Showing 1–50 of 79 results for author: Tao, A

Audio-Visual Flamingo: Open Audio-Visual Intelligence for Long and Complex Videos

Authors: Sreyan Ghosh, Arushi Goel, Kaousheik Jayakumar, Lasha Koroshinadze, Nishit Anand, Siddharth Gururani, Hanrong Ye, Pritam Biswas, Yuanhang Su, Ehsan Hosseini-Asl, Sang-gil Lee, Zhifeng Kong, Jaehyeon Kim, Sungwon Kim, S Sakshi, Ramani Duraiswami, Dinesh Manocha, Andrew Tao, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro, Ming-Yu Liu, Wei Ping

Abstract: We present Audio-Visual Flamingo (AV-Flamingo), a fully open state-of-the-art audio-visual large language model (AV-LLM) for joint understanding and reasoning over audio, images, and long-form videos. Unlike prior AV-LLMs that primarily focus on short clips, AV-Flamingo is designed for understanding and reasoning over long and complex real-world (audio-visual) videos. To support this, we make thre… ▽ More We present Audio-Visual Flamingo (AV-Flamingo), a fully open state-of-the-art audio-visual large language model (AV-LLM) for joint understanding and reasoning over audio, images, and long-form videos. Unlike prior AV-LLMs that primarily focus on short clips, AV-Flamingo is designed for understanding and reasoning over long and complex real-world (audio-visual) videos. To support this, we make three key contributions: (i) Audio-Visual-Skills, a large-scale collection of real-world videos with ~7M caption and question-answer training instances designed to emphasize temporal, compositional, and cross-modal audio-visual reasoning; (ii) a novel three-stage curriculum that progressively trains the model from short-range perception to long-horizon multi-event reasoning; and (iii) Temporal Audio-Visual Interleaved Chain-of-Thought, a reasoning framework that explicitly grounds intermediate reasoning steps to timestamps in long audio-visual streams, improving temporal alignment and interpretability. Extensive experiments across 15+ audio-visual, omni-modal, audio, and vision benchmarks show that AV-Flamingo outperforms similarly sized open models by clear margins and remains highly competitive with, and in some cases surpasses, much larger open-weight and closed models, particularly on long and complex real-world audio-visual understanding and reasoning tasks. Beyond benchmark performance, AV-Flamingo exhibits strong real-world utility and transfers well to unseen tasks, highlighting its robustness and generalization ability. △ Less

Submitted 17 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

Comments: Project Page: https://avflamingo.pages.dev/

Unified Audio Intelligence Without Regressing on Text Intelligence

Authors: Zhifeng Kong, Sang-gil Lee, Jaehyeon Kim, Boxin Wang, Zihan Liu, Sungwon Kim, Yang Chen, Arushi Goel, Rajarshi Roy, Wenliang Dai, Zhuolin Yang, Yangyi Chen, Dongfu Jiang, Sreyan Ghosh, Tuomas Rintamaki, Andrew Tao, Jonathan Raiman, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro, Wei Ping

Abstract: Audio intelligence involves understanding, reasoning about, and generating both audio and speech. In this work, we introduce Nemotron-Labs-Audex-30B-A3B (Audex), a unified audio-text LLM built on Nemotron-Cascade-2-30B-A3B, a strong text-only MoE LLM. Audex adopts a simple unified design with a single Transformer decoder: audio inputs are encoded and projected into the text embedding space, while… ▽ More Audio intelligence involves understanding, reasoning about, and generating both audio and speech. In this work, we introduce Nemotron-Labs-Audex-30B-A3B (Audex), a unified audio-text LLM built on Nemotron-Cascade-2-30B-A3B, a strong text-only MoE LLM. Audex adopts a simple unified design with a single Transformer decoder: audio inputs are encoded and projected into the text embedding space, while text tokens and quantized audio output tokens are treated uniformly during generation. This architecture enables strong audio-text fusion, seamless multimodal generation, and compatibility with standard LLM training and inference infrastructure. For training, we meticulously curate audio-text datasets comprising 157.4B audio tokens and 320.5B text tokens. We apply multi-stage supervised training on these datasets, followed by text-only Cascade RL and multi-domain on-policy distillation. Audex delivers state-of-the-art audio understanding, speech recognition and translation, text-to-speech, audio generation, and speech-to-speech generation, while preserving very compelling reasoning, alignment, knowledge, long-context, and agentic capabilities of its text-only LLM backbone with marginal or no regression. We release the model checkpoints to facilitate open research. △ Less

Submitted 7 July, 2026; v1 submitted 6 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

Comments: We release the Audex models at https://huggingface.co/collections/nvidia/nemotron-labs-audex

RADIO1D: Elastic Representations for Condensed Vision Modeling

Authors: Greg Heinrich, Mike Ranzinger, Collin McCarthy, Natan Bagrov, Eugene Khvedchenya, Bryan Catanzaro, Jan Kautz, Andrew Tao, Pavlo Molchanov

Abstract: This paper challenges the assumption that vision-language models (VLMs) require fixed patch-based 2D vision features. Analyzing fine-tuned vision encoders, we find that representations become increasingly abstract and less spatially coherent during VLM training. Notably, models trained with image-text alignment (such as SigLIP2) develop a small number of specialized tokens that effectively summari… ▽ More This paper challenges the assumption that vision-language models (VLMs) require fixed patch-based 2D vision features. Analyzing fine-tuned vision encoders, we find that representations become increasingly abstract and less spatially coherent during VLM training. Notably, models trained with image-text alignment (such as SigLIP2) develop a small number of specialized tokens that effectively summarize global image content. Building on this, we introduce RADIO1D, which compresses images into a compact, variable-length 1D token sequence using multi-teacher knowledge distillation and an autoencoder design. The resulting representations exhibit strong hierarchical summarization, enabling accurate scene understanding - even with a single token - and support improved composition-aware image retrieval. In VLMs, RADIO1D provides flexible accuracy-efficiency tradeoffs through adjustable token counts, delivering competitive performance on diverse multimodal benchmarks with lower computational overhead and better accuracy. △ Less

Submitted 3 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

Comments: Published as main conference paper at ICML 2026

Zone of Proximal Policy Optimization: Teacher in Prompts, Not Gradients

Authors: Byung-Kwan Lee, Ximing Lu, Shizhe Diao, Minki Kang, Saurav Muralidharan, Karan Sapra, Andrew Tao, Pavlo Molchanov, Yejin Choi, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang, Ryo Hachiuma

Abstract: Knowledge distillation transfers a teacher's competence to a small student but is brittle in the small-student regime: forcing the student to imitate logits from a much larger teacher concentrates it on the teacher's sharpest modes, hurting generalization on benchmark families beyond the training corpus. Reinforcement learning (RL) avoids logit imitation by training on the student's own rollouts.… ▽ More Knowledge distillation transfers a teacher's competence to a small student but is brittle in the small-student regime: forcing the student to imitate logits from a much larger teacher concentrates it on the teacher's sharpest modes, hurting generalization on benchmark families beyond the training corpus. Reinforcement learning (RL) avoids logit imitation by training on the student's own rollouts. However, on questions where every rollout fails-yielding zero advantage and being silently discarded-injecting a stronger teacher's response into the policy gradient breaks the on-policy assumption and induces drift. We introduce Zone of Proximal Policy Optimization (ZPPO), inspired by Vygotsky's zone of proximal development, which keeps the teacher inside the prompt rather than the policy gradient. On hard questions, ZPPO constructs two reformulated prompts: a Binary Candidate-included Question (BCQ) pairs one correct teacher response with one incorrect student response as anonymized candidates the student must discriminate, and a Negative Candidate-included Question (NCQ) aggregates the student's wrong rollouts into a single prompt to surface their shared failure modes. A prompt replay buffer recirculates each hard question until it either graduates-the student's mean rollout accuracy on it reaches half- or is FIFO-evicted under finite capacity, amplifying BCQ and NCQ inside the student's current zone of proximal development. On the Qwen3.5 family at four student scales (0.8B-9B) with a 27B teacher, post-trained as vision-language models and evaluated on a 31-benchmark suite (16 VLM, 10 LLM, 5 Video), ZPPO outperforms off/on-policy distillation and GRPO, with the largest gains at the smallest scale. △ Less

Submitted 16 June, 2026; originally announced June 2026.

