Daily Papers

This study introduces a novel On-the-Fly Guidance (OFG) training framework for enhancing existing learning-based image registration models, addressing the limitations of weakly-supervised and unsupervised methods. Weakly-supervised methods struggle due to the scarcity of labeled data, and unsupervised methods directly depend on image similarity metrics for accuracy. Our method proposes a supervised fashion for training registration models, without the need for any labeled data. OFG generates pseudo-ground truth during training by refining deformation predictions with a differentiable optimizer, enabling direct supervised learning. OFG optimizes deformation predictions efficiently, improving the performance of registration models without sacrificing inference speed. Our method is tested across several benchmark datasets and leading models, it significantly enhanced performance, providing a plug-and-play solution for training learning-based registration models. Code available at: https://github.com/cilix-ai/on-the-fly-guidance

Recent text-to-image generative models have demonstrated an unparalleled ability to generate diverse and creative imagery guided by a target text prompt. While revolutionary, current state-of-the-art diffusion models may still fail in generating images that fully convey the semantics in the given text prompt. We analyze the publicly available Stable Diffusion model and assess the existence of catastrophic neglect, where the model fails to generate one or more of the subjects from the input prompt. Moreover, we find that in some cases the model also fails to correctly bind attributes (e.g., colors) to their corresponding subjects. To help mitigate these failure cases, we introduce the concept of Generative Semantic Nursing (GSN), where we seek to intervene in the generative process on the fly during inference time to improve the faithfulness of the generated images. Using an attention-based formulation of GSN, dubbed Attend-and-Excite, we guide the model to refine the cross-attention units to attend to all subject tokens in the text prompt and strengthen - or excite - their activations, encouraging the model to generate all subjects described in the text prompt. We compare our approach to alternative approaches and demonstrate that it conveys the desired concepts more faithfully across a range of text prompts.

Flow-based generative models have achieved remarkable progress, with classifier-free guidance (CFG) becoming the standard for high-fidelity generation. However, the conventional practice of applying a strong, fixed guidance scale throughout inference is poorly suited for the rapid, few-step sampling required by modern applications. In this work, we uncover the root cause of this conflict: a fundamental sampling instability where the earliest steps are acutely sensitive to guidance. We trace this to a significant spike in the ratio of conditional to unconditional predictions--a spike that we prove to be an inherent property of the training data distribution itself, making it a almost inevitable challenge. Applying a high, static guidance value during this volatile initial phase leads to an exponential amplification of error, degrading image quality. To resolve this, we propose a simple, theoretically grounded, adaptive guidance schedule that automatically dampens the guidance scale at early steps based on the evolving ratio. Our method is lightweight, incurs no inference overhead, and is compatible with standard frameworks. Experiments across state-of-the-art image (SD3.5, Qwen-Image) and video (WAN2.1) models show our approach enables up to 3x faster sampling while maintaining or improving quality, robustness, and semantic alignment. Our findings highlight that adapting guidance to the sampling process, rather than fixing it, is critical for unlocking the full potential of fast, flow-based models.

This paper presents a novel guidance law for target tracking applications where the target motion model is unknown and sensor measurements are intermittent due to unknown environmental conditions and low measurement update rate. In this work, the target motion model is represented by a transformer neural network and trained by previous target position measurements. This transformer motion model serves as the prediction step in a particle filter for target state estimation and uncertainty quantification. The particle filter estimation uncertainty is utilized in the information-driven guidance law to compute a path for the mobile agent to travel to a position with maximum expected entropy reduction (EER). The computation of EER is performed in real-time by approximating the information gain from the predicted particle distributions relative to the current distribution. Simulation and hardware experiments are performed with a quadcopter agent and TurtleBot target to demonstrate that the presented guidance law outperforms two other baseline guidance methods.

Diffusion models are capable of generating impressive images conditioned on text descriptions, and extensions of these models allow users to edit images at a relatively coarse scale. However, the ability to precisely edit the layout, position, pose, and shape of objects in images with diffusion models is still difficult. To this end, we propose motion guidance, a zero-shot technique that allows a user to specify dense, complex motion fields that indicate where each pixel in an image should move. Motion guidance works by steering the diffusion sampling process with the gradients through an off-the-shelf optical flow network. Specifically, we design a guidance loss that encourages the sample to have the desired motion, as estimated by a flow network, while also being visually similar to the source image. By simultaneously sampling from a diffusion model and guiding the sample to have low guidance loss, we can obtain a motion-edited image. We demonstrate that our technique works on complex motions and produces high quality edits of real and generated images.

Recent diffusion models achieve the state-of-the-art performance in image generation, but often suffer from semantic inconsistencies or hallucinations. While various inference-time guidance methods can enhance generation, they often operate indirectly by relying on external signals or architectural modifications, which introduces additional computational overhead. In this paper, we propose Tangential Amplifying Guidance (TAG), a more efficient and direct guidance method that operates solely on trajectory signals without modifying the underlying diffusion model. TAG leverages an intermediate sample as a projection basis and amplifies the tangential components of the estimated scores with respect to this basis to correct the sampling trajectory. We formalize this guidance process by leveraging a first-order Taylor expansion, which demonstrates that amplifying the tangential component steers the state toward higher-probability regions, thereby reducing inconsistencies and enhancing sample quality. TAG is a plug-and-play, architecture-agnostic module that improves diffusion sampling fidelity with minimal computational addition, offering a new perspective on diffusion guidance.

Coordinated flight of multiple drones allows to achieve tasks faster such as search and rescue and infrastructure inspection. Thus, pushing the state-of-the-art of aerial swarms in navigation speed and robustness is of tremendous benefit. In particular, being able to account for unexplored/unknown environments when planning trajectories allows for safer flight. In this work, we propose the first high-speed, decentralized, and synchronous motion planning framework (HDSM) for an aerial swarm that explicitly takes into account the unknown/undiscovered parts of the environment. The proposed approach generates an optimized trajectory for each planning agent that avoids obstacles and other planning agents while moving and exploring the environment. The only global information that each agent has is the target location. The generated trajectory is high-speed, safe from unexplored spaces, and brings the agent closer to its goal. The proposed method outperforms four recent state-of-the-art methods in success rate (100% success in reaching the target location), flight speed (67% faster), and flight time (42% lower). Finally, the method is validated on a set of Crazyflie nano-drones as a proof of concept.

Guidance is a crucial technique for extracting the best performance out of image-generating diffusion models. Traditionally, a constant guidance weight has been applied throughout the sampling chain of an image. We show that guidance is clearly harmful toward the beginning of the chain (high noise levels), largely unnecessary toward the end (low noise levels), and only beneficial in the middle. We thus restrict it to a specific range of noise levels, improving both the inference speed and result quality. This limited guidance interval improves the record FID in ImageNet-512 significantly, from 1.81 to 1.40. We show that it is quantitatively and qualitatively beneficial across different sampler parameters, network architectures, and datasets, including the large-scale setting of Stable Diffusion XL. We thus suggest exposing the guidance interval as a hyperparameter in all diffusion models that use guidance.

High-speed online trajectory planning for UAVs poses a significant challenge due to the need for precise modeling of complex dynamics while also being constrained by computational limitations. This paper presents a multi-fidelity reinforcement learning method (MFRL) that aims to effectively create a realistic dynamics model and simultaneously train a planning policy that can be readily deployed in real-time applications. The proposed method involves the co-training of a planning policy and a reward estimator; the latter predicts the performance of the policy's output and is trained efficiently through multi-fidelity Bayesian optimization. This optimization approach models the correlation between different fidelity levels, thereby constructing a high-fidelity model based on a low-fidelity foundation, which enables the accurate development of the reward model with limited high-fidelity experiments. The framework is further extended to include real-world flight experiments in reinforcement learning training, allowing the reward model to precisely reflect real-world constraints and broadening the policy's applicability to real-world scenarios. We present rigorous evaluations by training and testing the planning policy in both simulated and real-world environments. The resulting trained policy not only generates faster and more reliable trajectories compared to the baseline snap minimization method, but it also achieves trajectory updates in 2 ms on average, while the baseline method takes several minutes.

The manual design of scenarios for Air Traffic Control (ATC) training is a demanding and time-consuming bottleneck that limits the diversity of simulations available to controllers. To address this, we introduce a novel, end-to-end approach, AirTrafficGen, that leverages large language models (LLMs) to automate and control the generation of complex ATC scenarios. Our method uses a purpose-built, graph-based representation to encode sector topology (including airspace geometry, routes, and fixes) into a format LLMs can process. Through rigorous benchmarking, we show that state-of-the-art models like Gemini 2.5 Pro and OpenAI o3 can generate high-traffic scenarios whilst maintaining operational realism. Our engineered prompting enables fine-grained control over interaction presence, type, and location. Initial findings suggest these models are also capable of iterative refinement, correcting flawed scenarios based on simple textual feedback. This approach provides a scalable alternative to manual scenario design, addressing the need for a greater volume and variety of ATC training and validation simulations. More broadly, this work showcases the potential of LLMs for complex planning in safety-critical domains.

Strategic planning is critical for multi-step reasoning, yet compact Large Language Models (LLMs) often lack the capacity to formulate global strategies, leading to error propagation in long-horizon tasks. Our analysis reveals that LLMs possess latent reasoning capabilities that can be unlocked when conditioned on explicit plans from a teacher model; however, runtime reliance on external guidance is often impractical due to latency and availability constraints. To bridge this gap, we propose PILOT (Planning via Internalized Latent Optimization Trajectories), a non-invasive framework designed to internalize the strategic oversight of large models into intrinsic Latent Guidance. Instead of altering backbone weights, PILOT employs a lightweight Hyper-Network to synthesize a query-conditioned Latent Guidance vector. This vector acts as an internal steering mechanism, guiding the model's representations toward optimal reasoning paths. Extensive experiments on mathematical and coding benchmarks demonstrate that PILOT effectively stabilizes reasoning trajectories, consistently outperforming strong baselines (e.g., +8.9% on MATH500) with negligible inference latency.

Guided sampling is a vital approach for applying diffusion models in real-world tasks that embeds human-defined guidance during the sampling procedure. This paper considers a general setting where the guidance is defined by an (unnormalized) energy function. The main challenge for this setting is that the intermediate guidance during the diffusion sampling procedure, which is jointly defined by the sampling distribution and the energy function, is unknown and is hard to estimate. To address this challenge, we propose an exact formulation of the intermediate guidance as well as a novel training objective named contrastive energy prediction (CEP) to learn the exact guidance. Our method is guaranteed to converge to the exact guidance under unlimited model capacity and data samples, while previous methods can not. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by applying it to offline reinforcement learning (RL). Extensive experiments on D4RL benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art algorithms. We also provide some examples of applying CEP for image synthesis to demonstrate the scalability of CEP on high-dimensional data.

Training-free guided generation is a widely used and powerful technique that allows the end user to exert further control over the generative process of flow/diffusion models. Generally speaking, two families of techniques have emerged for solving this problem for gradient-based guidance: namely, posterior guidance (i.e., guidance via projecting the current sample to the target distribution via the target prediction model) and end-to-end guidance (i.e., guidance by performing backpropagation throughout the entire ODE solve). In this work, we show that these two seemingly separate families can actually be unified by looking at posterior guidance as a greedy strategy of end-to-end guidance. We explore the theoretical connections between these two families and provide an in-depth theoretical of these two techniques relative to the continuous ideal gradients. Motivated by this analysis we then show a method for interpolating between these two families enabling a trade-off between compute and accuracy of the guidance gradients. We then validate this work on several inverse image problems and property-guided molecular generation.

Recent advancements in diffusion and flow-matching models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in high-fidelity image synthesis. A prominent line of research involves reward-guided guidance, which steers the generation process during inference to align with specific objectives. However, leveraging this reward-guided approach to the task of image editing, which requires preserving the semantic content of the source image while enhancing a target reward, is largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce a novel framework for training-free, reward-guided image editing. We formulate the editing process as a trajectory optimal control problem where the reverse process of a diffusion model is treated as a controllable trajectory originating from the source image, and the adjoint states are iteratively updated to steer the editing process. Through extensive experiments across distinct editing tasks, we demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing inversion-based training-free guidance baselines, achieving a superior balance between reward maximization and fidelity to the source image without reward hacking.

Classifier-free guidance is a key component for enhancing the performance of conditional generative models across diverse tasks. While it has previously demonstrated remarkable improvements for the sample quality, it has only been exclusively employed for diffusion models. In this paper, we integrate classifier-free guidance into Flow Matching (FM) models, an alternative simulation-free approach that trains Continuous Normalizing Flows (CNFs) based on regressing vector fields. We explore the usage of Guided Flows for a variety of downstream applications. We show that Guided Flows significantly improves the sample quality in conditional image generation and zero-shot text-to-speech synthesis, boasting state-of-the-art performance. Notably, we are the first to apply flow models for plan generation in the offline reinforcement learning setting, showcasing a 10x speedup in computation compared to diffusion models while maintaining comparable performance.

We present a novel approach named OmniControl for incorporating flexible spatial control signals into a text-conditioned human motion generation model based on the diffusion process. Unlike previous methods that can only control the pelvis trajectory, OmniControl can incorporate flexible spatial control signals over different joints at different times with only one model. Specifically, we propose analytic spatial guidance that ensures the generated motion can tightly conform to the input control signals. At the same time, realism guidance is introduced to refine all the joints to generate more coherent motion. Both the spatial and realism guidance are essential and they are highly complementary for balancing control accuracy and motion realism. By combining them, OmniControl generates motions that are realistic, coherent, and consistent with the spatial constraints. Experiments on HumanML3D and KIT-ML datasets show that OmniControl not only achieves significant improvement over state-of-the-art methods on pelvis control but also shows promising results when incorporating the constraints over other joints.

