (LLM) agents have exhibited strong problem-solving competence across domains like research and coding. Yet, it remains underexplored whether LLM agents can tackle compounding real-world problems that require a diverse set of tools to complete. Given a broad, heterogeneous tool repository, LLM agents must not only select appropriate tools based on task planning analysis but also strategically schedule the execution order to ensure efficiency. This paper introduces TPS-Bench to benchmark the ability of LLM agents in solving such problems that demand Tool Planning and Scheduling. TPS-Bench collects 200 compounding tasks of two difficulty levels, based on a tool repository containing hundreds of model context protocol (MCP) tools. In particular, each task is composed of multiple subtasks, such as web search, map navigation, calendar checking, etc., and each subtask can be completed by a basic tool. Our evaluation emphasizes both task completion rate and efficiency. The empirical studies on popular closed-source and open-source LLMs indicate that most models can perform reasonable tool planning, but differ in scheduling. For example, GLM-4.5 achieves an outperforming task completion rate of 64.72% with extensive sequential tool calls, hence suffering from significantly long execution time. By contrast, GPT-4o prioritizes parallel tool calls but achieves only a 45.08% completion rate. Considering reinforcement learning (RL) can be a viable way to improve the scheduling efficiency without compromising performance, we perform an initial study on Qwen3-1.7B and witness a 14% reduction in execution time alongside a 6% gain in task completion rate based on rarely 100 RL training samples. Our code is available https://github.com/hanwenxu1/mcp-agent.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

SafeEraser: Enhancing Safety in Multimodal Large Language Models through Multimodal Machine Unlearning

As Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) develop, their potential security issues have become increasingly prominent. Machine Unlearning (MU), as an effective strategy for forgetting specific knowledge in training data, has been widely used in privacy protection. However, MU for safety in MLLM has yet to be fully explored. To address this issue, we propose SAFEERASER, a safety unlearning benchmark for MLLMs, consisting of 3,000 images and 28.8K VQA pairs. We comprehensively evaluate unlearning methods from two perspectives: forget quality and model utility. Our findings show that existing MU methods struggle to maintain model performance while implementing the forget operation and often suffer from over-forgetting. Hence, we introduce Prompt Decouple (PD) Loss to alleviate over-forgetting through decouple prompt during unlearning process. To quantitatively measure over-forgetting mitigated by PD Loss, we propose a new metric called Safe Answer Refusal Rate (SARR). Experimental results demonstrate that combining PD Loss with existing unlearning methods can effectively prevent over-forgetting and achieve a decrease of 79.5% in the SARR metric of LLaVA-7B and LLaVA-13B, while maintaining forget quality and model utility. Our code and dataset will be released upon acceptance. Warning: This paper contains examples of harmful language and images, and reader discretion is recommended.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Label Smoothing Improves Gradient Ascent in LLM Unlearning

LLM unlearning has emerged as a promising approach, aiming to enable models to forget hazardous/undesired knowledge at low cost while preserving as much model utility as possible. Among existing techniques, the most straightforward method is performing Gradient Ascent (GA) w.r.t. the forget data, thereby forcing the model to unlearn the forget dataset. However, GA suffers from severe instability, as it drives updates in a divergent direction, often resulting in drastically degraded model utility. To address this issue, we propose Smoothed Gradient Ascent (SGA). SGA combines the forget data with multiple constructed normal data through a tunable smoothing rate. Intuitively, this extends GA from learning solely on the forget data to jointly learning across both forget and normal data, enabling more stable unlearning while better preserving model utility. Theoretically, we provide the theoretical guidance on the selection of the optimal smoothing rate. Empirically, we evaluate SGA on three benchmarks: TOFU, Harry Potter, and MUSE-NEWS. Experimental results demonstrate that SGA consistently outperforms the original Gradient Ascent (GA) method across all metrics and achieves top-2 performance among all baseline methods on several key metrics.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Adaptive Discretization for Consistency Models