Comments: Project page: https://byungkwanlee.github.io/ZPPO-page/

ProCUA-SFT Technical Report

Authors: Jaehun Jung, Ximing Lu, Brandon Cui, Muhammad Khalifa, Shaokun Zhang, Hao Zhang, Jin Xu, Amala Sanjay Deshmukh, Karan Sapra, Andrew Tao, Yejin Choi, Jan Kautz, Mingjie Liu, Yi Dong

Abstract: Training computer-use agents (CUAs) -- models that interact with graphical desktops through screenshots and keyboard/mouse actions -- requires large-scale, diverse trajectory data collected in full desktop environments. The largest public resource, AgentNet (22.5K human trajectories), leads to negative transfer when used for supervised fine-tuning (SFT): continuing training UI-TARS 7B on AgentNet… ▽ More Training computer-use agents (CUAs) -- models that interact with graphical desktops through screenshots and keyboard/mouse actions -- requires large-scale, diverse trajectory data collected in full desktop environments. The largest public resource, AgentNet (22.5K human trajectories), leads to negative transfer when used for supervised fine-tuning (SFT): continuing training UI-TARS 7B on AgentNet causes OSWorld success rate to fall from 26.3% to 8-10%. We present ProCUA-SFT, a dataset of 3.1M step-level SFT samples distilled from 93K synthetic trajectories across 2,484 application combinations. The dataset is produced by a fully automated pipeline that (i) synthesizes grounded tasks on live desktops seeded with real-world content -- 912 spreadsheets from SpreadsheetBench, approximately 10K permissively-licensed presentations from Zenodo10K, and multi-application OSWorld configs -- and (ii) verifies each task's feasibility through binary precondition checking before rollout. A single VLM (Kimi-K2.5) serves as goal generator, precondition judge, and trajectory executor, eliminating planner-actor capability gaps. Each trajectory is expanded into step-prefix samples that exactly reproduce the context layout seen at inference time. Fine-tuning UI-TARS 7B on ProCUA-SFT for one epoch yields 45.0% on OSWorld -- an 18.7 percentage-point improvement over the base model and over 35% above AgentNet-trained counterparts. A subset of ProCUA was incorporated into the training data for the Nemotron 3 Nano Omni model, contributing to its computer-use capabilities. △ Less

Submitted 15 June, 2026; originally announced June 2026.

Comments: 15 pages, 5 figures

Nemotron 3 Ultra: Open, Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Model for Agentic Reasoning

Authors: NVIDIA, :, Aaron Blakeman, Aaron Thomas, Aastha Jhunjhunwala, Abhibha Gupta, Abhinav Khattar, Adam Rajfer, Adi Renduchintala, Adil Asif, Aditya Vavre, Adriana Flores Miranda, Ahmad Bilal, Aileen Zaman, Ajay Hotchandani, Akanksha Shukla, Akhiad Bercovich, Aleksander Ficek, Alex Gronskiy, Alex Kondratenko, Alex Steiner, Alex Ye, Alexander Bukharin, Alexandre Milesi, Ali Taghibakhshi , et al. (549 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: We introduce Nemotron 3 Ultra, a 550 billion total and 55 billion active parameter Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Attention language model. We pre-trained Nemotron 3 Ultra on 20 trillion text tokens, then extended the context length to 1M tokens, and post-trained using Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT), Reinforcement Learning (RL), and Multi-teacher On-Policy Distillation (MOPD). Nemotron 3 Ultra is o… ▽ More We introduce Nemotron 3 Ultra, a 550 billion total and 55 billion active parameter Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Attention language model. We pre-trained Nemotron 3 Ultra on 20 trillion text tokens, then extended the context length to 1M tokens, and post-trained using Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT), Reinforcement Learning (RL), and Multi-teacher On-Policy Distillation (MOPD). Nemotron 3 Ultra is our most capable model yet, employing multiple key technologies - LatentMoE, Multi Token Prediction (MTP), NVFP4 pre-training, multi-environment RLVR, MOPD, and reasoning budget control. Nemotron 3 Ultra achieves up to ~6x higher inference throughput as compared to state-of-the-art publicly available LLMs while attaining on-par accuracy. The state-of-the-art accuracy, high inference throughput, and 1M token context length make Nemotron 3 Ultra ideal for long-running autonomous agentic tasks. We open-source the base, post-trained, and quantized checkpoints, along with the training data and recipe on HuggingFace. △ Less

Submitted 12 June, 2026; originally announced June 2026.

Ride, Track, and Recover: Pilot Randomized Trial of a Wearable Digital Self-Management Intervention During a Veteran Endurance-Cycling Program

Authors: Alan Ta, Nilsu Salgin, Caleb Armstrong, Kala Phillips Reindel, Farzan Sasangohar

Abstract: Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in veterans is characterized by persistent hyperarousal and comorbid anxiety and depressive symptoms that are difficult to monitor and manage outside clinical settings. Thirteen veterans participating in a Project Hero cycling event in Texas were randomized by computer-generated sequence in a naturalistic setting to two arms: (1) digital intervention plus phys… ▽ More Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in veterans is characterized by persistent hyperarousal and comorbid anxiety and depressive symptoms that are difficult to monitor and manage outside clinical settings. Thirteen veterans participating in a Project Hero cycling event in Texas were randomized by computer-generated sequence in a naturalistic setting to two arms: (1) digital intervention plus physical activity, or (2) physical activity only, plus a third at-home monitoring control cohort consisting of 7 veterans selected from the broader Project Hero veteran community. Continuous smartwatch sensing combined heart rate and accelerometer features to detect hyperarousal events, which were confirmed in real time by participants. Weekly self-report measures of anxiety, depression, and PTSD severity were collected. Generalized additive mixed models characterized nonlinear trajectories over time. Baseline-normalized hyperarousal trajectories differed significantly across conditions, with the digital intervention group (n=7) showing structured stabilization compared to late-study escalation in the physical-only group (n=3). Both cycling groups exhibited acute symptom improvements during the endurance event; however, the digital intervention group demonstrated a higher overall maintenance of gains. The at-home control group (n=4) showed gradual symptom declines. Perceived precision of ML detections varied substantially across individuals and was positively associated with symptom severity, with higher-severity participants confirming a greater proportion of detected events. These results suggest that coupling wearable detection with digital self-management tools may support stabilization of hyperarousal and symptom improvement while emphasizing the importance of personalization and human-centered design in wearable mental health systems. △ Less

Submitted 11 June, 2026; originally announced June 2026.

LocateAnything: Fast and High-Quality Vision-Language Grounding with Parallel Box Decoding

Authors: Shihao Wang, Shilong Liu, Yuanguo Kuang, Xinyu Wei, Yangzhou Liu, Zhiqi Li, Yunze Man, Guo Chen, Andrew Tao, Guilin Liu, Jan Kautz, Lei Zhang, Zhiding Yu

Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) commonly formulate visual grounding and detection as a coordinate-token generation problem, serializing each 2D box into multiple 1D tokens that are learned and decoded largely independently. This token-by-token decoding mismatches the coupled structure of box geometry and creates a practical inference bottleneck due to strictly sequential generation. We introduce Loc… ▽ More Vision-language models (VLMs) commonly formulate visual grounding and detection as a coordinate-token generation problem, serializing each 2D box into multiple 1D tokens that are learned and decoded largely independently. This token-by-token decoding mismatches the coupled structure of box geometry and creates a practical inference bottleneck due to strictly sequential generation. We introduce LocateAnything, a unified generative grounding and detection framework based on Parallel Box Decoding (PBD). By decoding geometric elements such as bounding boxes and points as atomic units in a single step, LocateAnything preserves intra-box geometric coherence and unlocks substantial parallelism. We show that PBD improves both decoding throughput and localization accuracy. We further develop a scalable data engine and curate LocateAnything-Data, a large-scale dataset with more than 138 million training samples, substantially increasing data diversity for high-precision localization. Extensive evaluations show that LocateAnything advances the speed-accuracy frontier, achieving significantly higher decoding throughput while improving high-IoU localization quality across diverse benchmarks. The results highlight the complementary benefits of Parallel Box Decoding and large-scale training data in enabling efficient and precise unified visual grounding and detection. △ Less

Submitted 26 May, 2026; v1 submitted 26 May, 2026; originally announced May 2026.