This paper deals with the problem of informative path planning for a UAV deployed for precision agriculture applications. First, we observe that the ``fear of missing out'' data lead to uniform, conservative scanning policies over the whole agricultural field. Consequently, employing a non-uniform scanning approach can mitigate the expenditure of time in areas with minimal or negligible real value, while ensuring heightened precision in information-dense regions. Turning to the available informative path planning methodologies, we discern that certain methods entail intensive computational requirements, while others necessitate training on an ideal world simulator. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose an active sensing coverage path planning approach, named OverFOMO, that regulates the speed of the UAV in accordance with both the relative quantity of the identified classes, i.e. crops and weeds, and the confidence level of such detections. To identify these instances, a robust Deep Learning segmentation model is deployed. The computational needs of the proposed algorithm are independent of the size of the agricultural field, rendering its applicability on modern UAVs quite straightforward. The proposed algorithm was evaluated with a simu-realistic pipeline, combining data from real UAV missions and the high-fidelity dynamics of AirSim simulator, showcasing its performance improvements over the established state of affairs for this type of missions. An open-source implementation of the algorithm and the evaluation pipeline is also available: https://github.com/emmarapt/OverFOMO.

Deploying large, complex policies in the real world requires the ability to steer them to fit the needs of a situation. Most common steering approaches, like goal-conditioning, require training the robot policy with a distribution of test-time objectives in mind. To overcome this limitation, we present DynaGuide, a steering method for diffusion policies using guidance from an external dynamics model during the diffusion denoising process. DynaGuide separates the dynamics model from the base policy, which gives it multiple advantages, including the ability to steer towards multiple objectives, enhance underrepresented base policy behaviors, and maintain robustness on low-quality objectives. The separate guidance signal also allows DynaGuide to work with off-the-shelf pretrained diffusion policies. We demonstrate the performance and features of DynaGuide against other steering approaches in a series of simulated and real experiments, showing an average steering success of 70% on a set of articulated CALVIN tasks and outperforming goal-conditioning by 5.4x when steered with low-quality objectives. We also successfully steer an off-the-shelf real robot policy to express preference for particular objects and even create novel behavior. Videos and more can be found on the project website: https://dynaguide.github.io

Classifier-free guidance (CFG) is a cornerstone of text-to-image diffusion models, yet its effectiveness is limited by the use of static guidance scales. This "one-size-fits-all" approach fails to adapt to the diverse requirements of different prompts; moreover, prior solutions like gradient-based correction or fixed heuristic schedules introduce additional complexities and fail to generalize. In this work, we challeng this static paradigm by introducing a framework for dynamic CFG scheduling. Our method leverages online feedback from a suite of general-purpose and specialized small-scale latent-space evaluations, such as CLIP for alignment, a discriminator for fidelity and a human preference reward model, to assess generation quality at each step of the reverse diffusion process. Based on this feedback, we perform a greedy search to select the optimal CFG scale for each timestep, creating a unique guidance schedule tailored to every prompt and sample. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on both small-scale models and the state-of-the-art Imagen 3, showing significant improvements in text alignment, visual quality, text rendering and numerical reasoning. Notably, when compared against the default Imagen 3 baseline, our method achieves up to 53.8% human preference win-rate for overall preference, a figure that increases up to to 55.5% on prompts targeting specific capabilities like text rendering. Our work establishes that the optimal guidance schedule is inherently dynamic and prompt-dependent, and provides an efficient and generalizable framework to achieve it.

Motion diffusion models and Reinforcement Learning (RL) based control for physics-based simulations have complementary strengths for human motion generation. The former is capable of generating a wide variety of motions, adhering to intuitive control such as text, while the latter offers physically plausible motion and direct interaction with the environment. In this work, we present a method that combines their respective strengths. CLoSD is a text-driven RL physics-based controller, guided by diffusion generation for various tasks. Our key insight is that motion diffusion can serve as an on-the-fly universal planner for a robust RL controller. To this end, CLoSD maintains a closed-loop interaction between two modules -- a Diffusion Planner (DiP), and a tracking controller. DiP is a fast-responding autoregressive diffusion model, controlled by textual prompts and target locations, and the controller is a simple and robust motion imitator that continuously receives motion plans from DiP and provides feedback from the environment. CLoSD is capable of seamlessly performing a sequence of different tasks, including navigation to a goal location, striking an object with a hand or foot as specified in a text prompt, sitting down, and getting up. https://guytevet.github.io/CLoSD-page/

We introduce Cognitive Kernel, an open-source agent system towards the goal of generalist autopilots. Unlike copilot systems, which primarily rely on users to provide essential state information (e.g., task descriptions) and assist users by answering questions or auto-completing contents, autopilot systems must complete tasks from start to finish independently, which requires the system to acquire the state information from the environments actively. To achieve this, an autopilot system should be capable of understanding user intents, actively gathering necessary information from various real-world sources, and making wise decisions. Cognitive Kernel adopts a model-centric design. In our implementation, the central policy model (a fine-tuned LLM) initiates interactions with the environment using a combination of atomic actions, such as opening files, clicking buttons, saving intermediate results to memory, or calling the LLM itself. This differs from the widely used environment-centric design, where a task-specific environment with predefined actions is fixed, and the policy model is limited to selecting the correct action from a given set of options. Our design facilitates seamless information flow across various sources and provides greater flexibility. We evaluate our system in three use cases: real-time information management, private information management, and long-term memory management. The results demonstrate that Cognitive Kernel achieves better or comparable performance to other closed-source systems in these scenarios. Cognitive Kernel is fully dockerized, ensuring everyone can deploy it privately and securely. We open-source the system and the backbone model to encourage further research on LLM-driven autopilot systems.

Typical diffusion models are trained to accept a particular form of conditioning, most commonly text, and cannot be conditioned on other modalities without retraining. In this work, we propose a universal guidance algorithm that enables diffusion models to be controlled by arbitrary guidance modalities without the need to retrain any use-specific components. We show that our algorithm successfully generates quality images with guidance functions including segmentation, face recognition, object detection, and classifier signals. Code is available at https://github.com/arpitbansal297/Universal-Guided-Diffusion.

Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) that operate in unstructured, unexplored environments require fast and flexible local planning, which can replan when new parts of the map are explored. Trajectory optimization methods fulfill these needs, but require obstacle distance information, which can be given by Euclidean Signed Distance Fields (ESDFs). We propose a method to incrementally build ESDFs from Truncated Signed Distance Fields (TSDFs), a common implicit surface representation used in computer graphics and vision. TSDFs are fast to build and smooth out sensor noise over many observations, and are designed to produce surface meshes. Meshes allow human operators to get a better assessment of the robot's environment, and set high-level mission goals. We show that we can build TSDFs faster than Octomaps, and that it is more accurate to build ESDFs out of TSDFs than occupancy maps. Our complete system, called voxblox, will be available as open source and runs in real-time on a single CPU core. We validate our approach on-board an MAV, by using our system with a trajectory optimization local planner, entirely on-board and in real-time.

The ability to converse with humans and follow natural language commands is crucial for intelligent unmanned aerial vehicles (a.k.a. drones). It can relieve people's burden of holding a controller all the time, allow multitasking, and make drone control more accessible for people with disabilities or with their hands occupied. To this end, we introduce Aerial Vision-and-Dialog Navigation (AVDN), to navigate a drone via natural language conversation. We build a drone simulator with a continuous photorealistic environment and collect a new AVDN dataset of over 3k recorded navigation trajectories with asynchronous human-human dialogs between commanders and followers. The commander provides initial navigation instruction and further guidance by request, while the follower navigates the drone in the simulator and asks questions when needed. During data collection, followers' attention on the drone's visual observation is also recorded. Based on the AVDN dataset, we study the tasks of aerial navigation from (full) dialog history and propose an effective Human Attention Aided Transformer model (HAA-Transformer), which learns to predict both navigation waypoints and human attention.

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success as generative models. However, even a well-trained model can accumulate errors throughout the generation process. These errors become particularly problematic when arbitrary guidance is applied to steer samples toward desired properties, which often breaks sample fidelity. In this paper, we propose a general solution to address the off-manifold phenomenon observed in diffusion models. Our approach leverages a time predictor to estimate deviations from the desired data manifold at each timestep, identifying that a larger time gap is associated with reduced generation quality. We then design a novel guidance mechanism, `Temporal Alignment Guidance' (TAG), attracting the samples back to the desired manifold at every timestep during generation. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that TAG consistently produces samples closely aligned with the desired manifold at each timestep, leading to significant improvements in generation quality across various downstream tasks.

Recent video diffusion models demonstrate strong potential in spatial intelligence tasks due to their rich latent world priors. However, this potential is hindered by their limited controllability and geometric inconsistency, creating a gap between their strong priors and their practical use in 3D/4D tasks. As a result, current approaches often rely on retraining or fine-tuning, which risks degrading pretrained knowledge and incurs high computational costs. To address this, we propose WorldForge, a training-free, inference-time framework composed of three tightly coupled modules. Intra-Step Recursive Refinement introduces a recursive refinement mechanism during inference, which repeatedly optimizes network predictions within each denoising step to enable precise trajectory injection. Flow-Gated Latent Fusion leverages optical flow similarity to decouple motion from appearance in the latent space and selectively inject trajectory guidance into motion-related channels. Dual-Path Self-Corrective Guidance compares guided and unguided denoising paths to adaptively correct trajectory drift caused by noisy or misaligned structural signals. Together, these components inject fine-grained, trajectory-aligned guidance without training, achieving both accurate motion control and photorealistic content generation. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks validate our method's superiority in realism, trajectory consistency, and visual fidelity. This work introduces a novel plug-and-play paradigm for controllable video synthesis, offering a new perspective on leveraging generative priors for spatial intelligence.

This paper introduces FALCON, a novel Fast Autonomous expLoration framework using COverage path guidaNce, which aims at setting a new performance benchmark in the field of autonomous aerial exploration. Despite recent advancements in the domain, existing exploration planners often suffer from inefficiencies such as frequent revisitations of previously explored regions.FALCON effectively harnesses the full potential of online generated coverage paths in enhancing exploration efficiency.The framework begins with an incremental connectivity-aware space decomposition and connectivity graph construction, which facilitate efficient coverage path planning.Subsequently, a hierarchical planner generates a coverage path spanning the entire unexplored space, serving as a global guidance.Then, a local planner optimizes the frontier visitation order, minimizing traversal time while consciously incorporating the intention of the global guidance.Finally, minimum-time smooth and safe trajectories are produced to visit the frontier viewpoints.For fair and comprehensive benchmark experiments, we introduce a lightweight exploration planner evaluation environment that allows for comparing exploration planners across a variety of testing scenarios using an identical quadrotor simulator.Additionally, an in-depth analysis and evaluation is conducted to highlight the significant performance advantages of FALCON in comparison with the state-of-the-art exploration planners based on objective criteria.Extensive ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of each component in the proposed framework.Real-world experiments conducted fully onboard further validate FALCON's practical capability in complex and challenging environments.The source code of both the exploration planner FALCON and the exploration planner evaluation environment has been released to benefit the community.

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) optimizes the policy on a previously collected dataset without any interactions with the environment, yet usually suffers from the distributional shift problem. To mitigate this issue, a typical solution is to impose a policy constraint on a policy improvement objective. However, existing methods generally adopt a ``one-size-fits-all'' practice, i.e., keeping only a single improvement-constraint balance for all the samples in a mini-batch or even the entire offline dataset. In this work, we argue that different samples should be treated with different policy constraint intensities. Based on this idea, a novel plug-in approach named Guided Offline RL (GORL) is proposed. GORL employs a guiding network, along with only a few expert demonstrations, to adaptively determine the relative importance of the policy improvement and policy constraint for every sample. We theoretically prove that the guidance provided by our method is rational and near-optimal. Extensive experiments on various environments suggest that GORL can be easily installed on most offline RL algorithms with statistically significant performance improvements.

Data driven robotics relies upon accurate real-world representations to learn useful policies. Despite our best-efforts, zero-shot sim-to-real transfer is still an unsolved problem, and we often need to allow our agents to explore online to learn useful policies for a given task. For many applications of field robotics online exploration is prohibitively expensive and dangerous, this is especially true in fixed-wing aerial robotics. To address these challenges we offer an intermediary solution for learning in field robotics. We investigate the use of dissimilar platform vehicle for learning and offer a procedure to mimic the behavior of one vehicle with another. We specifically consider the problem of training fixed-wing aircraft, an expensive and dangerous vehicle type, using a multi-rotor host platform. Using a Model Predictive Control approach, we design a controller capable of mimicking another vehicles behavior in both simulation and the real-world.

Classifier guidance -- using the gradients of an image classifier to steer the generations of a diffusion model -- has the potential to dramatically expand the creative control over image generation and editing. However, currently classifier guidance requires either training new noise-aware models to obtain accurate gradients or using a one-step denoising approximation of the final generation, which leads to misaligned gradients and sub-optimal control. We highlight this approximation's shortcomings and propose a novel guidance method: Direct Optimization of Diffusion Latents (DOODL), which enables plug-and-play guidance by optimizing diffusion latents w.r.t. the gradients of a pre-trained classifier on the true generated pixels, using an invertible diffusion process to achieve memory-efficient backpropagation. Showcasing the potential of more precise guidance, DOODL outperforms one-step classifier guidance on computational and human evaluation metrics across different forms of guidance: using CLIP guidance to improve generations of complex prompts from DrawBench, using fine-grained visual classifiers to expand the vocabulary of Stable Diffusion, enabling image-conditioned generation with a CLIP visual encoder, and improving image aesthetics using an aesthetic scoring network. Code at https://github.com/salesforce/DOODL.

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has markedly enhanced the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). Its success, however, largely depends on strong base models with rich world knowledge, yielding only modest improvements for small-size language models (SLMs). To address this limitation, we investigate Guided GRPO, which injects ground-truth reasoning steps into roll-out trajectories to compensate for SLMs' inherent weaknesses. Through a comprehensive study of various guidance configurations, we find that naively adding guidance delivers limited gains. These insights motivate G^2RPO-A, an adaptive algorithm that automatically adjusts guidance strength in response to the model's evolving training dynamics. Experiments on mathematical reasoning and code-generation benchmarks confirm that G^2RPO-A substantially outperforms vanilla GRPO. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/T-Lab-CUHKSZ/G2RPO-A.