Consistency Models (CMs) have shown promise for efficient one-step generation. However, most existing CMs rely on manually designed discretization schemes, which can cause repeated adjustments for different noise schedules and datasets. To address this, we propose a unified framework for the automatic and adaptive discretization of CMs, formulating it as an optimization problem with respect to the discretization step. Concretely, during the consistency training process, we propose using local consistency as the optimization objective to ensure trainability by avoiding excessive discretization, and taking global consistency as a constraint to ensure stability by controlling the denoising error in the training target. We establish the trade-off between local and global consistency with a Lagrange multiplier. Building on this framework, we achieve adaptive discretization for CMs using the Gauss-Newton method. We refer to our approach as ADCMs. Experiments demonstrate that ADCMs significantly improve the training efficiency of CMs, achieving superior generative performance with minimal training overhead on both CIFAR-10 and ImageNet. Moreover, ADCMs exhibit strong adaptability to more advanced DM variants. Code is available at https://github.com/rainstonee/ADCM.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Fast Quiet-STaR: Thinking Without Thought Tokens

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance across a range of natural language processing tasks. However, recent advances demonstrate that further gains particularly in complex reasoning tasks require more than merely scaling up model sizes or training data. One promising direction is to enable models to think during the reasoning process. Recently, Quiet STaR significantly improves reasoning by generating token-level thought traces, but incurs substantial inference overhead. In this work, we propose Fast Quiet STaR, a more efficient reasoning framework that preserves the benefits of token-level reasoning while reducing computational cost. Our method introduces a curriculum learning based training strategy that gradually reduces the number of thought tokens, enabling the model to internalize more abstract and concise reasoning processes. We further extend this approach to the standard Next Token Prediction (NTP) setting through reinforcement learning-based fine-tuning, resulting in Fast Quiet-STaR NTP, which eliminates the need for explicit thought token generation during inference. Experiments on four benchmark datasets with Mistral 7B and Qwen2.5 7B demonstrate that Fast Quiet-STaR consistently outperforms Quiet-STaR in terms of average accuracy under the same inference time budget. Notably, Fast Quiet-STaR NTP achieves an average accuracy improvement of 9\% on Mistral 7B and 5.7\% on Qwen2.5 7B, while maintaining the same inference latency. Our code will be available at https://github.com/huangwei200012/Fast-Quiet-STaR.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Meta-Unlearning on Diffusion Models: Preventing Relearning Unlearned Concepts

With the rapid progress of diffusion-based content generation, significant efforts are being made to unlearn harmful or copyrighted concepts from pretrained diffusion models (DMs) to prevent potential model misuse. However, it is observed that even when DMs are properly unlearned before release, malicious finetuning can compromise this process, causing DMs to relearn the unlearned concepts. This occurs partly because certain benign concepts (e.g., "skin") retained in DMs are related to the unlearned ones (e.g., "nudity"), facilitating their relearning via finetuning. To address this, we propose meta-unlearning on DMs. Intuitively, a meta-unlearned DM should behave like an unlearned DM when used as is; moreover, if the meta-unlearned DM undergoes malicious finetuning on unlearned concepts, the related benign concepts retained within it will be triggered to self-destruct, hindering the relearning of unlearned concepts. Our meta-unlearning framework is compatible with most existing unlearning methods, requiring only the addition of an easy-to-implement meta objective. We validate our approach through empirical experiments on meta-unlearning concepts from Stable Diffusion models (SD-v1-4 and SDXL), supported by extensive ablation studies. Our code is available at https://github.com/sail-sg/Meta-Unlearning.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Diffusion LLMs Can Do Faster-Than-AR Inference via Discrete Diffusion Forcing

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive (AR) LLMs for text generation, with the potential to decode multiple tokens in a single iteration. However, none of the existing open-source dLLMs have achieved superior inference speed over AR LLMs of similar size. This paper breaks this barrier based on a simple and effective strategy named discrete diffusion forcing (D2F). D2F equips dLLMs with two key capabilities: (1) block-wise autoregressive generation to enable KV cache utilization; (2) prediction of following tokens without requiring completion of prior blocks for inter-block parallel decoding. In this way, the vanilla dLLMs are refurbished into an AR-diffusion hybrid paradigm for efficient inference. D2F can be implemented with an asymmetric distillation process based on pre-trained dLLMs. We further propose a pipelined parallel decoding algorithm, which enables a trade-off between efficiency and efficacy. Empirically, D2F dLLMs achieve more than $\mathbf{2.5\times}$ inference speed than LLaMA3 and Qwen2.5 on GSM8K. Compared to vanilla dLLMs like LLaDA and Dream, the acceleration can be more than $\mathbf{50\times}$ while maintaining comparable output quality. The code is available at https://github.com/zhijie-group/Discrete-Diffusion-Forcing.

cs.LG↗