Comments: fix github link

Reinforced Agent: Inference-Time Feedback for Tool-Calling Agents

Authors: Anh Ta, Junjie Zhu, Shahin Shayandeh

Abstract: Tool-calling agents are evaluated on tool selection, parameter accuracy, and scope recognition, yet LLM trajectory assessments remain inherently post-hoc. Disconnected from the active execution loop, such assessments identify errors that are usually addressed through prompt-tuning or retraining, and fundamentally cannot course-correct the agent in real time. To close this gap, we move evaluation i… ▽ More Tool-calling agents are evaluated on tool selection, parameter accuracy, and scope recognition, yet LLM trajectory assessments remain inherently post-hoc. Disconnected from the active execution loop, such assessments identify errors that are usually addressed through prompt-tuning or retraining, and fundamentally cannot course-correct the agent in real time. To close this gap, we move evaluation into the execution loop at inference time: a specialized reviewer agent evaluates provisional tool calls prior to execution, shifting the paradigm from post-hoc recovery to proactive evaluation and error mitigation. In practice, this architecture establishes a clear separation of concerns between the primary execution agent and a secondary review agent. As with any multi-agent system, the reviewer can introduce new errors while correcting others, yet no prior work to our knowledge has systematically measured this tradeoff. To quantify this tradeoff, we introduce Helpfulness-Harmfulness metrics: helpfulness measures the percentage of base agent errors that feedback corrects; harmfulness measures the percentage of correct responses that feedback degrades. These metrics directly inform reviewer design by revealing whether a given model or prompt provides net positive value. We evaluate our approach on BFCL (single-turn) and Tau2-Bench (multi-turn stateful scenarios), achieving +5.5% on irrelevance detection and +7.1% on multi-turn tasks. Our metrics reveal that reviewer model choice is critical: the reasoning model o3-mini achieves a 3:1 benefit-to-risk ratio versus 2.1:1 for GPT-4o. Automated prompt optimization via GEPA provides an additional +1.5-2.8%. Together, these results demonstrate a core advantage of separating execution and review: the reviewer can be systematically improved through model selection and prompt optimization, without retraining the base agent. △ Less

Submitted 29 April, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

Nemotron 3 Nano Omni: Efficient and Open Multimodal Intelligence

Authors: NVIDIA, :, Amala Sanjay Deshmukh, Kateryna Chumachenko, Tuomas Rintamaki, Matthieu Le, Tyler Poon, Danial Mohseni Taheri, Ilia Karmanov, Guilin Liu, Jarno Seppanen, Arushi Goel, Mike Ranzinger, Greg Heinrich, Guo Chen, Lukas Voegtle, Philipp Fischer, Timo Roman, Karan Sapra, Collin McCarthy, Shaokun Zhang, Fuxiao Liu, Hanrong Ye, Yi Dong, Mingjie Liu , et al. (194 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: We introduce Nemotron 3 Nano Omni, the latest model in the Nemotron multimodal series and the first to natively support audio inputs alongside text, images, and video. Nemotron 3 Nano Omni delivers consistent accuracy improvements over its predecessor, Nemotron Nano V2 VL, across all modalities, enabled by advances in architecture, training data and recipes. In particular, Nemotron 3 delivers lead… ▽ More We introduce Nemotron 3 Nano Omni, the latest model in the Nemotron multimodal series and the first to natively support audio inputs alongside text, images, and video. Nemotron 3 Nano Omni delivers consistent accuracy improvements over its predecessor, Nemotron Nano V2 VL, across all modalities, enabled by advances in architecture, training data and recipes. In particular, Nemotron 3 delivers leading results in real-world document understanding, long audio-video comprehension, and agentic computer use. Built on the highly efficient Nemotron 3 Nano 30B-A3B backbone, Nemotron 3 Nano Omni further incorporates innovative multimodal token-reduction techniques to deliver substantially lower inference latency and higher throughput than other models of similar size. We are releasing model checkpoints in BF16, FP8, and FP4 formats, along with portions of the training data and codebase to facilitate further research and development. △ Less

Submitted 11 May, 2026; v1 submitted 27 April, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

Nemotron 3 Super: Open, Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Model for Agentic Reasoning

Authors: NVIDIA, :, Aakshita Chandiramani, Aaron Blakeman, Abdullahi Olaoye, Abhibha Gupta, Abhilash Somasamudramath, Abhinav Khattar, Adeola Adesoba, Adi Renduchintala, Adil Asif, Aditya Agrawal, Aditya Vavre, Ahmad Kiswani, Aishwarya Padmakumar, Ajay Hotchandani, Akanksha Shukla, Akhiad Bercovich, Aleksander Ficek, Aleksandr Shaposhnikov, Alex Gronskiy, Alex Kondratenko, Alex Neefus, Alex Steiner, Alex Yang , et al. (522 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: We describe the pre-training, post-training, and quantization of Nemotron 3 Super, a 120 billion (active 12 billion) parameter hybrid Mamba-Attention Mixture-of-Experts model. Nemotron 3 Super is the first model in the Nemotron 3 family to 1) be pre-trained in NVFP4, 2) leverage LatentMoE, a new Mixture-of-Experts architecture that optimizes for both accuracy per FLOP and accuracy per parameter, a… ▽ More We describe the pre-training, post-training, and quantization of Nemotron 3 Super, a 120 billion (active 12 billion) parameter hybrid Mamba-Attention Mixture-of-Experts model. Nemotron 3 Super is the first model in the Nemotron 3 family to 1) be pre-trained in NVFP4, 2) leverage LatentMoE, a new Mixture-of-Experts architecture that optimizes for both accuracy per FLOP and accuracy per parameter, and 3) include MTP layers for inference acceleration through native speculative decoding. We pre-trained Nemotron 3 Super on 25 trillion tokens followed by post-training using supervised fine tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL). The final model supports up to 1M context length and achieves comparable accuracy on common benchmarks, while also achieving up to 2.2x and 7.5x higher inference throughput compared to GPT-OSS-120B and Qwen3.5-122B, respectively. Nemotron 3 Super datasets, along with the base, post-trained, and quantized checkpoints, are open-sourced on HuggingFace. △ Less

Submitted 14 April, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

MMOU: A Massive Multi-Task Omni Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Long and Complex Real-World Videos

Authors: Arushi Goel, Sreyan Ghosh, Vatsal Agarwal, Nishit Anand, Kaousheik Jayakumar, Lasha Koroshinadze, Yao Xu, Katie Lyons, James Case, Karan Sapra, Kevin J. Shih, Siddharth Gururani, Abhinav Shrivastava, Ramani Duraiswami, Dinesh Manocha, Andrew Tao, Bryan Catanzaro, Mohammad Shoeybi, Wei Ping

Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown strong performance in visual and audio understanding when evaluated in isolation. However, their ability to jointly reason over omni-modal (visual, audio, and textual) signals in long and complex videos remains largely unexplored. We introduce MMOU, a new benchmark designed to systematically evaluate multimodal understanding and reasoning under t… ▽ More Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown strong performance in visual and audio understanding when evaluated in isolation. However, their ability to jointly reason over omni-modal (visual, audio, and textual) signals in long and complex videos remains largely unexplored. We introduce MMOU, a new benchmark designed to systematically evaluate multimodal understanding and reasoning under these challenging, real-world conditions. MMOU consists of 20,000 carefully curated questions paired with 11877 web-collected videos of varying length, spanning diverse domains and exhibiting rich, tightly coupled audio-visual content. The benchmark covers 13 fundamental skill categories, all of which require integrating evidence across modalities and time. All questions are manually annotated across multiple turns by professional annotators, ensuring high quality and reasoning fidelity. We evaluate 20+ state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary multimodal models on MMOU. The results expose substantial performance gaps: the best closed-source model achieves only 64.2% accuracy, while the strongest open-source model reaches just 46.8%. Our results highlight the challenges of long-form omni-modal understanding, revealing that current models frequently fail to apply even fundamental skills in long videos. Through detailed analysis, we further identify systematic failure modes and provide insights into where and why current models break. △ Less

Submitted 20 June, 2026; v1 submitted 14 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Comments: Project Page: https://huggingface.co/datasets/nvidia/MMOU

ViDia2Std: A Parallel Corpus and Methods for Low-Resource Vietnamese Dialect-to-Standard Translation

Authors: Khoa Anh Ta, Nguyen Van Dinh, Kiet Van Nguyen

Abstract: Vietnamese exhibits extensive dialectal variation, posing challenges for NLP systems trained predominantly on standard Vietnamese. Such systems often underperform on dialectal inputs, especially from underrepresented Central and Southern regions. Previous work on dialect normalization has focused narrowly on Central-to-Northern dialect transfer using synthetic data and limited dialectal diversity.… ▽ More Vietnamese exhibits extensive dialectal variation, posing challenges for NLP systems trained predominantly on standard Vietnamese. Such systems often underperform on dialectal inputs, especially from underrepresented Central and Southern regions. Previous work on dialect normalization has focused narrowly on Central-to-Northern dialect transfer using synthetic data and limited dialectal diversity. These efforts exclude Southern varieties and intra-regional variants within the North. We introduce ViDia2Std, the first manually annotated parallel corpus for dialect-to-standard Vietnamese translation covering all 63 provinces. Unlike prior datasets, ViDia2Std includes diverse dialects from Central, Southern, and non-standard Northern regions often absent from existing resources, making it the most dialectally inclusive corpus to date. The dataset consists of over 13,000 sentence pairs sourced from real-world Facebook comments and annotated by native speakers across all three dialect regions. To assess annotation consistency, we define a semantic mapping agreement metric that accounts for synonymous standard mappings across annotators. Based on this criterion, we report agreement rates of 86% (North), 82% (Central), and 85% (South). We benchmark several sequence-to-sequence models on ViDia2Std. mBART-large-50 achieves the best results (BLEU 0.8166, ROUGE-L 0.9384, METEOR 0.8925), while ViT5-base offers competitive performance with fewer parameters. ViDia2Std demonstrates that dialect normalization substantially improves downstream tasks, highlighting the need for dialect-aware resources in building robust Vietnamese NLP systems. △ Less

Submitted 10 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Comments: Accepted to AAAI-26 (Oral)