Guidance in conditional diffusion generation is of great importance for sample quality and controllability. However, existing guidance schemes are to be desired. On one hand, mainstream methods such as classifier guidance and classifier-free guidance both require extra training with labeled data, which is time-consuming and unable to adapt to new conditions. On the other hand, training-free methods such as universal guidance, though more flexible, have yet to demonstrate comparable performance. In this work, through a comprehensive investigation into the design space, we show that it is possible to achieve significant performance improvements over existing guidance schemes by leveraging off-the-shelf classifiers in a training-free fashion, enjoying the best of both worlds. Employing calibration as a general guideline, we propose several pre-conditioning techniques to better exploit pretrained off-the-shelf classifiers for guiding diffusion generation. Extensive experiments on ImageNet validate our proposed method, showing that state-of-the-art diffusion models (DDPM, EDM, DiT) can be further improved (up to 20%) using off-the-shelf classifiers with barely any extra computational cost. With the proliferation of publicly available pretrained classifiers, our proposed approach has great potential and can be readily scaled up to text-to-image generation tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/AlexMaOLS/EluCD/tree/main.

Aerial robots can enhance construction site productivity by autonomously handling inspection and mapping tasks. However, ensuring safe navigation near human workers remains challenging. While navigation in static environments has been well studied, navigating dynamic environments remains open due to challenges in perception and planning. Payload limitations restrict the robots to using cameras with limited fields of view, resulting in unreliable perception and tracking during collision avoidance. Moreover, the rapidly changing conditions of dynamic environments can quickly make the generated optimal trajectory outdated.To address these challenges, this paper presents a comprehensive navigation framework that integrates perception, intent prediction, and planning. Our perception module detects and tracks dynamic obstacles efficiently and handles tracking loss and occlusion during collision avoidance. The proposed intent prediction module employs a Markov Decision Process (MDP) to forecast potential actions of dynamic obstacles with the possible future trajectories. Finally, a novel intent-based planning algorithm, leveraging model predictive control (MPC), is applied to generate navigation trajectories. Simulation and physical experiments demonstrate that our method improves the safety of navigation by achieving the fewest collisions compared to benchmarks.

We present See, Point, Fly (SPF), a training-free aerial vision-and-language navigation (AVLN) framework built atop vision-language models (VLMs). SPF is capable of navigating to any goal based on any type of free-form instructions in any kind of environment. In contrast to existing VLM-based approaches that treat action prediction as a text generation task, our key insight is to consider action prediction for AVLN as a 2D spatial grounding task. SPF harnesses VLMs to decompose vague language instructions into iterative annotation of 2D waypoints on the input image. Along with the predicted traveling distance, SPF transforms predicted 2D waypoints into 3D displacement vectors as action commands for UAVs. Moreover, SPF also adaptively adjusts the traveling distance to facilitate more efficient navigation. Notably, SPF performs navigation in a closed-loop control manner, enabling UAVs to follow dynamic targets in dynamic environments. SPF sets a new state of the art in DRL simulation benchmark, outperforming the previous best method by an absolute margin of 63%. In extensive real-world evaluations, SPF outperforms strong baselines by a large margin. We also conduct comprehensive ablation studies to highlight the effectiveness of our design choice. Lastly, SPF shows remarkable generalization to different VLMs. Project page: https://spf-web.pages.dev

Nano-UAV teams offer great agility yet face severe navigation challenges due to constrained onboard sensing, communication, and computation. Existing approaches rely on high-resolution vision or compute-intensive planners, rendering them infeasible for these platforms. We introduce LEARN, a lightweight, two-stage safety-guided reinforcement learning (RL) framework for multi-UAV navigation in cluttered spaces. Our system combines low-resolution Time-of-Flight (ToF) sensors and a simple motion planner with a compact, attention-based RL policy. In simulation, LEARN outperforms two state-of-the-art planners by 10% while using substantially fewer resources. We demonstrate LEARN's viability on six Crazyflie quadrotors, achieving fully onboard flight in diverse indoor and outdoor environments at speeds up to 2.0 m/s and traversing 0.2 m gaps.

Diffusion-based generative models have achieved remarkable success in image generation. Their guidance formulation allows an external model to plug-and-play control the generation process for various tasks without finetuning the diffusion model. However, the direct use of publicly available off-the-shelf models for guidance fails due to their poor performance on noisy inputs. For that, the existing practice is to fine-tune the guidance models with labeled data corrupted with noises. In this paper, we argue that this practice has limitations in two aspects: (1) performing on inputs with extremely various noises is too hard for a single guidance model; (2) collecting labeled datasets hinders scaling up for various tasks. To tackle the limitations, we propose a novel strategy that leverages multiple experts where each expert is specialized in a particular noise range and guides the reverse process of the diffusion at its corresponding timesteps. However, as it is infeasible to manage multiple networks and utilize labeled data, we present a practical guidance framework termed Practical Plug-And-Play (PPAP), which leverages parameter-efficient fine-tuning and data-free knowledge transfer. We exhaustively conduct ImageNet class conditional generation experiments to show that our method can successfully guide diffusion with small trainable parameters and no labeled data. Finally, we show that image classifiers, depth estimators, and semantic segmentation models can guide publicly available GLIDE through our framework in a plug-and-play manner. Our code is available at https://github.com/riiid/PPAP.

We present Readout Guidance, a method for controlling text-to-image diffusion models with learned signals. Readout Guidance uses readout heads, lightweight networks trained to extract signals from the features of a pre-trained, frozen diffusion model at every timestep. These readouts can encode single-image properties, such as pose, depth, and edges; or higher-order properties that relate multiple images, such as correspondence and appearance similarity. Furthermore, by comparing the readout estimates to a user-defined target, and back-propagating the gradient through the readout head, these estimates can be used to guide the sampling process. Compared to prior methods for conditional generation, Readout Guidance requires significantly fewer added parameters and training samples, and offers a convenient and simple recipe for reproducing different forms of conditional control under a single framework, with a single architecture and sampling procedure. We showcase these benefits in the applications of drag-based manipulation, identity-consistent generation, and spatially aligned control. Project page: https://readout-guidance.github.io.

Recently, learning-based controllers have been shown to push mobile robotic systems to their limits and provide the robustness needed for many real-world applications. However, only classical optimization-based control frameworks offer the inherent flexibility to be dynamically adjusted during execution by, for example, setting target speeds or actuator limits. We present a framework to overcome this shortcoming of neural controllers by conditioning them on an auxiliary input. This advance is enabled by including a feature-wise linear modulation layer (FiLM). We use model-free reinforcement-learning to train quadrotor control policies for the task of navigating through a sequence of waypoints in minimum time. By conditioning the policy on the maximum available thrust or the viewing direction relative to the next waypoint, a user can regulate the aggressiveness of the quadrotor's flight during deployment. We demonstrate in simulation and in real-world experiments that a single control policy can achieve close to time-optimal flight performance across the entire performance envelope of the robot, reaching up to 60 km/h and 4.5g in acceleration. The ability to guide a learned controller during task execution has implications beyond agile quadrotor flight, as conditioning the control policy on human intent helps safely bringing learning based systems out of the well-defined laboratory environment into the wild.

Ensuring safe, comfortable, and efficient planning is crucial for autonomous driving systems. While end-to-end models trained on large datasets perform well in standard driving scenarios, they struggle with complex low-frequency events. Recent Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs) advancements offer enhanced reasoning but suffer from computational inefficiency. Inspired by the dual-process cognitive model "Thinking, Fast and Slow", we propose FASIONAD -- a novel dual-system framework that synergizes a fast end-to-end planner with a VLM-based reasoning module. The fast system leverages end-to-end learning to achieve real-time trajectory generation in common scenarios, while the slow system activates through uncertainty estimation to perform contextual analysis and complex scenario resolution. Our architecture introduces three key innovations: (1) A dynamic switching mechanism enabling slow system intervention based on real-time uncertainty assessment; (2) An information bottleneck with high-level plan feedback that optimizes the slow system's guidance capability; (3) A bidirectional knowledge exchange where visual prompts enhance the slow system's reasoning while its feedback refines the fast planner's decision-making. To strengthen VLM reasoning, we develop a question-answering mechanism coupled with reward-instruct training strategy. In open-loop experiments, FASIONAD achieves a 6.7% reduction in average L2 trajectory error and 28.1% lower collision rate.

Recent advances in large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have provided rich semantic understanding that empowers drones to search for open-set objects via natural language instructions. However, prior systems struggle to integrate VLMs into practical aerial systems due to orders-of-magnitude frequency mismatch between VLM inference and real-time planning, as well as VLMs' limited 3D scene understanding. They also lack a unified mechanism to balance semantic guidance with motion efficiency in large-scale environments. To address these challenges, we present AirHunt, an aerial object navigation system that efficiently locates open-set objects with zero-shot generalization in outdoor environments by seamlessly fusing VLM semantic reasoning with continuous path planning. AirHunt features a dual-pathway asynchronous architecture that establishes a synergistic interface between VLM reasoning and path planning, enabling continuous flight with adaptive semantic guidance that evolves through motion. Moreover, we propose an active dual-task reasoning module that exploits geometric and semantic redundancy to enable selective VLM querying, and a semantic-geometric coherent planning module that dynamically reconciles semantic priorities and motion efficiency in a unified framework, enabling seamless adaptation to environmental heterogeneity. We evaluate AirHunt across diverse object navigation tasks and environments, demonstrating a higher success rate with lower navigation error and reduced flight time compared to state-of-the-art methods. Real-world experiments further validate AirHunt's practical capability in complex and challenging environments. Code and dataset will be made publicly available before publication.

Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) is a widely adopted technique in diffusion/flow models to improve image fidelity and controllability. In this work, we first analytically study the effect of CFG on flow matching models trained on Gaussian mixtures where the ground-truth flow can be derived. We observe that in the early stages of training, when the flow estimation is inaccurate, CFG directs samples toward incorrect trajectories. Building on this observation, we propose CFG-Zero*, an improved CFG with two contributions: (a) optimized scale, where a scalar is optimized to correct for the inaccuracies in the estimated velocity, hence the * in the name; and (b) zero-init, which involves zeroing out the first few steps of the ODE solver. Experiments on both text-to-image (Lumina-Next, Stable Diffusion 3, and Flux) and text-to-video (Wan-2.1) generation demonstrate that CFG-Zero* consistently outperforms CFG, highlighting its effectiveness in guiding Flow Matching models. (Code is available at github.com/WeichenFan/CFG-Zero-star)

Current Visual-Language Navigation (VLN) methodologies face a trade-off between semantic understanding and control precision. While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offer superior reasoning, deploying them as low-level controllers leads to high latency, trajectory oscillations, and poor generalization due to weak geometric grounding. To address these limitations, we propose Fly0, a framework that decouples semantic reasoning from geometric planning. The proposed method operates through a three-stage pipeline: (1) an MLLM-driven module for grounding natural language instructions into 2D pixel coordinates; (2) a geometric projection module that utilizes depth data to localize targets in 3D space; and (3) a geometric planner that generates collision-free trajectories. This mechanism enables robust navigation even when visual contact is lost. By eliminating the need for continuous inference, Fly0 reduces computational overhead and improves system stability. Extensive experiments in simulation and real-world environments demonstrate that Fly0 outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, improving the Success Rate by over 20\% and reducing Navigation Error (NE) by approximately 50\% in unstructured environments. Our code is available at https://github.com/xuzhenxing1/Fly0.

Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) significantly enhances controllability in generative models by interpolating conditional and unconditional predictions. However, standard CFG often employs a static unconditional input, which can be suboptimal for iterative generation processes where model uncertainty varies dynamically. We introduce Adaptive Classifier-Free Guidance (A-CFG), a novel method that tailors the unconditional input by leveraging the model's instantaneous predictive confidence. At each step of an iterative (masked) diffusion language model, A-CFG identifies tokens in the currently generated sequence for which the model exhibits low confidence. These tokens are temporarily re-masked to create a dynamic, localized unconditional input. This focuses CFG's corrective influence precisely on areas of ambiguity, leading to more effective guidance. We integrate A-CFG into a state-of-the-art masked diffusion language model and demonstrate its efficacy. Experiments on diverse language generation benchmarks show that A-CFG yields substantial improvements over standard CFG, achieving, for instance, a 3.9 point gain on GPQA. Our work highlights the benefit of dynamically adapting guidance mechanisms to model uncertainty in iterative generation.

Classifier guidance is a recently introduced method to trade off mode coverage and sample fidelity in conditional diffusion models post training, in the same spirit as low temperature sampling or truncation in other types of generative models. Classifier guidance combines the score estimate of a diffusion model with the gradient of an image classifier and thereby requires training an image classifier separate from the diffusion model. It also raises the question of whether guidance can be performed without a classifier. We show that guidance can be indeed performed by a pure generative model without such a classifier: in what we call classifier-free guidance, we jointly train a conditional and an unconditional diffusion model, and we combine the resulting conditional and unconditional score estimates to attain a trade-off between sample quality and diversity similar to that obtained using classifier guidance.

Popular guidance for denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM) linearly combines distinct conditional models together to provide enhanced control over samples. However, this approach overlooks nonlinear effects that become significant when guidance scale is large. To address this issue, we propose characteristic guidance, a guidance method that provides first-principle non-linear correction for classifier-free guidance. Such correction forces the guided DDPMs to respect the Fokker-Planck (FP) equation of diffusion process, in a way that is training-free and compatible with existing sampling methods. Experiments show that characteristic guidance enhances semantic characteristics of prompts and mitigate irregularities in image generation, proving effective in diverse applications ranging from simulating magnet phase transitions to latent space sampling.

Denoising diffusion models excel at generating high-quality images conditioned on text prompts, yet their effectiveness heavily relies on careful guidance during the sampling process. Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) provides a widely used mechanism for steering generation by setting the guidance scale, which balances image quality and prompt alignment. However, the choice of the guidance scale has a critical impact on the convergence toward a visually appealing and prompt-adherent image. In this work, we propose an annealing guidance scheduler which dynamically adjusts the guidance scale over time based on the conditional noisy signal. By learning a scheduling policy, our method addresses the temperamental behavior of CFG. Empirical results demonstrate that our guidance scheduler significantly enhances image quality and alignment with the text prompt, advancing the performance of text-to-image generation. Notably, our novel scheduler requires no additional activations or memory consumption, and can seamlessly replace the common classifier-free guidance, offering an improved trade-off between prompt alignment and quality.

In classic instruction following, language like "I'd like the JetBlue flight" maps to actions (e.g., selecting that flight). However, language also conveys information about a user's underlying reward function (e.g., a general preference for JetBlue), which can allow a model to carry out desirable actions in new contexts. We present a model that infers rewards from language pragmatically: reasoning about how speakers choose utterances not only to elicit desired actions, but also to reveal information about their preferences. On a new interactive flight-booking task with natural language, our model more accurately infers rewards and predicts optimal actions in unseen environments, in comparison to past work that first maps language to actions (instruction following) and then maps actions to rewards (inverse reinforcement learning).

Classifier-free guidance (CFG) is crucial for improving both generation quality and alignment between the input condition and final output in diffusion models. While a high guidance scale is generally required to enhance these aspects, it also causes oversaturation and unrealistic artifacts. In this paper, we revisit the CFG update rule and introduce modifications to address this issue. We first decompose the update term in CFG into parallel and orthogonal components with respect to the conditional model prediction and observe that the parallel component primarily causes oversaturation, while the orthogonal component enhances image quality. Accordingly, we propose down-weighting the parallel component to achieve high-quality generations without oversaturation. Additionally, we draw a connection between CFG and gradient ascent and introduce a new rescaling and momentum method for the CFG update rule based on this insight. Our approach, termed adaptive projected guidance (APG), retains the quality-boosting advantages of CFG while enabling the use of higher guidance scales without oversaturation. APG is easy to implement and introduces practically no additional computational overhead to the sampling process. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that APG is compatible with various conditional diffusion models and samplers, leading to improved FID, recall, and saturation scores while maintaining precision comparable to CFG, making our method a superior plug-and-play alternative to standard classifier-free guidance.

Large-scale generative models are capable of producing high-quality images from detailed text descriptions. However, many aspects of an image are difficult or impossible to convey through text. We introduce self-guidance, a method that provides greater control over generated images by guiding the internal representations of diffusion models. We demonstrate that properties such as the shape, location, and appearance of objects can be extracted from these representations and used to steer sampling. Self-guidance works similarly to classifier guidance, but uses signals present in the pretrained model itself, requiring no additional models or training. We show how a simple set of properties can be composed to perform challenging image manipulations, such as modifying the position or size of objects, merging the appearance of objects in one image with the layout of another, composing objects from many images into one, and more. We also show that self-guidance can be used to edit real images. For results and an interactive demo, see our project page at https://dave.ml/selfguidance/

Classifier-free guidance (CFG) is a key technique for improving conditional generation in diffusion models, enabling more accurate control while enhancing sample quality. It is natural to extend this technique to video diffusion, which generates video conditioned on a variable number of context frames, collectively referred to as history. However, we find two key challenges to guiding with variable-length history: architectures that only support fixed-size conditioning, and the empirical observation that CFG-style history dropout performs poorly. To address this, we propose the Diffusion Forcing Transformer (DFoT), a video diffusion architecture and theoretically grounded training objective that jointly enable conditioning on a flexible number of history frames. We then introduce History Guidance, a family of guidance methods uniquely enabled by DFoT. We show that its simplest form, vanilla history guidance, already significantly improves video generation quality and temporal consistency. A more advanced method, history guidance across time and frequency further enhances motion dynamics, enables compositional generalization to out-of-distribution history, and can stably roll out extremely long videos. Website: https://boyuan.space/history-guidance

When solving inverse problems, it is increasingly popular to use pre-trained diffusion models as plug-and-play priors. This framework can accommodate different forward models without re-training while preserving the generative capability of diffusion models. Despite their success in many imaging inverse problems, most existing methods rely on privileged information such as derivative, pseudo-inverse, or full knowledge about the forward model. This reliance poses a substantial limitation that restricts their use in a wide range of problems where such information is unavailable, such as in many scientific applications. To address this issue, we propose Ensemble Kalman Diffusion Guidance (EnKG) for diffusion models, a derivative-free approach that can solve inverse problems by only accessing forward model evaluations and a pre-trained diffusion model prior. We study the empirical effectiveness of our method across various inverse problems, including scientific settings such as inferring fluid flows and astronomical objects, which are highly non-linear inverse problems that often only permit black-box access to the forward model.

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is a promising paradigm for enhancing the reasoning ability in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, prevailing methods primarily rely on self-exploration or a single off-policy teacher to elicit long chain-of-thought (LongCoT) reasoning, which may introduce intrinsic model biases and restrict exploration, ultimately limiting reasoning diversity and performance. Drawing inspiration from multi-teacher strategies in knowledge distillation, we introduce Adaptive Multi-Guidance Policy Optimization (AMPO), a novel framework that adaptively leverages guidance from multiple proficient teacher models, but only when the on-policy model fails to generate correct solutions. This "guidance-on-demand" approach expands exploration while preserving the value of self-discovery. Moreover, AMPO incorporates a comprehension-based selection mechanism, prompting the student to learn from the reasoning paths that it is most likely to comprehend, thus balancing broad exploration with effective exploitation. Extensive experiments show AMPO substantially outperforms a strong baseline (GRPO), with a 4.3% improvement on mathematical reasoning tasks and 12.2% on out-of-distribution tasks, while significantly boosting Pass@k performance and enabling more diverse exploration. Notably, using four peer-sized teachers, our method achieves comparable results to approaches that leverage a single, more powerful teacher (e.g., DeepSeek-R1) with more data. These results demonstrate a more efficient and scalable path to superior reasoning and generalizability. Our code is available at https://github.com/SII-Enigma/AMPO.

We study inference-time scaling for diffusion models, where the goal is to adapt a pre-trained model to new target distributions without retraining. Existing guidance-based methods are simple but introduce bias, while particle-based corrections suffer from weight degeneracy and high computational cost. We introduce DriftLite, a lightweight, training-free particle-based approach that steers the inference dynamics on the fly with provably optimal stability control. DriftLite exploits a previously unexplored degree of freedom in the Fokker-Planck equation between the drift and particle potential, and yields two practical instantiations: Variance- and Energy-Controlling Guidance (VCG/ECG) for approximating the optimal drift with minimal overhead. Across Gaussian mixture models, particle systems, and large-scale protein-ligand co-folding problems, DriftLite consistently reduces variance and improves sample quality over pure guidance and sequential Monte Carlo baselines. These results highlight a principled, efficient route toward scalable inference-time adaptation of diffusion models.

Flow matching in the continuous simplex has emerged as a promising strategy for DNA sequence design, but struggles to scale to higher simplex dimensions required for peptide and protein generation. We introduce Gumbel-Softmax Flow and Score Matching, a generative framework on the simplex based on a novel Gumbel-Softmax interpolant with a time-dependent temperature. Using this interpolant, we introduce Gumbel-Softmax Flow Matching by deriving a parameterized velocity field that transports from smooth categorical distributions to distributions concentrated at a single vertex of the simplex. We alternatively present Gumbel-Softmax Score Matching which learns to regress the gradient of the probability density. Our framework enables high-quality, diverse generation and scales efficiently to higher-dimensional simplices. To enable training-free guidance, we propose Straight-Through Guided Flows (STGFlow), a classifier-based guidance method that leverages straight-through estimators to steer the unconditional velocity field toward optimal vertices of the simplex. STGFlow enables efficient inference-time guidance using classifiers pre-trained on clean sequences, and can be used with any discrete flow method. Together, these components form a robust framework for controllable de novo sequence generation. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in conditional DNA promoter design, sequence-only protein generation, and target-binding peptide design for rare disease treatment.

Shortcut models represent a promising, non-adversarial paradigm for generative modeling, uniquely supporting one-step, few-step, and multi-step sampling from a single trained network. However, their widespread adoption has been stymied by critical performance bottlenecks. This paper tackles the five core issues that held shortcut models back: (1) the hidden flaw of compounding guidance, which we are the first to formalize, causing severe image artifacts; (2) inflexible fixed guidance that restricts inference-time control; (3) a pervasive frequency bias driven by a reliance on low-level distances in the direct domain, which biases reconstructions toward low frequencies; (4) divergent self-consistency arising from a conflict with EMA training; and (5) curvy flow trajectories that impede convergence. To address these challenges, we introduce iSM, a unified training framework that systematically resolves each limitation. Our framework is built on four key improvements: Intrinsic Guidance provides explicit, dynamic control over guidance strength, resolving both compounding guidance and inflexibility. A Multi-Level Wavelet Loss mitigates frequency bias to restore high-frequency details. Scaling Optimal Transport (sOT) reduces training variance and learns straighter, more stable generative paths. Finally, a Twin EMA strategy reconciles training stability with self-consistency. Extensive experiments on ImageNet 256 x 256 demonstrate that our approach yields substantial FID improvements over baseline shortcut models across one-step, few-step, and multi-step generation, making shortcut models a viable and competitive class of generative models.

In this work, we consider the complex control problem of making a monopod reach a target with a jump. The monopod can jump in any direction and the terrain underneath its foot can be uneven. This is a template of a much larger class of problems, which are extremely challenging and computationally expensive to solve using standard optimisation-based techniques. Reinforcement Learning (RL) could be an interesting alternative, but the application of an end-to-end approach in which the controller must learn everything from scratch, is impractical. The solution advocated in this paper is to guide the learning process within an RL framework by injecting physical knowledge. This expedient brings to widespread benefits, such as a drastic reduction of the learning time, and the ability to learn and compensate for possible errors in the low-level controller executing the motion. We demonstrate the advantage of our approach with respect to both optimization-based and end-to-end RL approaches.

Guidance of generative models is typically achieved by modifying the probability flow vector field through the addition of a guidance field. In this paper, we instead propose the Source-Guided Flow Matching (SGFM) framework, which modifies the source distribution directly while keeping the pre-trained vector field intact. This reduces the guidance problem to a well-defined problem of sampling from the source distribution. We theoretically show that SGFM recovers the desired target distribution exactly. Furthermore, we provide bounds on the Wasserstein error for the generated distribution when using an approximate sampler of the source distribution and an approximate vector field. The key benefit of our approach is that it allows the user to flexibly choose the sampling method depending on their specific problem. To illustrate this, we systematically compare different sampling methods and discuss conditions for asymptotically exact guidance. Moreover, our framework integrates well with optimal flow matching models since the straight transport map generated by the vector field is preserved. Experimental results on synthetic 2D benchmarks, physics-informed generative tasks, and imaging inverse problems demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of the proposed framework.

Trajectory planning is commonly used as part of a local planner in autonomous driving. This paper considers the problem of planning a continuous-curvature-rate trajectory between fixed start and goal states that minimizes a tunable trade-off between passenger comfort and travel time. The problem is an instance of infinite dimensional optimization over two continuous functions: a path, and a velocity profile. We propose a simplification of this problem that facilitates the discretization of both functions. This paper also proposes a method to quickly generate minimal-length paths between start and goal states based on a single tuning parameter: the second derivative of curvature. Furthermore, we discretize the set of velocity profiles along a given path into a selection of acceleration way-points along the path. Gradient-descent is then employed to minimize cost over feasible choices of the second derivative of curvature, and acceleration way-points, resulting in a method that repeatedly solves the path and velocity profiles in an iterative fashion. Numerical examples are provided to illustrate the benefits of the proposed methods.

At the core of reinforcement learning is the idea of learning beyond the performance in the data. However, scaling such systems has proven notoriously tricky. In contrast, techniques from generative modeling have proven remarkably scalable and are simple to train. In this work, we combine these strengths, by deriving a direct relation between policy improvement and guidance of diffusion models. The resulting framework, CFGRL, is trained with the simplicity of supervised learning, yet can further improve on the policies in the data. On offline RL tasks, we observe a reliable trend -- increased guidance weighting leads to increased performance. Of particular importance, CFGRL can operate without explicitly learning a value function, allowing us to generalize simple supervised methods (e.g., goal-conditioned behavioral cloning) to further prioritize optimality, gaining performance for "free" across the board.

The progress in generative AI has fueled AI-powered tools like co-pilots and assistants to provision better guidance, particularly during data analysis. However, research on guidance has not yet examined the perceived efficacy of the source from which guidance is offered and the impact of this source on the user's perception and usage of guidance. We ask whether users perceive all guidance sources as equal, with particular interest in three sources: (i) AI, (ii) human expert, and (iii) a group of human analysts. As a benchmark, we consider a fourth source, (iv) unattributed guidance, where guidance is provided without attribution to any source, enabling isolation of and comparison with the effects of source-specific guidance. We design a five-condition between-subjects study, with one condition for each of the four guidance sources and an additional (v) no-guidance condition, which serves as a baseline to evaluate the influence of any kind of guidance. We situate our study in a custom data preparation and analysis tool wherein we task users to select relevant attributes from an unfamiliar dataset to inform a business report. Depending on the assigned condition, users can request guidance, which the system then provides in the form of attribute suggestions. To ensure internal validity, we control for the quality of guidance across source-conditions. Through several metrics of usage and perception, we statistically test five preregistered hypotheses and report on additional analysis. We find that the source of guidance matters to users, but not in a manner that matches received wisdom. For instance, users utilize guidance differently at various stages of analysis, including expressing varying levels of regret, despite receiving guidance of similar quality. Notably, users in the AI condition reported both higher post-task benefit and regret.

Diffusion models have emerged as a formidable tool for training-free conditional generation.However, a key hurdle in inference-time guidance techniques is the need for compute-heavy backpropagation through the diffusion network for estimating the guidance direction. Moreover, these techniques often require handcrafted parameter tuning on a case-by-case basis. Although some recent works have introduced minimal compute methods for linear inverse problems, a generic lightweight guidance solution to both linear and non-linear guidance problems is still missing. To this end, we propose Dreamguider, a method that enables inference-time guidance without compute-heavy backpropagation through the diffusion network. The key idea is to regulate the gradient flow through a time-varying factor. Moreover, we propose an empirical guidance scale that works for a wide variety of tasks, hence removing the need for handcrafted parameter tuning. We further introduce an effective lightweight augmentation strategy that significantly boosts the performance during inference-time guidance. We present experiments using Dreamguider on multiple tasks across multiple datasets and models to show the effectiveness of the proposed modules. To facilitate further research, we will make the code public after the review process.