Towards Multimodal Lifelong Understanding: A Dataset and Agentic Baseline

Authors: Guo Chen, Lidong Lu, Yicheng Liu, Liangrui Dong, Lidong Zou, Jixin Lv, Zhenquan Li, Xinyi Mao, Baoqi Pei, Shihao Wang, Zhiqi Li, Karan Sapra, Fuxiao Liu, Yin-Dong Zheng, Yifei Huang, Limin Wang, Zhiding Yu, Andrew Tao, Guilin Liu, Tong Lu

Abstract: While datasets for video understanding have scaled to hour-long durations, they typically consist of densely concatenated clips that differ from natural, unscripted daily life. To bridge this gap, we introduce MM-Lifelong, a dataset designed for Multimodal Lifelong Understanding. Comprising 181.1 hours of footage, it is structured across Day, Week, and Month scales to capture varying temporal dens… ▽ More While datasets for video understanding have scaled to hour-long durations, they typically consist of densely concatenated clips that differ from natural, unscripted daily life. To bridge this gap, we introduce MM-Lifelong, a dataset designed for Multimodal Lifelong Understanding. Comprising 181.1 hours of footage, it is structured across Day, Week, and Month scales to capture varying temporal densities. Extensive evaluations reveal two critical failure modes in current paradigms: end-to-end MLLMs suffer from a Working Memory Bottleneck due to context saturation, while representative agentic baselines experience Global Localization Collapse when navigating sparse, month-long timelines. To address this, we propose the Recursive Multimodal Agent (ReMA), which employs dynamic memory management to iteratively update a recursive belief state, significantly outperforming existing methods. Finally, we establish dataset splits designed to isolate temporal and domain biases, providing a rigorous foundation for future research in supervised learning and out-of-distribution generalization. △ Less

Submitted 5 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Stateful Token Reduction for Long-Video Hybrid VLMs

Authors: Jindong Jiang, Amala Sanjay Deshmukh, Kateryna Chumachenko, Karan Sapra, Zhiding Yu, Guilin Liu, Andrew Tao, Pavlo Molchanov, Jan Kautz, Wonmin Byeon

Abstract: Token reduction accelerates long-video vision--language models (VLMs), but existing methods target Transformers, where reduction is treated as token pruning. We study token reduction in hybrid Mamba--Transformer VLMs and find that it is \emph{stateful}: Mamba layers maintain a recurrent state that accumulates information from earlier tokens, allowing discarded tokens to persist, so reduction behav… ▽ More Token reduction accelerates long-video vision--language models (VLMs), but existing methods target Transformers, where reduction is treated as token pruning. We study token reduction in hybrid Mamba--Transformer VLMs and find that it is \emph{stateful}: Mamba layers maintain a recurrent state that accumulates information from earlier tokens, allowing discarded tokens to persist, so reduction behaves more like compression than dropping.We support this view with a representation-based probing method measuring how much information from discarded tokens is retained, and analyze layer-wise sparsity and cross-layer importance stability. Our findings show importance is sparse within layers but unstable across layers, making aggressive early pruning unreliable while hybrids remain robust to later reduction.Motivated by this, we propose a hybrid-aware token reduction framework with a low-to-high progressive schedule and a unified query-conditioned importance score for attention and Mamba layers. For Mamba, excluding the position-dependent decay from the recurrence produces a stronger selection signal. Across long-video benchmarks, our method achieves $3.8{\times}$--$4.2{\times}$ prefilling speedups at a 25% token budget while maintaining near-baseline accuracy and improving with light finetuning. Hybrid models benefit from aggressive reduction, improving both efficiency and accuracy, whereas Transformers exhibit the standard trade-off. Our method also outperforms prior baselines on the same hybrid backbone and combines effectively with visual redundancy reduction methods. △ Less

Submitted 30 June, 2026; v1 submitted 27 February, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

BioEnvSense: A Human-Centred Security Framework for Preventing Behaviour-Driven Cyber Incidents

Authors: Duy Anh Ta, Farnaz Farid, Farhad Ahamed, Ala Al-Areqi, Robert Beutel, Tamara Watson, Alana Maurushat

Abstract: Modern organizations increasingly face cybersecurity incidents driven by human behaviour rather than technical failures. To address this, we propose a conceptual security framework that integrates a hybrid Convolutional Neural Network-Long Short-Term Memory (CNN-LSTM) model to analyze biometric and environmental data for context-aware security decisions. The CNN extracts spatial patterns from sens… ▽ More Modern organizations increasingly face cybersecurity incidents driven by human behaviour rather than technical failures. To address this, we propose a conceptual security framework that integrates a hybrid Convolutional Neural Network-Long Short-Term Memory (CNN-LSTM) model to analyze biometric and environmental data for context-aware security decisions. The CNN extracts spatial patterns from sensor data, while the LSTM captures temporal dynamics associated with human error susceptibility. The model achieves 84% accuracy, demonstrating its ability to reliably detect conditions that lead to elevated human-centred cyber risk. By enabling continuous monitoring and adaptive safeguards, the framework supports proactive interventions that reduce the likelihood of human-driven cyber incidents △ Less

Submitted 22 February, 2026; originally announced February 2026.

ACM Class: F.2.2; I.2.7

Perception-Control Coupled Visual Servoing for Textureless Objects Using Keypoint-Based EKF

Authors: Allen Tao, Jun Yang, Stanko Oparnica, Wenjie Xue

Abstract: Visual servoing is fundamental to robotic applications, enabling precise positioning and control. However, applying it to textureless objects remains a challenge due to the absence of reliable visual features. Moreover, adverse visual conditions, such as occlusions, often corrupt visual feedback, leading to reduced accuracy and instability in visual servoing. In this work, we build upon learning-b… ▽ More Visual servoing is fundamental to robotic applications, enabling precise positioning and control. However, applying it to textureless objects remains a challenge due to the absence of reliable visual features. Moreover, adverse visual conditions, such as occlusions, often corrupt visual feedback, leading to reduced accuracy and instability in visual servoing. In this work, we build upon learning-based keypoint detection for textureless objects and propose a method that enhances robustness by tightly integrating perception and control in a closed loop. Specifically, we employ an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) that integrates per-frame keypoint measurements to estimate 6D object pose, which drives pose-based visual servoing (PBVS) for control. The resulting camera motion, in turn, enhances the tracking of subsequent keypoints, effectively closing the perception-control loop. Additionally, unlike standard PBVS, we propose a probabilistic control law that computes both camera velocity and its associated uncertainty, enabling uncertainty-aware control for safe and reliable operation. We validate our approach on real-world robotic platforms using quantitative metrics and grasping experiments, demonstrating that our method outperforms traditional visual servoing techniques in both accuracy and practical application. △ Less

Submitted 25 February, 2026; v1 submitted 6 February, 2026; originally announced February 2026.

C-RADIOv4 (Tech Report)

Authors: Mike Ranzinger, Greg Heinrich, Collin McCarthy, Jan Kautz, Andrew Tao, Bryan Catanzaro, Pavlo Molchanov

Abstract: By leveraging multi-teacher distillation, agglomerative vision backbones provide a unified student model that retains and improves the distinct capabilities of multiple teachers. In this tech report, we describe the most recent release of the C-RADIO family of models, C-RADIOv4, which builds upon AM-RADIO/RADIOv2.5 in design, offering strong improvements on key downstream tasks at the same computa… ▽ More By leveraging multi-teacher distillation, agglomerative vision backbones provide a unified student model that retains and improves the distinct capabilities of multiple teachers. In this tech report, we describe the most recent release of the C-RADIO family of models, C-RADIOv4, which builds upon AM-RADIO/RADIOv2.5 in design, offering strong improvements on key downstream tasks at the same computational complexity. We release -SO400M (412M params), and -H (631M) model variants, both trained with an updated set of teachers: SigLIP2, DINOv3, and SAM3. In addition to improvements on core metrics and new capabilities from imitating SAM3, the C-RADIOv4 model family further improves any-resolution support, brings back the ViTDet option for drastically enhanced efficiency at high-resolution, and comes with a permissive license. △ Less

Submitted 23 January, 2026; originally announced January 2026.

AdaFRUGAL: Adaptive Memory-Efficient Training with Dynamic Control

Authors: Quang-Hung Bui, Anh Son Ta

Abstract: Training Large Language Models (LLMs) is highly memory-intensive due to optimizer state overhead. The FRUGAL framework mitigates this with gradient splitting, but its static hyperparameters -- the subspace ratio ($ρ$) and update frequency ($T$) -- require costly manual tuning, limiting adaptability. We present AdaFRUGAL, which automates this process by introducing two dynamic controls: (i) a linea… ▽ More Training Large Language Models (LLMs) is highly memory-intensive due to optimizer state overhead. The FRUGAL framework mitigates this with gradient splitting, but its static hyperparameters -- the subspace ratio ($ρ$) and update frequency ($T$) -- require costly manual tuning, limiting adaptability. We present AdaFRUGAL, which automates this process by introducing two dynamic controls: (i) a linear decay for $ρ$ to progressively reduce memory, and (ii) a loss-aware schedule for $T$ to lower computational overhead. Experiments across large-scale pre-training (English C4, Vietnamese VietVault) and fine-tuning (GLUE) demonstrate that AdaFRUGAL achieves a compelling trade-off. It maintains competitive performance against AdamW and static FRUGAL while significantly reducing both GPU memory and training time, offering a more practical, autonomous solution for resource-constrained LLM training. △ Less

Submitted 29 April, 2026; v1 submitted 27 December, 2025; originally announced January 2026.