Diffusion models excel in generating high-quality images. However, current diffusion models struggle to produce reliable images without guidance methods, such as classifier-free guidance (CFG). Are guidance methods truly necessary? Observing that noise obtained via diffusion inversion can reconstruct high-quality images without guidance, we focus on the initial noise of the denoising pipeline. By mapping Gaussian noise to `guidance-free noise', we uncover that small low-magnitude low-frequency components significantly enhance the denoising process, removing the need for guidance and thus improving both inference throughput and memory. Expanding on this, we propose \ours, a novel method that replaces guidance methods with a single refinement of the initial noise. This refined noise enables high-quality image generation without guidance, within the same diffusion pipeline. Our noise-refining model leverages efficient noise-space learning, achieving rapid convergence and strong performance with just 50K text-image pairs. We validate its effectiveness across diverse metrics and analyze how refined noise can eliminate the need for guidance. See our project page: https://cvlab-kaist.github.io/NoiseRefine/.

This paper tackles the problem of positioning a swarm of UAVs inside a completely unknown terrain, having as objective to maximize the overall situational awareness. The situational awareness is expressed by the number and quality of unique objects of interest, inside the UAVs' fields of view. YOLOv3 and a system to identify duplicate objects of interest were employed to assign a single score to each UAVs' configuration. Then, a novel navigation algorithm, capable of optimizing the previously defined score, without taking into consideration the dynamics of either UAVs or environment, is proposed. A cornerstone of the proposed approach is that it shares the same convergence characteristics as the block coordinate descent (BCD) family of approaches. The effectiveness and performance of the proposed navigation scheme were evaluated utilizing a series of experiments inside the AirSim simulator. The experimental evaluation indicates that the proposed navigation algorithm was able to consistently navigate the swarm of UAVs to "strategic" monitoring positions and also adapt to the different number of swarm sizes. Source code is available at https://github.com/dimikout3/ConvCAOAirSim.

Classifier-free guidance (CFG) is an essential mechanism in contemporary text-driven diffusion models. In practice, in controlling the impact of guidance we can see the trade-off between the quality of the generated images and correspondence to the prompt. When we use strong guidance, generated images fit the conditioned text perfectly but at the cost of their quality. Dually, we can use small guidance to generate high-quality results, but the generated images do not suit our prompt. In this paper, we present beta-CFG (beta-adaptive scaling in Classifier-Free Guidance), which controls the impact of guidance during generation to solve the above trade-off. First, beta-CFG stabilizes the effects of guiding by gradient-based adaptive normalization. Second, beta-CFG uses the family of single-modal (beta-distribution), time-dependent curves to dynamically adapt the trade-off between prompt matching and the quality of samples during the diffusion denoising process. Our model obtained better FID scores, maintaining the text-to-image CLIP similarity scores at a level similar to that of the reference CFG.

Denoising diffusion models have shown great promise in human motion synthesis conditioned on natural language descriptions. However, integrating spatial constraints, such as pre-defined motion trajectories and obstacles, remains a challenge despite being essential for bridging the gap between isolated human motion and its surrounding environment. To address this issue, we propose Guided Motion Diffusion (GMD), a method that incorporates spatial constraints into the motion generation process. Specifically, we propose an effective feature projection scheme that manipulates motion representation to enhance the coherency between spatial information and local poses. Together with a new imputation formulation, the generated motion can reliably conform to spatial constraints such as global motion trajectories. Furthermore, given sparse spatial constraints (e.g. sparse keyframes), we introduce a new dense guidance approach to turn a sparse signal, which is susceptible to being ignored during the reverse steps, into denser signals to guide the generated motion to the given constraints. Our extensive experiments justify the development of GMD, which achieves a significant improvement over state-of-the-art methods in text-based motion generation while allowing control of the synthesized motions with spatial constraints.

Robotic instruction following tasks require seamless integration of visual perception, task planning, target localization, and motion execution. However, existing task planning methods for instruction following are either data-driven or underperform in zero-shot scenarios due to difficulties in grounding lengthy instructions into actionable plans under operational constraints. To address this, we propose FlowPlan, a structured multi-stage LLM workflow that elevates zero-shot pipeline and bridges the performance gap between zero-shot and data-driven in-context learning methods. By decomposing the planning process into modular stages--task information retrieval, language-level reasoning, symbolic-level planning, and logical evaluation--FlowPlan generates logically coherent action sequences while adhering to operational constraints and further extracts contextual guidance for precise instance-level target localization. Benchmarked on the ALFRED and validated in real-world applications, our method achieves competitive performance relative to data-driven in-context learning methods and demonstrates adaptability across diverse environments. This work advances zero-shot task planning in robotic systems without reliance on labeled data. Project website: https://instruction-following-project.github.io/.

The diffusion model presents a powerful ability to capture the entire (conditional) data distribution. However, due to the lack of sufficient training and data to learn to cover low-probability areas, the model will be penalized for failing to generate high-quality images corresponding to these areas. To achieve better generation quality, guidance strategies such as classifier free guidance (CFG) can guide the samples to the high-probability areas during the sampling stage. However, the standard CFG often leads to over-simplified or distorted samples. On the other hand, the alternative line of guiding diffusion model with its bad version is limited by carefully designed degradation strategies, extra training and additional sampling steps. In this paper, we proposed a simple yet effective strategy Internal Guidance (IG), which introduces an auxiliary supervision on the intermediate layer during training process and extrapolates the intermediate and deep layer's outputs to obtain generative results during sampling process. This simple strategy yields significant improvements in both training efficiency and generation quality on various baselines. On ImageNet 256x256, SiT-XL/2+IG achieves FID=5.31 and FID=1.75 at 80 and 800 epochs. More impressively, LightningDiT-XL/1+IG achieves FID=1.34 which achieves a large margin between all of these methods. Combined with CFG, LightningDiT-XL/1+IG achieves the current state-of-the-art FID of 1.19.

In trajectory forecasting tasks for traffic, future output trajectories can be computed by advancing the ego vehicle's state with predicted actions according to a kinematics model. By unrolling predicted trajectories via time integration and models of kinematic dynamics, predicted trajectories should not only be kinematically feasible but also relate uncertainty from one timestep to the next. While current works in probabilistic prediction do incorporate kinematic priors for mean trajectory prediction, variance is often left as a learnable parameter, despite uncertainty in one time step being inextricably tied to uncertainty in the previous time step. In this paper, we show simple and differentiable analytical approximations describing the relationship between variance at one timestep and that at the next with the kinematic bicycle model. These approximations can be easily incorporated with negligible additional overhead into any existing trajectory forecasting framework utilizing probabilistic predictions, whether it is autoregressive or one-shot prediction. In our results, we find that encoding the relationship between variance across timesteps works especially well in unoptimal settings, such as with small or noisy datasets. We observe up to a 50% performance boost in partial dataset settings and up to an 8% performance boost in large-scale learning compared to previous kinematic prediction methods on SOTA trajectory forecasting architectures out-of-the-box, with no fine-tuning. In this paper, we show four analytical formulations of probabilistic kinematic priors which can be used for any Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM)-based deep learning models, quantify the error bound on linear approximations applied during trajectory unrolling, and show results to evaluate each formulation in trajectory forecasting.

We address the challenge of developing a generalizable neural tracking controller for dexterous manipulation from human references. This controller aims to manage a dexterous robot hand to manipulate diverse objects for various purposes defined by kinematic human-object interactions. Developing such a controller is complicated by the intricate contact dynamics of dexterous manipulation and the need for adaptivity, generalizability, and robustness. Current reinforcement learning and trajectory optimization methods often fall short due to their dependence on task-specific rewards or precise system models. We introduce an approach that curates large-scale successful robot tracking demonstrations, comprising pairs of human references and robot actions, to train a neural controller. Utilizing a data flywheel, we iteratively enhance the controller's performance, as well as the number and quality of successful tracking demonstrations. We exploit available tracking demonstrations and carefully integrate reinforcement learning and imitation learning to boost the controller's performance in dynamic environments. At the same time, to obtain high-quality tracking demonstrations, we individually optimize per-trajectory tracking by leveraging the learned tracking controller in a homotopy optimization method. The homotopy optimization, mimicking chain-of-thought, aids in solving challenging trajectory tracking problems to increase demonstration diversity. We showcase our success by training a generalizable neural controller and evaluating it in both simulation and real world. Our method achieves over a 10% improvement in success rates compared to leading baselines. The project website with animated results is available at https://meowuu7.github.io/DexTrack/.

Autonomous driving has long relied on modular "Perception-Decision-Action" pipelines, where hand-crafted interfaces and rule-based components often break down in complex or long-tailed scenarios. Their cascaded design further propagates perception errors, degrading downstream planning and control. Vision-Action (VA) models address some limitations by learning direct mappings from visual inputs to actions, but they remain opaque, sensitive to distribution shifts, and lack structured reasoning or instruction-following capabilities. Recent progress in Large Language Models (LLMs) and multimodal learning has motivated the emergence of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) frameworks, which integrate perception with language-grounded decision making. By unifying visual understanding, linguistic reasoning, and actionable outputs, VLAs offer a pathway toward more interpretable, generalizable, and human-aligned driving policies. This work provides a structured characterization of the emerging VLA landscape for autonomous driving. We trace the evolution from early VA approaches to modern VLA frameworks and organize existing methods into two principal paradigms: End-to-End VLA, which integrates perception, reasoning, and planning within a single model, and Dual-System VLA, which separates slow deliberation (via VLMs) from fast, safety-critical execution (via planners). Within these paradigms, we further distinguish subclasses such as textual vs. numerical action generators and explicit vs. implicit guidance mechanisms. We also summarize representative datasets and benchmarks for evaluating VLA-based driving systems and highlight key challenges and open directions, including robustness, interpretability, and instruction fidelity. Overall, this work aims to establish a coherent foundation for advancing human-compatible autonomous driving systems.

Image generation using diffusion models have demonstrated outstanding learning capabilities, effectively capturing the full distribution of the training dataset. They are known to generate wide variations in sampled images, albeit with a trade-off in image fidelity. Guided sampling methods, such as classifier guidance (CG) and classifier-free guidance (CFG), focus sampling in well-learned high-probability regions to generate images of high fidelity, but each has its limitations. CG is computationally expensive due to the use of back-propagation for classifier gradient descent, while CFG, being gradient-free, is more efficient but compromises class label alignment compared to CG. In this work, we propose an efficient guidance method that fully utilizes a pre-trained classifier without using gradient descent. By using the classifier solely in inference mode, a time-adaptive reference class label and corresponding guidance scale are determined at each time step for guided sampling. Experiments on both class-conditioned and text-to-image generation diffusion models demonstrate that the proposed Gradient-free Classifier Guidance (GFCG) method consistently improves class prediction accuracy. We also show GFCG to be complementary to other guided sampling methods like CFG. When combined with the state-of-the-art Autoguidance (ATG), without additional computational overhead, it enhances image fidelity while preserving diversity. For ImageNet 512times512, we achieve a record FD_{DINOv2} of 23.09, while simultaneously attaining a higher classification Precision (94.3%) compared to ATG (90.2%)

In offline reinforcement learning (RL), an RL agent learns to solve a task using only a fixed dataset of previously collected data. While offline RL has been successful in learning real-world robot control policies, it typically requires large amounts of expert-quality data to learn effective policies that generalize to out-of-distribution states. Unfortunately, such data is often difficult and expensive to acquire in real-world tasks. Several recent works have leveraged data augmentation (DA) to inexpensively generate additional data, but most DA works apply augmentations in a random fashion and ultimately produce highly suboptimal augmented experience. In this work, we propose Guided Data Augmentation (GuDA), a human-guided DA framework that generates expert-quality augmented data. The key insight behind GuDA is that while it may be difficult to demonstrate the sequence of actions required to produce expert data, a user can often easily characterize when an augmented trajectory segment represents progress toward task completion. Thus, a user can restrict the space of possible augmentations to automatically reject suboptimal augmented data. To extract a policy from GuDA, we use off-the-shelf offline reinforcement learning and behavior cloning algorithms. We evaluate GuDA on a physical robot soccer task as well as simulated D4RL navigation tasks, a simulated autonomous driving task, and a simulated soccer task. Empirically, GuDA enables learning given a small initial dataset of potentially suboptimal experience and outperforms a random DA strategy as well as a model-based DA strategy.

Image animation is a key task in computer vision which aims to generate dynamic visual content from static image. Recent image animation methods employ neural based rendering technique to generate realistic animations. Despite these advancements, achieving fine-grained and controllable image animation guided by text remains challenging, particularly for open-domain images captured in diverse real environments. In this paper, we introduce an open domain image animation method that leverages the motion prior of video diffusion model. Our approach introduces targeted motion area guidance and motion strength guidance, enabling precise control the movable area and its motion speed. This results in enhanced alignment between the animated visual elements and the prompting text, thereby facilitating a fine-grained and interactive animation generation process for intricate motion sequences. We validate the effectiveness of our method through rigorous experiments on an open-domain dataset, with the results showcasing its superior performance. Project page can be found at https://animationai.github.io/AnimateAnything.

Controllable image synthesis models allow creation of diverse images based on text instructions or guidance from a reference image. Recently, denoising diffusion probabilistic models have been shown to generate more realistic imagery than prior methods, and have been successfully demonstrated in unconditional and class-conditional settings. We investigate fine-grained, continuous control of this model class, and introduce a novel unified framework for semantic diffusion guidance, which allows either language or image guidance, or both. Guidance is injected into a pretrained unconditional diffusion model using the gradient of image-text or image matching scores, without re-training the diffusion model. We explore CLIP-based language guidance as well as both content and style-based image guidance in a unified framework. Our text-guided synthesis approach can be applied to datasets without associated text annotations. We conduct experiments on FFHQ and LSUN datasets, and show results on fine-grained text-guided image synthesis, synthesis of images related to a style or content reference image, and examples with both textual and image guidance.

We introduce UMI-on-Air, a framework for embodiment-aware deployment of embodiment-agnostic manipulation policies. Our approach leverages diverse, unconstrained human demonstrations collected with a handheld gripper (UMI) to train generalizable visuomotor policies. A central challenge in transferring these policies to constrained robotic embodiments-such as aerial manipulators-is the mismatch in control and robot dynamics, which often leads to out-of-distribution behaviors and poor execution. To address this, we propose Embodiment-Aware Diffusion Policy (EADP), which couples a high-level UMI policy with a low-level embodiment-specific controller at inference time. By integrating gradient feedback from the controller's tracking cost into the diffusion sampling process, our method steers trajectory generation towards dynamically feasible modes tailored to the deployment embodiment. This enables plug-and-play, embodiment-aware trajectory adaptation at test time. We validate our approach on multiple long-horizon and high-precision aerial manipulation tasks, showing improved success rates, efficiency, and robustness under disturbances compared to unguided diffusion baselines. Finally, we demonstrate deployment in previously unseen environments, using UMI demonstrations collected in the wild, highlighting a practical pathway for scaling generalizable manipulation skills across diverse-and even highly constrained-embodiments. All code, data, and checkpoints will be publicly released after acceptance. Result videos can be found at umi-on-air.github.io.

We introduce DreamDrone, an innovative method for generating unbounded flythrough scenes from textual prompts. Central to our method is a novel feature-correspondence-guidance diffusion process, which utilizes the strong correspondence of intermediate features in the diffusion model. Leveraging this guidance strategy, we further propose an advanced technique for editing the intermediate latent code, enabling the generation of subsequent novel views with geometric consistency. Extensive experiments reveal that DreamDrone significantly surpasses existing methods, delivering highly authentic scene generation with exceptional visual quality. This approach marks a significant step in zero-shot perpetual view generation from textual prompts, enabling the creation of diverse scenes, including natural landscapes like oases and caves, as well as complex urban settings such as Lego-style street views. Our code is publicly available.

Smartphones have become indispensable in modern life, yet navigating complex tasks on mobile devices often remains frustrating. Recent advancements in large multimodal model (LMM)-based mobile agents have demonstrated the ability to perceive and act in mobile environments. However, current approaches face significant limitations: they fall short in addressing real-world human needs, struggle with reasoning-intensive and long-horizon tasks, and lack mechanisms to learn and improve from prior experiences. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Mobile-Agent-E, a hierarchical multi-agent framework capable of self-evolution through past experience. By hierarchical, we mean an explicit separation of high-level planning and low-level action execution. The framework comprises a Manager, responsible for devising overall plans by breaking down complex tasks into subgoals, and four subordinate agents--Perceptor, Operator, Action Reflector, and Notetaker--which handle fine-grained visual perception, immediate action execution, error verification, and information aggregation, respectively. Mobile-Agent-E also features a novel self-evolution module which maintains a persistent long-term memory comprising Tips and Shortcuts. Tips are general guidance and lessons learned from prior tasks on how to effectively interact with the environment. Shortcuts are reusable, executable sequences of atomic operations tailored for specific subroutines. The inclusion of Tips and Shortcuts facilitates continuous refinement in performance and efficiency. Alongside this framework, we introduce Mobile-Eval-E, a new benchmark featuring complex mobile tasks requiring long-horizon, multi-app interactions. Empirical results show that Mobile-Agent-E achieves a 22% absolute improvement over previous state-of-the-art approaches across three foundation model backbones. Project page: https://x-plug.github.io/MobileAgent.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have become increasingly prominence in recent years, finding applications in surveillance, package delivery, among many others. Despite considerable efforts in developing algorithms that enable UAVs to navigate through complex unknown environments autonomously, they often require expensive hardware and sensors, such as RGB-D cameras and 3D-LiDAR, leading to a persistent trade-off between performance and cost. To this end, we propose RELAX, a novel end-to-end autonomous framework that is exceptionally cost-efficient, requiring only a single 2D-LiDAR to enable UAVs operating in unknown environments. Specifically, RELAX comprises three components: a pre-processing map constructor; an offline mission planner; and a reinforcement learning (RL)-based online re-planner. Experiments demonstrate that RELAX offers more robust dynamic navigation compared to existing algorithms, while only costing a fraction of the others. The code will be made public upon acceptance.

Applying diffusion models in reinforcement learning for long-term planning has gained much attention recently. Several diffusion-based methods have successfully leveraged the modeling capabilities of diffusion for arbitrary distributions. These methods generate subsequent trajectories for planning and have demonstrated significant improvement. However, these methods are limited by their plain base distributions and their overlooking of the diversity of samples, in which different states have different returns. They simply leverage diffusion to learn the distribution of offline dataset, generate the trajectories whose states share the same distribution with the offline dataset. As a result, the probability of these models reaching the high-return states is largely dependent on the dataset distribution. Even equipped with the guidance model, the performance is still suppressed. To address these limitations, in this paper, we propose a novel method called CDiffuser, which devises a return contrast mechanism to pull the states in generated trajectories towards high-return states while pushing them away from low-return states to improve the base distribution. Experiments on 14 commonly used D4RL benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

We study the process through which reasoning models trained with reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards (RLVR) can learn to solve new problems. We find that RLVR drives performance in two main ways: (1) by compressing pass@k into pass@1 and (2) via "capability gain" in which models learn to solve new problems that they previously could not solve even at high k. We find that while capability gain exists across model scales, learning to solve new problems is primarily driven through self-distillation. We demonstrate these findings across model scales ranging from 0.5B to 72B parameters on >500,000 reasoning problems with prompts and verifiable final answers across math, science, and code domains. We further show that we can significantly improve pass@k rates by leveraging natural language guidance for the model to consider within context while still requiring the model to derive a solution chain from scratch. Based of these insights, we derive Guide -- a new class of online training algorithms. Guide adaptively incorporates hints into the model's context on problems for which all rollouts were initially incorrect and adjusts the importance sampling ratio for the "off-policy" trajectories in order to optimize the policy for contexts in which the hints are no longer present. We describe variants of Guide for GRPO and PPO and empirically show that Guide-GRPO on 7B and 32B parameter models improves generalization over its vanilla counterpart with up to 4% macro-average improvement across math benchmarks. We include careful ablations to analyze Guide's components and theoretically analyze Guide's learning efficiency.

In this paper, we address the task of interacting with dynamic environments where the changes in the environment are independent of the agent. We study this through the context of trapping a moving ball with a UR5 robotic arm. Our key contribution is an approach to utilize a static planner for dynamic tasks using a Dynamic Planning add-on; that is, if we can successfully solve a task with a static target, then our approach can solve the same task when the target is moving. Our approach has three key components: an off-the-shelf static planner, a trajectory forecasting network, and a network to predict robot's estimated time of arrival at any location. We demonstrate the generalization of our approach across environments. More information and videos at https://mlevy2525.github.io/DynamicAddOn.

Recent advances in diffusion/flow-matching policies have enabled imitation learning of complex, multi-modal action trajectories. However, they are computationally expensive because they sample a trajectory of trajectories: a diffusion/flow trajectory of action trajectories. They discard intermediate action trajectories, and must wait for the sampling process to complete before any actions can be executed on the robot. We simplify diffusion/flow policies by treating action trajectories as flow trajectories. Instead of starting from pure noise, our algorithm samples from a narrow Gaussian around the last action. Then, it incrementally integrates a velocity field learned via flow matching to produce a sequence of actions that constitute a single trajectory. This enables actions to be streamed to the robot on-the-fly during the flow sampling process, and is well-suited for receding horizon policy execution. Despite streaming, our method retains the ability to model multi-modal behavior. We train flows that stabilize around demonstration trajectories to reduce distribution shift and improve imitation learning performance. Streaming flow policy outperforms prior methods while enabling faster policy execution and tighter sensorimotor loops for learning-based robot control. Project website: https://streaming-flow-policy.github.io/

Classifier-free guidance (CFG) has become the standard method for enhancing the quality of conditional diffusion models. However, employing CFG requires either training an unconditional model alongside the main diffusion model or modifying the training procedure by periodically inserting a null condition. There is also no clear extension of CFG to unconditional models. In this paper, we revisit the core principles of CFG and introduce a new method, independent condition guidance (ICG), which provides the benefits of CFG without the need for any special training procedures. Our approach streamlines the training process of conditional diffusion models and can also be applied during inference on any pre-trained conditional model. Additionally, by leveraging the time-step information encoded in all diffusion networks, we propose an extension of CFG, called time-step guidance (TSG), which can be applied to any diffusion model, including unconditional ones. Our guidance techniques are easy to implement and have the same sampling cost as CFG. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that ICG matches the performance of standard CFG across various conditional diffusion models. Moreover, we show that TSG improves generation quality in a manner similar to CFG, without relying on any conditional information.

Protein fitness optimization involves finding a protein sequence that maximizes desired quantitative properties in a combinatorially large design space of possible sequences. Recent developments in steering protein generative models (e.g diffusion models, language models) offer a promising approach. However, by and large, past studies have optimized surrogate rewards and/or utilized large amounts of labeled data for steering, making it unclear how well existing methods perform and compare to each other in real-world optimization campaigns where fitness is measured by low-throughput wet-lab assays. In this study, we explore fitness optimization using small amounts (hundreds) of labeled sequence-fitness pairs and comprehensively evaluate strategies such as classifier guidance and posterior sampling for guiding generation from different discrete diffusion models of protein sequences. We also demonstrate how guidance can be integrated into adaptive sequence selection akin to Thompson sampling in Bayesian optimization, showing that plug-and-play guidance strategies offer advantages compared to alternatives such as reinforcement learning with protein language models.

We propose MotionAgent, enabling fine-grained motion control for text-guided image-to-video generation. The key technique is the motion field agent that converts motion information in text prompts into explicit motion fields, providing flexible and precise motion guidance. Specifically, the agent extracts the object movement and camera motion described in the text and converts them into object trajectories and camera extrinsics, respectively. An analytical optical flow composition module integrates these motion representations in 3D space and projects them into a unified optical flow. An optical flow adapter takes the flow to control the base image-to-video diffusion model for generating fine-grained controlled videos. The significant improvement in the Video-Text Camera Motion metrics on VBench indicates that our method achieves precise control over camera motion. We construct a subset of VBench to evaluate the alignment of motion information in the text and the generated video, outperforming other advanced models on motion generation accuracy.

Large language model (LLM) agents perform well in sequential decision-making tasks, but improving them on unfamiliar domains often requires costly online interactions or fine-tuning on large expert datasets. These strategies are impractical for closed-source models and expensive for open-source ones, with risks of catastrophic forgetting. Offline trajectories offer reusable knowledge, yet demonstration-based methods struggle because raw traces are long, noisy, and tied to specific tasks. We present Just-in-time Episodic Feedback Hinter (JEF Hinter), an agentic system that distills offline traces into compact, context-aware hints. A zooming mechanism highlights decisive steps in long trajectories, capturing both strategies and pitfalls. Unlike prior methods, JEF Hinter leverages both successful and failed trajectories, extracting guidance even when only failure data is available, while supporting parallelized hint generation and benchmark-independent prompting. At inference, a retriever selects relevant hints for the current state, providing targeted guidance with transparency and traceability. Experiments on MiniWoB++, WorkArena-L1, and WebArena-Lite show that JEF Hinter consistently outperforms strong baselines, including human- and document-based hints.

Creating high-quality data for training robust language-instructed agents is a long-lasting challenge in embodied AI. In this paper, we introduce a Self-Refining Data Flywheel (SRDF) that generates high-quality and large-scale navigational instruction-trajectory pairs by iteratively refining the data pool through the collaboration between two models, the instruction generator and the navigator, without any human-in-the-loop annotation. Specifically, SRDF starts with using a base generator to create an initial data pool for training a base navigator, followed by applying the trained navigator to filter the data pool. This leads to higher-fidelity data to train a better generator, which can, in turn, produce higher-quality data for training the next-round navigator. Such a flywheel establishes a data self-refining process, yielding a continuously improved and highly effective dataset for large-scale language-guided navigation learning. Our experiments demonstrate that after several flywheel rounds, the navigator elevates the performance boundary from 70% to 78% SPL on the classic R2R test set, surpassing human performance (76%) for the first time. Meanwhile, this process results in a superior generator, evidenced by a SPICE increase from 23.5 to 26.2, better than all previous VLN instruction generation methods. Finally, we demonstrate the scalability of our method through increasing environment and instruction diversity, and the generalization ability of our pre-trained navigator across various downstream navigation tasks, surpassing state-of-the-art methods by a large margin in all cases.

Low-quality or scarce data has posed significant challenges for training deep neural networks in practice. While classical data augmentation cannot contribute very different new data, diffusion models opens up a new door to build self-evolving AI by generating high-quality and diverse synthetic data through text-guided prompts. However, text-only guidance cannot control synthetic images' proximity to the original images, resulting in out-of-distribution data detrimental to the model performance. To overcome the limitation, we study image guidance to achieve a spectrum of interpolations between synthetic and real images. With stronger image guidance, the generated images are similar to the training data but hard to learn. While with weaker image guidance, the synthetic images will be easier for model but contribute to a larger distribution gap with the original data. The generated full spectrum of data enables us to build a novel "Diffusion Curriculum (DisCL)". DisCL adjusts the image guidance level of image synthesis for each training stage: It identifies and focuses on hard samples for the model and assesses the most effective guidance level of synthetic images to improve hard data learning. We apply DisCL to two challenging tasks: long-tail (LT) classification and learning from low-quality data. It focuses on lower-guidance images of high-quality to learn prototypical features as a warm-up of learning higher-guidance images that might be weak on diversity or quality. Extensive experiments showcase a gain of 2.7% and 2.1% in OOD and ID macro-accuracy when applying DisCL to iWildCam dataset. On ImageNet-LT, DisCL improves the base model's tail-class accuracy from 4.4% to 23.64% and leads to a 4.02% improvement in all-class accuracy.