Comments: We have identified issues in the current version of the manuscript that may affect the validity of some results. We are withdrawing the paper to conduct further verification and improvements before resubmission

NVIDIA Nemotron 3: Efficient and Open Intelligence

Authors: NVIDIA, :, Aaron Blakeman, Aaron Grattafiori, Aarti Basant, Abhibha Gupta, Abhinav Khattar, Adi Renduchintala, Aditya Vavre, Akanksha Shukla, Akhiad Bercovich, Aleksander Ficek, Aleksandr Shaposhnikov, Alex Kondratenko, Alexander Bukharin, Alexandre Milesi, Ali Taghibakhshi, Alisa Liu, Amelia Barton, Ameya Sunil Mahabaleshwarkar, Amir Klein, Amit Zuker, Amnon Geifman, Amy Shen, Anahita Bhiwandiwalla , et al. (334 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: We introduce the Nemotron 3 family of models - Nano, Super, and Ultra. These models deliver strong agentic, reasoning, and conversational capabilities. The Nemotron 3 family uses a Mixture-of-Experts hybrid Mamba-Transformer architecture to provide best-in-class throughput and context lengths of up to 1M tokens. Super and Ultra models are trained with NVFP4 and incorporate LatentMoE, a novel appro… ▽ More We introduce the Nemotron 3 family of models - Nano, Super, and Ultra. These models deliver strong agentic, reasoning, and conversational capabilities. The Nemotron 3 family uses a Mixture-of-Experts hybrid Mamba-Transformer architecture to provide best-in-class throughput and context lengths of up to 1M tokens. Super and Ultra models are trained with NVFP4 and incorporate LatentMoE, a novel approach that improves model quality. The two larger models also include MTP layers for faster text generation. All Nemotron 3 models are post-trained using multi-environment reinforcement learning enabling reasoning, multi-step tool use, and support granular reasoning budget control. Nano, the smallest model, outperforms comparable models in accuracy while remaining extremely cost-efficient for inference. Super is optimized for collaborative agents and high-volume workloads such as IT ticket automation. Ultra, the largest model, provides state-of-the-art accuracy and reasoning performance. Nano is released together with its technical report and this white paper, while Super and Ultra will follow in the coming months. We will openly release the model weights, pre- and post-training software, recipes, and all data for which we hold redistribution rights. △ Less

Submitted 23 December, 2025; originally announced December 2025.

Nemotron 3 Nano: Open, Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Model for Agentic Reasoning

Authors: NVIDIA, :, Aaron Blakeman, Aaron Grattafiori, Aarti Basant, Abhibha Gupta, Abhinav Khattar, Adi Renduchintala, Aditya Vavre, Akanksha Shukla, Akhiad Bercovich, Aleksander Ficek, Aleksandr Shaposhnikov, Alex Kondratenko, Alexander Bukharin, Alexandre Milesi, Ali Taghibakhshi, Alisa Liu, Amelia Barton, Ameya Sunil Mahabaleshwarkar, Amir Klein, Amit Zuker, Amnon Geifman, Amy Shen, Anahita Bhiwandiwalla , et al. (289 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: We present Nemotron 3 Nano 30B-A3B, a Mixture-of-Experts hybrid Mamba-Transformer language model. Nemotron 3 Nano was pretrained on 25 trillion text tokens, including more than 3 trillion new unique tokens over Nemotron 2, followed by supervised fine tuning and large-scale RL on diverse environments. Nemotron 3 Nano achieves better accuracy than our previous generation Nemotron 2 Nano while activa… ▽ More We present Nemotron 3 Nano 30B-A3B, a Mixture-of-Experts hybrid Mamba-Transformer language model. Nemotron 3 Nano was pretrained on 25 trillion text tokens, including more than 3 trillion new unique tokens over Nemotron 2, followed by supervised fine tuning and large-scale RL on diverse environments. Nemotron 3 Nano achieves better accuracy than our previous generation Nemotron 2 Nano while activating less than half of the parameters per forward pass. It achieves up to 3.3x higher inference throughput than similarly-sized open models like GPT-OSS-20B and Qwen3-30B-A3B-Thinking-2507, while also being more accurate on popular benchmarks. Nemotron 3 Nano demonstrates enhanced agentic, reasoning, and chat abilities and supports context lengths up to 1M tokens. We release both our pretrained Nemotron 3 Nano 30B-A3B Base and post-trained Nemotron 3 Nano 30B-A3B checkpoints on Hugging Face. △ Less

Submitted 23 December, 2025; originally announced December 2025.

NVIDIA Nemotron Parse 1.1

Authors: Kateryna Chumachenko, Amala Sanjay Deshmukh, Jarno Seppanen, Ilia Karmanov, Chia-Chih Chen, Lukas Voegtle, Philipp Fischer, Marek Wawrzos, Saeid Motiian, Roman Ageev, Kedi Wu, Alexandre Milesi, Maryam Moosaei, Krzysztof Pawelec, Padmavathy Subramanian, Mehrzad Samadi, Xin Yu, Celina Dear, Sarah Stoddard, Jenna Diamond, Jesse Oliver, Leanna Chraghchian, Patrick Skelly, Tom Balough, Yao Xu , et al. (8 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: We introduce Nemotron-Parse-1.1, a lightweight document parsing and OCR model that advances the capabilities of its predecessor, Nemoretriever-Parse-1.0. Nemotron-Parse-1.1 delivers improved capabilities across general OCR, markdown formatting, structured table parsing, and text extraction from pictures, charts, and diagrams. It also supports a longer output sequence length for visually dense docu… ▽ More We introduce Nemotron-Parse-1.1, a lightweight document parsing and OCR model that advances the capabilities of its predecessor, Nemoretriever-Parse-1.0. Nemotron-Parse-1.1 delivers improved capabilities across general OCR, markdown formatting, structured table parsing, and text extraction from pictures, charts, and diagrams. It also supports a longer output sequence length for visually dense documents. As with its predecessor, it extracts bounding boxes of text segments, as well as corresponding semantic classes. Nemotron-Parse-1.1 follows an encoder-decoder architecture with 885M parameters, including a compact 256M-parameter language decoder. It achieves competitive accuracy on public benchmarks making it a strong lightweight OCR solution. We release the model weights publicly on Huggingface, as well as an optimized NIM container, along with a subset of the training data as part of the broader Nemotron-VLM-v2 dataset. Additionally, we release Nemotron-Parse-1.1-TC which operates on a reduced vision token length, offering a 20% speed improvement with minimal quality degradation. △ Less

Submitted 25 November, 2025; originally announced November 2025.

NVIDIA Nemotron Nano V2 VL

Authors: NVIDIA, :, Amala Sanjay Deshmukh, Kateryna Chumachenko, Tuomas Rintamaki, Matthieu Le, Tyler Poon, Danial Mohseni Taheri, Ilia Karmanov, Guilin Liu, Jarno Seppanen, Guo Chen, Karan Sapra, Zhiding Yu, Adi Renduchintala, Charles Wang, Peter Jin, Arushi Goel, Mike Ranzinger, Lukas Voegtle, Philipp Fischer, Timo Roman, Wei Ping, Boxin Wang, Zhuolin Yang , et al. (99 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: We introduce Nemotron Nano V2 VL, the latest model of the Nemotron vision-language series designed for strong real-world document understanding, long video comprehension, and reasoning tasks. Nemotron Nano V2 VL delivers significant improvements over our previous model, Llama-3.1-Nemotron-Nano-VL-8B, across all vision and text domains through major enhancements in model architecture, datasets, and… ▽ More We introduce Nemotron Nano V2 VL, the latest model of the Nemotron vision-language series designed for strong real-world document understanding, long video comprehension, and reasoning tasks. Nemotron Nano V2 VL delivers significant improvements over our previous model, Llama-3.1-Nemotron-Nano-VL-8B, across all vision and text domains through major enhancements in model architecture, datasets, and training recipes. Nemotron Nano V2 VL builds on Nemotron Nano V2, a hybrid Mamba-Transformer LLM, and innovative token reduction techniques to achieve higher inference throughput in long document and video scenarios. We are releasing model checkpoints in BF16, FP8, and FP4 formats and sharing large parts of our datasets, recipes and training code. △ Less

Submitted 6 November, 2025; v1 submitted 5 November, 2025; originally announced November 2025.