The primary limitation of large language models (LLMs) is their restricted understanding of the world. This poses significant difficulties for LLM-based agents, particularly in domains where pre-trained LLMs lack sufficient knowledge. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework, called AutoGuide, that bridges the knowledge gap in pre-trained LLMs by leveraging implicit knowledge in offline experiences. Specifically, AutoGuide effectively extracts knowledge embedded in offline data by extracting a set of state-aware guidelines. Importantly, each state-aware guideline is expressed in concise natural language and follows a conditional structure, clearly describing the state where it is applicable. As such, the resulting guidelines enable a principled way to provide helpful knowledge pertinent to an agent's current decision-making process. We show that our approach outperforms competitive LLM-based baselines by a large margin in sequential decision-making benchmarks.

Sample efficiency and exploration remain major challenges in online reinforcement learning (RL). A powerful approach that can be applied to address these issues is the inclusion of offline data, such as prior trajectories from a human expert or a sub-optimal exploration policy. Previous methods have relied on extensive modifications and additional complexity to ensure the effective use of this data. Instead, we ask: can we simply apply existing off-policy methods to leverage offline data when learning online? In this work, we demonstrate that the answer is yes; however, a set of minimal but important changes to existing off-policy RL algorithms are required to achieve reliable performance. We extensively ablate these design choices, demonstrating the key factors that most affect performance, and arrive at a set of recommendations that practitioners can readily apply, whether their data comprise a small number of expert demonstrations or large volumes of sub-optimal trajectories. We see that correct application of these simple recommendations can provide a 2.5times improvement over existing approaches across a diverse set of competitive benchmarks, with no additional computational overhead. We have released our code at https://github.com/ikostrikov/rlpd.

Diffusion models, despite their impressive demos, often produce hallucinatory samples with structural inconsistencies that lie outside of the support of the true data distribution. Such hallucinations can be attributed to excessive smoothing between modes of the data distribution. However, semantic interpolations are often desirable and can lead to generation diversity, thus we believe a more nuanced solution is required. In this work, we introduce Dynamic Guidance, which tackles this issue. Dynamic Guidance mitigates hallucinations by selectively sharpening the score function only along the pre-determined directions known to cause artifacts, while preserving valid semantic variations. To our knowledge, this is the first approach that addresses hallucinations at generation time rather than through post-hoc filtering. Dynamic Guidance substantially reduces hallucinations on both controlled and natural image datasets, significantly outperforming baselines.

Reward guidance has been applied to great success in the test-time adaptation of continuous diffusion models; it updates each denoising step using the gradients from a downstream reward model. We study reward guidance for discrete diffusion language models, where one cannot differentiate through the natural outputs of the model because they are discrete tokens. Existing approaches either replace these discrete tokens with continuous relaxations, or employ techniques like the straight-through estimator. In this work, we show the downsides of both these methods. The former degrades gradient feedback because the reward model has never been trained with continuous inputs. The latter involves incorrect optimization because the gradient evaluated at discrete tokens is used to update continuous logits. Our key innovation is to go beyond this tradeoff by introducing a novel mechanism called EntRGi: Entropy aware Reward Guidance that dynamically regulates the gradients from the reward model. By modulating the continuous relaxation using the model's confidence, our approach substantially improves reward guidance while providing reliable inputs to the reward model. We empirically validate our approach on a 7B-parameter diffusion language model across 3 diverse reward models and 3 multi-skill benchmarks, showing consistent improvements over state-of-the-art methods.

Given an unconditional generative model and a predictor for a target property (e.g., a classifier), the goal of training-free guidance is to generate samples with desirable target properties without additional training. As a highly efficient technique for steering generative models toward flexible outcomes, training-free guidance has gained increasing attention in diffusion models. However, existing methods only handle data in continuous spaces, while many scientific applications involve both continuous and discrete data (referred to as multimodality). Another emerging trend is the growing use of the simple and general flow matching framework in building generative foundation models, where guided generation remains under-explored. To address this, we introduce TFG-Flow, a novel training-free guidance method for multimodal generative flow. TFG-Flow addresses the curse-of-dimensionality while maintaining the property of unbiased sampling in guiding discrete variables. We validate TFG-Flow on four molecular design tasks and show that TFG-Flow has great potential in drug design by generating molecules with desired properties.

Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable progress in image generation quality, especially when guidance is used to control the generative process. However, guidance requires a large amount of image-annotation pairs for training and is thus dependent on their availability, correctness and unbiasedness. In this paper, we eliminate the need for such annotation by instead leveraging the flexibility of self-supervision signals to design a framework for self-guided diffusion models. By leveraging a feature extraction function and a self-annotation function, our method provides guidance signals at various image granularities: from the level of holistic images to object boxes and even segmentation masks. Our experiments on single-label and multi-label image datasets demonstrate that self-labeled guidance always outperforms diffusion models without guidance and may even surpass guidance based on ground-truth labels, especially on unbalanced data. When equipped with self-supervised box or mask proposals, our method further generates visually diverse yet semantically consistent images, without the need for any class, box, or segment label annotation. Self-guided diffusion is simple, flexible and expected to profit from deployment at scale. Source code will be at: https://taohu.me/sgdm/

This work presents a novel online model-predictive trajectory planner for robotic manipulators called BoundMPC. This planner allows the collision-free following of Cartesian reference paths in the end-effector's position and orientation, including via-points, within desired asymmetric bounds of the orthogonal path error. The path parameter synchronizes the position and orientation reference paths. The decomposition of the path error into the tangential direction, describing the path progress, and the orthogonal direction, which represents the deviation from the path, is well known for the position from the path-following control in the literature. This paper extends this idea to the orientation by utilizing the Lie theory of rotations. Moreover, the orthogonal error plane is further decomposed into basis directions to define asymmetric Cartesian error bounds easily. Using piecewise linear position and orientation reference paths with via-points is computationally very efficient and allows replanning the pose trajectories during the robot's motion. This feature makes it possible to use this planner for dynamically changing environments and varying goals. The flexibility and performance of BoundMPC are experimentally demonstrated by two scenarios on a 7-DoF Kuka LBR iiwa 14 R820 robot. The first scenario shows the transfer of a larger object from a start to a goal pose through a confined space where the object must be tilted. The second scenario deals with grasping an object from a table where the grasping point changes during the robot's motion, and collisions with other obstacles in the scene must be avoided.

Human intelligence involves metacognitive abilities like self-regulation, recognizing limitations, and seeking assistance only when needed. While LLM Agents excel in many domains, they often lack this awareness. Overconfident agents risk catastrophic failures, while those that seek help excessively hinder efficiency. A key challenge is enabling agents with a limited intervention budget C is to decide when to request assistance. In this paper, we propose an offline framework that trains a "helper" policy to request interventions, such as more powerful models or test-time compute, by combining LLM-based process reward models (PRMs) with tabular reinforcement learning. Using state transitions collected offline, we score optimal intervention timing with PRMs and train the helper model on these labeled trajectories. This offline approach significantly reduces costly intervention calls during training. Furthermore, the integration of PRMs with tabular RL enhances robustness to off-policy data while avoiding the inefficiencies of deep RL. We empirically find that our method delivers optimal helper behavior.

Diffusion models are promising for joint trajectory prediction and controllable generation in autonomous driving, but they face challenges of inefficient inference steps and high computational demands. To tackle these challenges, we introduce Optimal Gaussian Diffusion (OGD) and Estimated Clean Manifold (ECM) Guidance. OGD optimizes the prior distribution for a small diffusion time T and starts the reverse diffusion process from it. ECM directly injects guidance gradients to the estimated clean manifold, eliminating extensive gradient backpropagation throughout the network. Our methodology streamlines the generative process, enabling practical applications with reduced computational overhead. Experimental validation on the large-scale Argoverse 2 dataset demonstrates our approach's superior performance, offering a viable solution for computationally efficient, high-quality joint trajectory prediction and controllable generation for autonomous driving. Our project webpage is at https://yixiaowang7.github.io/OptTrajDiff_Page/.

Vision-language models (VLMs) have been widely-applied in ground-based vision-language navigation (VLN). However, the vast complexity of outdoor aerial environments compounds data acquisition challenges and imposes long-horizon trajectory planning requirements on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), introducing novel complexities for aerial VLN. To address these challenges, we propose a data-efficient Open-world aerial Vision-Language Navigation (i.e., OpenVLN) framework, which could execute language-guided flight with limited data constraints and enhance long-horizon trajectory planning capabilities in complex aerial environments. Specifically, we reconfigure a reinforcement learning framework to optimize the VLM for UAV navigation tasks, which can efficiently fine-tune VLM by using rule-based policies under limited training data. Concurrently, we introduce a long-horizon planner for trajectory synthesis that dynamically generates precise UAV actions via value-based rewards. To the end, we conduct sufficient navigation experiments on the TravelUAV benchmark with dataset scaling across diverse reward settings. Our method demonstrates consistent performance gains of up to 4.34% in Success Rate, 6.19% in Oracle Success Rate, and 4.07% in Success weighted by Path Length over baseline methods, validating its deployment efficacy for long-horizon UAV navigation in complex aerial environments.

Large language model (LLM)-based agents have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in decision-making tasks, but struggle significantly with complex, long-horizon planning scenarios. This arises from their lack of macroscopic guidance, causing disorientation and failures in complex tasks, as well as insufficient continuous oversight during execution, rendering them unresponsive to environmental changes and prone to deviations. To tackle these challenges, we introduce HiPlan, a hierarchical planning framework that provides adaptive global-local guidance to boost LLM-based agents'decision-making. HiPlan decomposes complex tasks into milestone action guides for general direction and step-wise hints for detailed actions. During the offline phase, we construct a milestone library from expert demonstrations, enabling structured experience reuse by retrieving semantically similar tasks and milestones. In the execution phase, trajectory segments from past milestones are dynamically adapted to generate step-wise hints that align current observations with the milestone objectives, bridging gaps and correcting deviations. Extensive experiments across two challenging benchmarks demonstrate that HiPlan substantially outperforms strong baselines, and ablation studies validate the complementary benefits of its hierarchical components.

Recent advances in end-to-end autonomous driving leverage multi-view images to construct BEV representations for motion planning. In motion planning, autonomous vehicles need considering both hard constraints imposed by geometrically occupied obstacles (e.g., vehicles, pedestrians) and soft, rule-based semantics with no explicit geometry (e.g., lane boundaries, traffic priors). However, existing end-to-end frameworks typically rely on BEV features learned in an implicit manner, lacking explicit modeling of risk and guidance priors for safe and interpretable planning. To address this, we propose FlowDrive, a novel framework that introduces physically interpretable energy-based flow fields-including risk potential and lane attraction fields-to encode semantic priors and safety cues into the BEV space. These flow-aware features enable adaptive refinement of anchor trajectories and serve as interpretable guidance for trajectory generation. Moreover, FlowDrive decouples motion intent prediction from trajectory denoising via a conditional diffusion planner with feature-level gating, alleviating task interference and enhancing multimodal diversity. Experiments on the NAVSIM v2 benchmark demonstrate that FlowDrive achieves state-of-the-art performance with an EPDMS of 86.3, surpassing prior baselines in both safety and planning quality. The project is available at https://astrixdrive.github.io/FlowDrive.github.io/.

Low-altitude mobility, exemplified by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), has introduced transformative advancements across various domains, like transportation, logistics, and agriculture. Leveraging flexible perspectives and rapid maneuverability, UAVs extend traditional systems' perception and action capabilities, garnering widespread attention from academia and industry. However, current UAV operations primarily depend on human control, with only limited autonomy in simple scenarios, and lack the intelligence and adaptability needed for more complex environments and tasks. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) demonstrates remarkable problem-solving and generalization capabilities, offering a promising pathway for advancing UAV intelligence. This paper explores the integration of LLMs and UAVs, beginning with an overview of UAV systems' fundamental components and functionalities, followed by an overview of the state-of-the-art in LLM technology. Subsequently, it systematically highlights the multimodal data resources available for UAVs, which provide critical support for training and evaluation. Furthermore, it categorizes and analyzes key tasks and application scenarios where UAVs and LLMs converge. Finally, a reference roadmap towards agentic UAVs is proposed, aiming to enable UAVs to achieve agentic intelligence through autonomous perception, memory, reasoning, and tool utilization. Related resources are available at https://github.com/Hub-Tian/UAVs_Meet_LLMs.

Classifier-free guidance (CFG) has become an essential component of modern conditional diffusion models. Although highly effective in practice, the underlying mechanisms by which CFG enhances quality, detail, and prompt alignment are not fully understood. We present a novel perspective on CFG by analyzing its effects in the frequency domain, showing that low and high frequencies have distinct impacts on generation quality. Specifically, low-frequency guidance governs global structure and condition alignment, while high-frequency guidance mainly enhances visual fidelity. However, applying a uniform scale across all frequencies -- as is done in standard CFG -- leads to oversaturation and reduced diversity at high scales and degraded visual quality at low scales. Based on these insights, we propose frequency-decoupled guidance (FDG), an effective approach that decomposes CFG into low- and high-frequency components and applies separate guidance strengths to each component. FDG improves image quality at low guidance scales and avoids the drawbacks of high CFG scales by design. Through extensive experiments across multiple datasets and models, we demonstrate that FDG consistently enhances sample fidelity while preserving diversity, leading to improved FID and recall compared to CFG, establishing our method as a plug-and-play alternative to standard classifier-free guidance.

Diffusion models for continuous data gained widespread adoption owing to their high quality generation and control mechanisms. However, controllable diffusion on discrete data faces challenges given that continuous guidance methods do not directly apply to discrete diffusion. Here, we provide a straightforward derivation of classifier-free and classifier-based guidance for discrete diffusion, as well as a new class of diffusion models that leverage uniform noise and that are more guidable because they can continuously edit their outputs. We improve the quality of these models with a novel continuous-time variational lower bound that yields state-of-the-art performance, especially in settings involving guidance or fast generation. Empirically, we demonstrate that our guidance mechanisms combined with uniform noise diffusion improve controllable generation relative to autoregressive and diffusion baselines on several discrete data domains, including genomic sequences, small molecule design, and discretized image generation.

This article presents an in-depth review of the topic of path following for autonomous robotic vehicles, with a specific focus on vehicle motion in two dimensional space (2D). From a control system standpoint, path following can be formulated as the problem of stabilizing a path following error system that describes the dynamics of position and possibly orientation errors of a vehicle with respect to a path, with the errors defined in an appropriate reference frame. In spite of the large variety of path following methods described in the literature we show that, in principle, most of them can be categorized in two groups: stabilization of the path following error system expressed either in the vehicle's body frame or in a frame attached to a "reference point" moving along the path, such as a Frenet-Serret (F-S) frame or a Parallel Transport (P-T) frame. With this observation, we provide a unified formulation that is simple but general enough to cover many methods available in the literature. We then discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each method, comparing them from the design and implementation standpoint. We further show experimental results of the path following methods obtained from field trials testing with under-actuated and fully-actuated autonomous marine vehicles. In addition, we introduce open-source Matlab and Gazebo/ROS simulation toolboxes that are helpful in testing path following methods prior to their integration in the combined guidance, navigation, and control systems of autonomous vehicles.

Developing a generalist agent is a longstanding objective in artificial intelligence. Previous efforts utilizing extensive offline datasets from various tasks demonstrate remarkable performance in multitasking scenarios within Reinforcement Learning. However, these works encounter challenges in extending their capabilities to new tasks. Recent approaches integrate textual guidance or visual trajectory into decision networks to provide task-specific contextual cues, representing a promising direction. However, it is observed that relying solely on textual guidance or visual trajectory is insufficient for accurately conveying the contextual information of tasks. This paper explores enhanced forms of task guidance for agents, enabling them to comprehend gameplay instructions, thereby facilitating a "read-to-play" capability. Drawing inspiration from the success of multimodal instruction tuning in visual tasks, we treat the visual-based RL task as a long-horizon vision task and construct a set of multimodal game instructions to incorporate instruction tuning into a decision transformer. Experimental results demonstrate that incorporating multimodal game instructions significantly enhances the decision transformer's multitasking and generalization capabilities.

This paper presents a reinforcement learning-based quadrotor navigation method that leverages efficient differentiable simulation, novel loss functions, and privileged information to navigate around large obstacles. Prior learning-based methods perform well in scenes that exhibit narrow obstacles, but struggle when the goal location is blocked by large walls or terrain. In contrast, the proposed method utilizes time-of-arrival (ToA) maps as privileged information and a yaw alignment loss to guide the robot around large obstacles. The policy is evaluated in photo-realistic simulation environments containing large obstacles, sharp corners, and dead-ends. Our approach achieves an 86% success rate and outperforms baseline strategies by 34%. We deploy the policy onboard a custom quadrotor in outdoor cluttered environments both during the day and night. The policy is validated across 20 flights, covering 589 meters without collisions at speeds up to 4 m/s.

Advancements in diffusion models have significantly improved video quality, directing attention to fine-grained controllability. However, many existing methods depend on fine-tuning large-scale video models for specific tasks, which becomes increasingly impractical as model sizes continue to grow. In this work, we present Frame Guidance, a training-free guidance for controllable video generation based on frame-level signals, such as keyframes, style reference images, sketches, or depth maps. For practical training-free guidance, we propose a simple latent processing method that dramatically reduces memory usage, and apply a novel latent optimization strategy designed for globally coherent video generation. Frame Guidance enables effective control across diverse tasks, including keyframe guidance, stylization, and looping, without any training, compatible with any video models. Experimental results show that Frame Guidance can produce high-quality controlled videos for a wide range of tasks and input signals.

While classifier-free guidance (CFG) is essential for conditional diffusion models, it doubles the number of neural function evaluations (NFEs) per inference step. To mitigate this inefficiency, we introduce adapter guidance distillation (AGD), a novel approach that simulates CFG in a single forward pass. AGD leverages lightweight adapters to approximate CFG, effectively doubling the sampling speed while maintaining or even improving sample quality. Unlike prior guidance distillation methods that tune the entire model, AGD keeps the base model frozen and only trains minimal additional parameters (sim2%) to significantly reduce the resource requirement of the distillation phase. Additionally, this approach preserves the original model weights and enables the adapters to be seamlessly combined with other checkpoints derived from the same base model. We also address a key mismatch between training and inference in existing guidance distillation methods by training on CFG-guided trajectories instead of standard diffusion trajectories. Through extensive experiments, we show that AGD achieves comparable or superior FID to CFG across multiple architectures with only half the NFEs. Notably, our method enables the distillation of large models (sim2.6B parameters) on a single consumer GPU with 24 GB of VRAM, making it more accessible than previous approaches that require multiple high-end GPUs. We will publicly release the implementation of our method.

Personal assistants, automatic speech recognizers and dialogue understanding systems are becoming more critical in our interconnected digital world. A clear example is air traffic control (ATC) communications. ATC aims at guiding aircraft and controlling the airspace in a safe and optimal manner. These voice-based dialogues are carried between an air traffic controller (ATCO) and pilots via very-high frequency radio channels. In order to incorporate these novel technologies into ATC (low-resource domain), large-scale annotated datasets are required to develop the data-driven AI systems. Two examples are automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language understanding (NLU). In this paper, we introduce the ATCO2 corpus, a dataset that aims at fostering research on the challenging ATC field, which has lagged behind due to lack of annotated data. The ATCO2 corpus covers 1) data collection and pre-processing, 2) pseudo-annotations of speech data, and 3) extraction of ATC-related named entities. The ATCO2 corpus is split into three subsets. 1) ATCO2-test-set corpus contains 4 hours of ATC speech with manual transcripts and a subset with gold annotations for named-entity recognition (callsign, command, value). 2) The ATCO2-PL-set corpus consists of 5281 hours of unlabeled ATC data enriched with automatic transcripts from an in-domain speech recognizer, contextual information, speaker turn information, signal-to-noise ratio estimate and English language detection score per sample. Both available for purchase through ELDA at http://catalog.elra.info/en-us/repository/browse/ELRA-S0484. 3) The ATCO2-test-set-1h corpus is a one-hour subset from the original test set corpus, that we are offering for free at https://www.atco2.org/data. We expect the ATCO2 corpus will foster research on robust ASR and NLU not only in the field of ATC communications but also in the general research community.

Recent advances in motion planning for autonomous driving have led to models capable of generating high-quality trajectories. However, most existing planners tend to fix their policy after supervised training, leading to consistent but rigid driving behaviors. This limits their ability to reflect human preferences or adapt to dynamic, instruction-driven demands. In this work, we propose a diffusion-based multi-head trajectory planner(M-diffusion planner). During the early training stage, all output heads share weights to learn to generate high-quality trajectories. Leveraging the probabilistic nature of diffusion models, we then apply Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to fine-tune the pre-trained model for diverse policy-specific behaviors. At inference time, we incorporate a large language model (LLM) to guide strategy selection, enabling dynamic, instruction-aware planning without switching models. Closed-loop simulation demonstrates that our post-trained planner retains strong planning capability while achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the nuPlan val14 benchmark. Open-loop results further show that the generated trajectories exhibit clear diversity, effectively satisfying multi-modal driving behavior requirements. The code and related experiments will be released upon acceptance of the paper.

The recent rapid advancement of machine learning has been driven by increasingly powerful models with the growing availability of training data and computational resources. However, real-time decision-making tasks with limited time and sparse learning signals remain challenging. One way of improving the learning speed and performance of these agents is to leverage human guidance. In this work, we introduce GUIDE, a framework for real-time human-guided reinforcement learning by enabling continuous human feedback and grounding such feedback into dense rewards to accelerate policy learning. Additionally, our method features a simulated feedback module that learns and replicates human feedback patterns in an online fashion, effectively reducing the need for human input while allowing continual training. We demonstrate the performance of our framework on challenging tasks with sparse rewards and visual observations. Our human study involving 50 subjects offers strong quantitative and qualitative evidence of the effectiveness of our approach. With only 10 minutes of human feedback, our algorithm achieves up to 30% increase in success rate compared to its RL baseline.

In the real world, autonomous driving agents navigate in highly dynamic environments full of unexpected situations where pre-trained models are unreliable. In these situations, what is immediately available to vehicles is often only human operators. Empowering autonomous driving agents with the ability to navigate in a continuous and dynamic environment and to communicate with humans through sensorimotor-grounded dialogue becomes critical. To this end, we introduce Dialogue On the ROad To Handle Irregular Events (DOROTHIE), a novel interactive simulation platform that enables the creation of unexpected situations on the fly to support empirical studies on situated communication with autonomous driving agents. Based on this platform, we created the Situated Dialogue Navigation (SDN), a navigation benchmark of 183 trials with a total of 8415 utterances, around 18.7 hours of control streams, and 2.9 hours of trimmed audio. SDN is developed to evaluate the agent's ability to predict dialogue moves from humans as well as generate its own dialogue moves and physical navigation actions. We further developed a transformer-based baseline model for these SDN tasks. Our empirical results indicate that language guided-navigation in a highly dynamic environment is an extremely difficult task for end-to-end models. These results will provide insight towards future work on robust autonomous driving agents. The DOROTHIE platform, SDN benchmark, and code for the baseline model are available at https://github.com/sled-group/DOROTHIE.

The human-like form of humanoid robots positions them uniquely to achieve the agility and versatility in motor skills that humans possess. Learning from human demonstrations offers a scalable approach to acquiring these capabilities. However, prior works either produce unnatural motions or rely on motion-specific tuning to achieve satisfactory naturalness. Furthermore, these methods are often motion- or goal-specific, lacking the versatility to compose diverse skills, especially when solving unseen tasks. We present BeyondMimic, a framework that scales to diverse motions and carries the versatility to compose them seamlessly in tackling unseen downstream tasks. At heart, a compact motion-tracking formulation enables mastering a wide range of radically agile behaviors, including aerial cartwheels, spin-kicks, flip-kicks, and sprinting, with a single setup and shared hyperparameters, all while achieving state-of-the-art human-like performance. Moving beyond the mere imitation of existing motions, we propose a unified latent diffusion model that empowers versatile goal specification, seamless task switching, and dynamic composition of these agile behaviors. Leveraging classifier guidance, a diffusion-specific technique for test-time optimization toward novel objectives, our model extends its capability to solve downstream tasks never encountered during training, including motion inpainting, joystick teleoperation, and obstacle avoidance, and transfers these skills zero-shot to real hardware. This work opens new frontiers for humanoid robots by pushing the limits of scalable human-like motor skill acquisition from human motion and advancing seamless motion synthesis that achieves generalization and versatility beyond training setups.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable advancements in tackling agent-oriented tasks. Despite their potential, existing work faces challenges when deploying LLMs in agent-based environments. The widely adopted agent paradigm ReAct centers on integrating single-step reasoning with immediate action execution, which limits its effectiveness in complex tasks requiring long-term strategic planning. Furthermore, the coordination between the planner and executor during problem-solving is also a critical factor to consider in agent design. Additionally, current approaches predominantly rely on supervised fine-tuning, which often leads models to memorize established task completion trajectories, thereby restricting their generalization ability when confronted with novel problem contexts. To address these challenges, we introduce an adaptive global plan-based agent paradigm AdaPlan, aiming to synergize high-level explicit guidance with execution to support effective long-horizon decision-making. Based on the proposed paradigm, we further put forward PilotRL, a global planning-guided training framework for LLM agents driven by progressive reinforcement learning. We first develop the model's ability to follow explicit guidance from global plans when addressing agent tasks. Subsequently, based on this foundation, we focus on optimizing the quality of generated plans. Finally, we conduct joint optimization of the model's planning and execution coordination. Experiments indicate that PilotRL could achieve state-of-the-art performances, with LLaMA3.1-8B-Instruct + PilotRL surpassing closed-sourced GPT-4o by 3.60%, while showing a more substantial gain of 55.78% comparing to GPT-4o-mini at a comparable parameter scale.

Large-scale text-to-image generative models have been a revolutionary breakthrough in the evolution of generative AI, allowing us to synthesize diverse images that convey highly complex visual concepts. However, a pivotal challenge in leveraging such models for real-world content creation tasks is providing users with control over the generated content. In this paper, we present a new framework that takes text-to-image synthesis to the realm of image-to-image translation -- given a guidance image and a target text prompt, our method harnesses the power of a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model to generate a new image that complies with the target text, while preserving the semantic layout of the source image. Specifically, we observe and empirically demonstrate that fine-grained control over the generated structure can be achieved by manipulating spatial features and their self-attention inside the model. This results in a simple and effective approach, where features extracted from the guidance image are directly injected into the generation process of the target image, requiring no training or fine-tuning and applicable for both real or generated guidance images. We demonstrate high-quality results on versatile text-guided image translation tasks, including translating sketches, rough drawings and animations into realistic images, changing of the class and appearance of objects in a given image, and modifications of global qualities such as lighting and color.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning abilities in complex tasks, often relying on Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. However, due to their autoregressive token-level generation, the reasoning process is largely constrained to local decision-making and lacks global planning. This limitation frequently results in redundant, incoherent, or inaccurate reasoning, which significantly degrades overall performance. Existing approaches, such as tree-based algorithms and reinforcement learning (RL), attempt to address this issue but suffer from high computational costs and often fail to produce optimal reasoning trajectories. To tackle this challenge, we propose Plan-Then-Action Enhanced Reasoning with Group Relative Policy Optimization PTA-GRPO, a two-stage framework designed to improve both high-level planning and fine-grained CoT reasoning. In the first stage, we leverage advanced LLMs to distill CoT into compact high-level guidance, which is then used for supervised fine-tuning (SFT). In the second stage, we introduce a guidance-aware RL method that jointly optimizes the final output and the quality of high-level guidance, thereby enhancing reasoning effectiveness. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks, including MATH, AIME2024, AIME2025, and AMC, across diverse base models such as Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, Qwen3-8B, Qwen3-14B, and LLaMA3.2-3B. Experimental results demonstrate that PTA-GRPO consistently achieves stable and significant improvements across different models and tasks, validating its effectiveness and generalization.