OmniVinci: Enhancing Architecture and Data for Omni-Modal Understanding LLM

Authors: Hanrong Ye, Chao-Han Huck Yang, Arushi Goel, Wei Huang, Ligeng Zhu, Yuanhang Su, Sean Lin, An-Chieh Cheng, Zhen Wan, Jinchuan Tian, Yuming Lou, Dong Yang, Zhijian Liu, Yukang Chen, Ambrish Dantrey, Ehsan Jahangiri, Sreyan Ghosh, Daguang Xu, Ehsan Hosseini-Asl, Danial Mohseni Taheri, Vidya Murali, Sifei Liu, Yao Lu, Oluwatobi Olabiyi, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang , et al. (7 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: Advancing machine intelligence requires developing the ability to perceive across multiple modalities, much as humans sense the world. We introduce OmniVinci, an initiative to build a strong, open-source, omni-modal LLM. We carefully study the design choices across model architecture and data curation. For model architecture, we present three key innovations: (i) OmniAlignNet for strengthening ali… ▽ More Advancing machine intelligence requires developing the ability to perceive across multiple modalities, much as humans sense the world. We introduce OmniVinci, an initiative to build a strong, open-source, omni-modal LLM. We carefully study the design choices across model architecture and data curation. For model architecture, we present three key innovations: (i) OmniAlignNet for strengthening alignment between vision and audio embeddings in a shared omni-modal latent space; (ii) Temporal Embedding Grouping for capturing relative temporal alignment between vision and audio signals; and (iii) Constrained Rotary Time Embedding for encoding absolute temporal information in omni-modal embeddings. We introduce a curation and synthesis pipeline that generates 24M single-modal and omni-modal conversations. We find that modalities reinforce one another in both perception and reasoning. Our model, OmniVinci, outperforms Qwen2.5-Omni with +19.05 on DailyOmni (cross-modal understanding), +1.7 on MMAR (audio), and +3.9 on Video-MME (vision), while using just 0.2T training tokens - a 6 times reduction compared to Qwen2.5-Omni's 1.2T. We finally demonstrate omni-modal advantages in downstream applications spanning robotics, medical AI, and smart factory. △ Less

Submitted 27 October, 2025; v1 submitted 17 October, 2025; originally announced October 2025.

Comments: Technical Report. Code: https://github.com/NVlabs/OmniVinci

Efficient Video Sampling: Pruning Temporally Redundant Tokens for Faster VLM Inference

Authors: Natan Bagrov, Eugene Khvedchenia, Borys Tymchenko, Shay Aharon, Lior Kadoch, Tomer Keren, Ofri Masad, Yonatan Geifman, Ran Zilberstein, Tuomas Rintamaki, Matthieu Le, Andrew Tao

Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) have recently expanded from static image understanding to video reasoning, but their scalability is fundamentally limited by the quadratic cost of processing dense frame sequences. Long videos often exceed the token budget of modern language models, leading to severe context limitations and latency issues. We introduce Efficient Video Sampling (EVS), a simple, plug-an… ▽ More Vision-language models (VLMs) have recently expanded from static image understanding to video reasoning, but their scalability is fundamentally limited by the quadratic cost of processing dense frame sequences. Long videos often exceed the token budget of modern language models, leading to severe context limitations and latency issues. We introduce Efficient Video Sampling (EVS), a simple, plug-and-play method for reducing token redundancy in videos by identifying and pruning temporally static patches -- spatial regions that remain unchanged across consecutive frames. EVS preserves positional identity, requires no architectural changes or retraining. We show that EVS substantially reduces token count while maintaining semantic fidelity, enabling faster inference and longer input sequences. Applied at inference time, EVS reduces large language model (LLM) time-to-first-token (TTFT) by up to 4x with minimal accuracy loss. When combined with an uptraining phase using stochastic pruning rates, EVS yields models that are robust to varying compression levels and retain full performance under aggressive pruning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EVS consistently improves efficiency-accuracy trade-offs, unlocking scalable video-language understanding without sacrificing quality. △ Less

Submitted 16 October, 2025; originally announced October 2025.

Path Drift in Large Reasoning Models:How First-Person Commitments Override Safety

Authors: Yuyi Huang, Runzhe Zhan, Lidia S. Chao, Ailin Tao, Derek F. Wong

Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed for complex reasoning tasks, Long Chain-of-Thought (Long-CoT) prompting has emerged as a key paradigm for structured inference. Despite early-stage safeguards enabled by alignment techniques such as RLHF, we identify a previously underexplored vulnerability: reasoning trajectories in Long-CoT models can drift from aligned paths, resulting i… ▽ More As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed for complex reasoning tasks, Long Chain-of-Thought (Long-CoT) prompting has emerged as a key paradigm for structured inference. Despite early-stage safeguards enabled by alignment techniques such as RLHF, we identify a previously underexplored vulnerability: reasoning trajectories in Long-CoT models can drift from aligned paths, resulting in content that violates safety constraints. We term this phenomenon Path Drift. Through empirical analysis, we uncover three behavioral triggers of Path Drift: (1) first-person commitments that induce goal-driven reasoning that delays refusal signals; (2) ethical evaporation, where surface-level disclaimers bypass alignment checkpoints; (3) condition chain escalation, where layered cues progressively steer models toward unsafe completions. Building on these insights, we introduce a three-stage Path Drift Induction Framework comprising cognitive load amplification, self-role priming, and condition chain hijacking. Each stage independently reduces refusal rates, while their combination further compounds the effect. To mitigate these risks, we propose a path-level defense strategy incorporating role attribution correction and metacognitive reflection (reflective safety cues). Our findings highlight the need for trajectory-level alignment oversight in long-form reasoning beyond token-level alignment. △ Less

Submitted 11 October, 2025; originally announced October 2025.

NVIDIA Nemotron Nano 2: An Accurate and Efficient Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Reasoning Model

Authors: NVIDIA, :, Aarti Basant, Abhijit Khairnar, Abhijit Paithankar, Abhinav Khattar, Adithya Renduchintala, Aditya Malte, Akhiad Bercovich, Akshay Hazare, Alejandra Rico, Aleksander Ficek, Alex Kondratenko, Alex Shaposhnikov, Alexander Bukharin, Ali Taghibakhshi, Amelia Barton, Ameya Sunil Mahabaleshwarkar, Amy Shen, Andrew Tao, Ann Guan, Anna Shors, Anubhav Mandarwal, Arham Mehta, Arun Venkatesan , et al. (192 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: We introduce Nemotron-Nano-9B-v2, a hybrid Mamba-Transformer language model designed to increase throughput for reasoning workloads while achieving state-of-the-art accuracy compared to similarly-sized models. Nemotron-Nano-9B-v2 builds on the Nemotron-H architecture, in which the majority of the self-attention layers in the common Transformer architecture are replaced with Mamba-2 layers, to achi… ▽ More We introduce Nemotron-Nano-9B-v2, a hybrid Mamba-Transformer language model designed to increase throughput for reasoning workloads while achieving state-of-the-art accuracy compared to similarly-sized models. Nemotron-Nano-9B-v2 builds on the Nemotron-H architecture, in which the majority of the self-attention layers in the common Transformer architecture are replaced with Mamba-2 layers, to achieve improved inference speed when generating the long thinking traces needed for reasoning. We create Nemotron-Nano-9B-v2 by first pre-training a 12-billion-parameter model (Nemotron-Nano-12B-v2-Base) on 20 trillion tokens using an FP8 training recipe. After aligning Nemotron-Nano-12B-v2-Base, we employ the Minitron strategy to compress and distill the model with the goal of enabling inference on up to 128k tokens on a single NVIDIA A10G GPU (22GiB of memory, bfloat16 precision). Compared to existing similarly-sized models (e.g., Qwen3-8B), we show that Nemotron-Nano-9B-v2 achieves on-par or better accuracy on reasoning benchmarks while achieving up to 6x higher inference throughput in reasoning settings like 8k input and 16k output tokens. We are releasing Nemotron-Nano-9B-v2, Nemotron-Nano12B-v2-Base, and Nemotron-Nano-9B-v2-Base checkpoints along with the majority of our pre- and post-training datasets on Hugging Face. △ Less

Submitted 2 September, 2025; v1 submitted 20 August, 2025; originally announced August 2025.

Real-Time Stress Monitoring, Detection, and Management in College Students: A Wearable Technology and Machine-Learning Approach

Authors: Alan Ta, Nilsu Salgin, Mustafa Demir, Kala Phillips Reindel, Ranjana K. Mehta, Anthony McDonald, Carly McCord, Farzan Sasangohar

Abstract: College students are increasingly affected by stress, anxiety, and depression, yet face barriers to traditional mental health care. This study evaluated the efficacy of a mobile health (mHealth) intervention, Mental Health Evaluation and Lookout Program (mHELP), which integrates a smartwatch sensor and machine learning (ML) algorithms for real-time stress detection and self-management. In a 12-wee… ▽ More College students are increasingly affected by stress, anxiety, and depression, yet face barriers to traditional mental health care. This study evaluated the efficacy of a mobile health (mHealth) intervention, Mental Health Evaluation and Lookout Program (mHELP), which integrates a smartwatch sensor and machine learning (ML) algorithms for real-time stress detection and self-management. In a 12-week randomized controlled trial (n = 117), participants were assigned to a treatment group using mHELP's full suite of interventions or a control group using the app solely for real-time stress logging and weekly psychological assessments. The primary outcome, "Moments of Stress" (MS), was assessed via physiological and self-reported indicators and analyzed using Generalized Linear Mixed Models (GLMM) approaches. Similarly, secondary outcomes of psychological assessments, including the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7) for anxiety, the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-8) for depression, and the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS), were also analyzed via GLMM. The finding of the objective measure, MS, indicates a substantial decrease in MS among the treatment group compared to the control group, while no notable between-group differences were observed in subjective scores of anxiety (GAD-7), depression (PHQ-8), or stress (PSS). However, the treatment group exhibited a clinically meaningful decline in GAD-7 and PSS scores. These findings underscore the potential of wearable-enabled mHealth tools to reduce acute stress in college populations and highlight the need for extended interventions and tailored features to address chronic symptoms like depression. △ Less

Submitted 26 May, 2025; v1 submitted 21 May, 2025; originally announced May 2025.

Comments: 30 pages, 5 figures

Nemotron-Research-Tool-N1: Exploring Tool-Using Language Models with Reinforced Reasoning

Authors: Shaokun Zhang, Yi Dong, Jieyu Zhang, Jan Kautz, Bryan Catanzaro, Andrew Tao, Qingyun Wu, Zhiding Yu, Guilin Liu

Abstract: Enabling large language models with external tools has become a pivotal strategy for extending their functionality beyond text space. To enhance LLMs' tool-calling abilities, previous approaches primarily rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with trajectories distilled from stronger models, often resulting in imitative reasoning that limits generalization. In this work, we explore rule-based reinf… ▽ More Enabling large language models with external tools has become a pivotal strategy for extending their functionality beyond text space. To enhance LLMs' tool-calling abilities, previous approaches primarily rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with trajectories distilled from stronger models, often resulting in imitative reasoning that limits generalization. In this work, we explore rule-based reinforcement learning to enhance tool-calling in LLMs, resulting in Nemotron-Research-Tool-N1, a series of tool-calling reasoning models. Rather than enforcing supervision over intermediate distilled reasoning traces, Tool-N1 is trained with a binary RL reward that assesses only the format validity and functional correctness of tool invocations. This lightweight supervision allows the model to develop reasoning strategies independently, without relying on annotated trajectories. Experiments on several major benchmarks show that Tool-N1-7B/14B clearly outperform GPT-4o. We conduct a systematic study on the design of rule-based reinforcement learning strategies for training tool-calling models. Using 5,518 distilled reasoning trajectories, we compare SFT, RL, and the SFT-then-RL pipeline, finding that the widely adopted SFT-then-RL paradigm does not necessarily outperform pure RL. △ Less

Submitted 11 May, 2025; v1 submitted 24 April, 2025; originally announced May 2025.

Comments: 17 pages, 6 tables, 12 figures. - update new results - add more details

Eagle 2.5: Boosting Long-Context Post-Training for Frontier Vision-Language Models

Authors: Guo Chen, Zhiqi Li, Shihao Wang, Jindong Jiang, Yicheng Liu, Lidong Lu, De-An Huang, Wonmin Byeon, Matthieu Le, Tuomas Rintamaki, Tyler Poon, Max Ehrlich, Tuomas Rintamaki, Tyler Poon, Tong Lu, Limin Wang, Bryan Catanzaro, Jan Kautz, Andrew Tao, Zhiding Yu, Guilin Liu

Abstract: We introduce Eagle 2.5, a family of frontier vision-language models (VLMs) for long-context multimodal learning. Our work addresses the challenges in long video comprehension and high-resolution image understanding, introducing a generalist framework for both tasks. The proposed training framework incorporates Automatic Degrade Sampling and Image Area Preservation, two techniques that preserve con… ▽ More We introduce Eagle 2.5, a family of frontier vision-language models (VLMs) for long-context multimodal learning. Our work addresses the challenges in long video comprehension and high-resolution image understanding, introducing a generalist framework for both tasks. The proposed training framework incorporates Automatic Degrade Sampling and Image Area Preservation, two techniques that preserve contextual integrity and visual details. The framework also includes numerous efficiency optimizations in the pipeline for long-context data training. Finally, we propose Eagle-Video-110K, a novel dataset that integrates both story-level and clip-level annotations, facilitating long-video understanding. Eagle 2.5 demonstrates substantial improvements on long-context multimodal benchmarks, providing a robust solution to the limitations of existing VLMs. Notably, our best model Eagle 2.5-8B achieves 72.4% on Video-MME with 512 input frames, matching the results of top-tier commercial model such as GPT-4o and large-scale open-source models like Qwen2.5-VL-72B and InternVL2.5-78B. △ Less

Submitted 21 April, 2025; originally announced April 2025.

Nemotron-H: A Family of Accurate and Efficient Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Models

Authors: NVIDIA, :, Aaron Blakeman, Aarti Basant, Abhinav Khattar, Adithya Renduchintala, Akhiad Bercovich, Aleksander Ficek, Alexis Bjorlin, Ali Taghibakhshi, Amala Sanjay Deshmukh, Ameya Sunil Mahabaleshwarkar, Andrew Tao, Anna Shors, Ashwath Aithal, Ashwin Poojary, Ayush Dattagupta, Balaram Buddharaju, Bobby Chen, Boris Ginsburg, Boxin Wang, Brandon Norick, Brian Butterfield, Bryan Catanzaro, Carlo del Mundo , et al. (176 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: As inference-time scaling becomes critical for enhanced reasoning capabilities, it is increasingly becoming important to build models that are efficient to infer. We introduce Nemotron-H, a family of 8B and 56B/47B hybrid Mamba-Transformer models designed to reduce inference cost for a given accuracy level. To achieve this goal, we replace the majority of self-attention layers in the common Transf… ▽ More As inference-time scaling becomes critical for enhanced reasoning capabilities, it is increasingly becoming important to build models that are efficient to infer. We introduce Nemotron-H, a family of 8B and 56B/47B hybrid Mamba-Transformer models designed to reduce inference cost for a given accuracy level. To achieve this goal, we replace the majority of self-attention layers in the common Transformer model architecture with Mamba layers that perform constant computation and require constant memory per generated token. We show that Nemotron-H models offer either better or on-par accuracy compared to other similarly-sized state-of-the-art open-sourced Transformer models (e.g., Qwen-2.5-7B/72B and Llama-3.1-8B/70B), while being up to 3$\times$ faster at inference. To further increase inference speed and reduce the memory required at inference time, we created Nemotron-H-47B-Base from the 56B model using a new compression via pruning and distillation technique called MiniPuzzle. Nemotron-H-47B-Base achieves similar accuracy to the 56B model, but is 20% faster to infer. In addition, we introduce an FP8-based training recipe and show that it can achieve on par results with BF16-based training. This recipe is used to train the 56B model. We are releasing Nemotron-H base model checkpoints with support in Hugging Face and NeMo. △ Less

Submitted 5 September, 2025; v1 submitted 4 April, 2025; originally announced April 2025.

Intrinsic Model Weaknesses: How Priming Attacks Unveil Vulnerabilities in Large Language Models

Authors: Yuyi Huang, Runzhe Zhan, Derek F. Wong, Lidia S. Chao, Ailin Tao

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have significantly influenced various industries but suffer from a critical flaw, the potential sensitivity of generating harmful content, which poses severe societal risks. We developed and tested novel attack strategies on popular LLMs to expose their vulnerabilities in generating inappropriate content. These strategies, inspired by psychological phenomena such as th… ▽ More Large language models (LLMs) have significantly influenced various industries but suffer from a critical flaw, the potential sensitivity of generating harmful content, which poses severe societal risks. We developed and tested novel attack strategies on popular LLMs to expose their vulnerabilities in generating inappropriate content. These strategies, inspired by psychological phenomena such as the "Priming Effect", "Safe Attention Shift", and "Cognitive Dissonance", effectively attack the models' guarding mechanisms. Our experiments achieved an attack success rate (ASR) of 100% on various open-source models, including Meta's Llama-3.2, Google's Gemma-2, Mistral's Mistral-NeMo, Falcon's Falcon-mamba, Apple's DCLM, Microsoft's Phi3, and Qwen's Qwen2.5, among others. Similarly, for closed-source models such as OpenAI's GPT-4o, Google's Gemini-1.5, and Claude-3.5, we observed an ASR of at least 95% on the AdvBench dataset, which represents the current state-of-the-art. This study underscores the urgent need to reassess the use of generative models in critical applications to mitigate potential adverse societal impacts. △ Less

Submitted 23 February, 2025; originally announced February 2025.

FeatSharp: Your Vision Model Features, Sharper

Authors: Mike Ranzinger, Greg Heinrich, Pavlo Molchanov, Jan Kautz, Bryan Catanzaro, Andrew Tao

Abstract: The feature maps of vision encoders are fundamental to myriad modern AI tasks, ranging from core perception algorithms (e.g. semantic segmentation, object detection, depth perception, etc.) to modern multimodal understanding in vision-language models (VLMs). Currently, in computer vision, the frontier of general purpose vision backbones is Vision Transformers (ViT), typically trained using contras… ▽ More The feature maps of vision encoders are fundamental to myriad modern AI tasks, ranging from core perception algorithms (e.g. semantic segmentation, object detection, depth perception, etc.) to modern multimodal understanding in vision-language models (VLMs). Currently, in computer vision, the frontier of general purpose vision backbones is Vision Transformers (ViT), typically trained using contrastive loss (e.g. CLIP). A key problem with most off-the-shelf ViTs, particularly CLIP, is that these models are inflexibly low resolution. Most run at $224 \times 224$px, while the "high-resolution" versions are around $378-448$px, but still inflexible. We introduce a novel method to coherently and cheaply upsample the feature maps of low-resolution vision encoders while picking up on fine-grained details that would otherwise be lost due to resolution. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach on core perception tasks as well as within agglomerative model training using RADIO as a way of providing richer targets for distillation. Code available at https://github.com/NVlabs/FeatSharp . △ Less

Submitted 2 July, 2025; v1 submitted 21 February, 2025; originally announced February 2025.

Comments: ICML 2025 Version

AIDE: Agentically Improve Visual Language Model with Domain Experts

Authors: Ming-Chang Chiu, Fuxiao Liu, Karan Sapra, Andrew Tao, Yaser Jacoob, Xuezhe Ma, Zhiding Yu, Guilin Liu

Abstract: The enhancement of Visual Language Models (VLMs) has traditionally relied on knowledge distillation from larger, more capable models. This dependence creates a fundamental bottleneck for improving state-of-the-art systems, particularly when no superior models exist. We introduce AIDE (Agentic Improvement through Domain Experts), a novel framework that enables VLMs to autonomously enhance their cap… ▽ More The enhancement of Visual Language Models (VLMs) has traditionally relied on knowledge distillation from larger, more capable models. This dependence creates a fundamental bottleneck for improving state-of-the-art systems, particularly when no superior models exist. We introduce AIDE (Agentic Improvement through Domain Experts), a novel framework that enables VLMs to autonomously enhance their capabilities by leveraging specialized domain expert models. AIDE operates through a four-stage process: (1) identifying instances for refinement, (2) engaging domain experts for targeted analysis, (3) synthesizing expert outputs with existing data, and (4) integrating enhanced instances into the training pipeline. Experiments on multiple benchmarks, including MMMU, MME, MMBench, etc., demonstrate AIDE's ability to achieve notable performance gains without relying on larger VLMs nor human supervision. Our framework provides a scalable, resource-efficient approach to continuous VLM improvement, addressing critical limitations in current methodologies, particularly valuable when larger models are unavailable to access. △ Less

Submitted 13 February, 2025; originally announced February 2025.

Comments: 6 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables

Éclair -- Extracting Content and Layout with Integrated Reading Order for Documents

Authors: Ilia Karmanov, Amala Sanjay Deshmukh, Lukas Voegtle, Philipp Fischer, Kateryna Chumachenko, Timo Roman, Jarno Seppänen, Jupinder Parmar, Joseph Jennings, Andrew Tao, Karan Sapra

Abstract: Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology is widely used to extract text from images of documents, facilitating efficient digitization and data retrieval. However, merely extracting text is insufficient when dealing with complex documents. Fully comprehending such documents requires an understanding of their structure -- including formatting, formulas, tables, and the reading order of multipl… ▽ More Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology is widely used to extract text from images of documents, facilitating efficient digitization and data retrieval. However, merely extracting text is insufficient when dealing with complex documents. Fully comprehending such documents requires an understanding of their structure -- including formatting, formulas, tables, and the reading order of multiple blocks and columns across multiple pages -- as well as semantic information for detecting elements like footnotes and image captions. This comprehensive understanding is crucial for downstream tasks such as retrieval, document question answering, and data curation for training Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs). To address this, we introduce Éclair, a general-purpose text-extraction tool specifically designed to process a wide range of document types. Given an image, Éclair is able to extract formatted text in reading order, along with bounding boxes and their corresponding semantic classes. To thoroughly evaluate these novel capabilities, we introduce our diverse human-annotated benchmark for document-level OCR and semantic classification. Éclair achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on this benchmark, outperforming other methods across key metrics. Additionally, we evaluate Éclair on established benchmarks, demonstrating its versatility and strength across several evaluation standards. △ Less

Submitted 6 February, 2025; originally announced February 2025.

Eagle 2: Building Post-Training Data Strategies from Scratch for Frontier Vision-Language Models

Authors: Zhiqi Li, Guo Chen, Shilong Liu, Shihao Wang, Vibashan VS, Yishen Ji, Shiyi Lan, Hao Zhang, Yilin Zhao, Subhashree Radhakrishnan, Nadine Chang, Karan Sapra, Amala Sanjay Deshmukh, Tuomas Rintamaki, Matthieu Le, Ilia Karmanov, Lukas Voegtle, Philipp Fischer, De-An Huang, Timo Roman, Tong Lu, Jose M. Alvarez, Bryan Catanzaro, Jan Kautz, Andrew Tao , et al. (2 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: Recently, promising progress has been made by open-source vision-language models (VLMs) in bringing their capabilities closer to those of proprietary frontier models. However, most open-source models only publish their final model weights, leaving the critical details of data strategies and implementation largely opaque. In this work, we address VLM post-training from a data-centric perspective, s… ▽ More Recently, promising progress has been made by open-source vision-language models (VLMs) in bringing their capabilities closer to those of proprietary frontier models. However, most open-source models only publish their final model weights, leaving the critical details of data strategies and implementation largely opaque. In this work, we address VLM post-training from a data-centric perspective, showing the key role of data strategy in developing frontier VLMs. By studying and building our post-training data strategy from scratch, we share detailed insights into the development processes, aiming to benefit the development of competitive models for the open-source community. Our introduced data strategy, together with training recipes and model design, leads to a family of performant VLMs named Eagle2. Specifically, Eagle2-9B achieves state-of-the-art results across various multimodal benchmarks, matching certain competitive models with up to 70B parameters. △ Less

Submitted 20 January, 2025; originally announced January 2025.

RADIOv2.5: Improved Baselines for Agglomerative Vision Foundation Models

Authors: Greg Heinrich, Mike Ranzinger, Hongxu, Yin, Yao Lu, Jan Kautz, Andrew Tao, Bryan Catanzaro, Pavlo Molchanov

Abstract: Agglomerative models have recently emerged as a powerful approach to training vision foundation models, leveraging multi-teacher distillation from existing models such as CLIP, DINO, and SAM. This strategy enables the efficient creation of robust models, combining the strengths of individual teachers while significantly reducing computational and resource demands. In this paper, we thoroughly anal… ▽ More Agglomerative models have recently emerged as a powerful approach to training vision foundation models, leveraging multi-teacher distillation from existing models such as CLIP, DINO, and SAM. This strategy enables the efficient creation of robust models, combining the strengths of individual teachers while significantly reducing computational and resource demands. In this paper, we thoroughly analyze state-of-the-art agglomerative models, identifying critical challenges including resolution mode shifts, teacher imbalance, idiosyncratic teacher artifacts, and an excessive number of output tokens. To address these issues, we propose several novel solutions: multi-resolution training, mosaic augmentation, and improved balancing of teacher loss functions. Specifically, in the context of Vision Language Models, we introduce a token compression technique to maintain high-resolution information within a fixed token count. We release our top-performing variants at multiple scales (-B, -L, -H, and -g), along with inference code and pretrained weights △ Less

Submitted 9 February, 2025; v1 submitted 10 December, 2024; originally announced December 2024.

Automated Planning Domain Inference for Task and Motion Planning

Authors: Jinbang Huang, Allen Tao, Rozilyn Marco, Miroslav Bogdanovic, Jonathan Kelly, Florian Shkurti

Abstract: Task and motion planning (TAMP) frameworks address long and complex planning problems by integrating high-level task planners with low-level motion planners. However, existing TAMP methods rely heavily on the manual design of planning domains that specify the preconditions and postconditions of all high-level actions. This paper proposes a method to automate planning domain inference from a handfu… ▽ More Task and motion planning (TAMP) frameworks address long and complex planning problems by integrating high-level task planners with low-level motion planners. However, existing TAMP methods rely heavily on the manual design of planning domains that specify the preconditions and postconditions of all high-level actions. This paper proposes a method to automate planning domain inference from a handful of test-time trajectory demonstrations, reducing the reliance on human design. Our approach incorporates a deep learning-based estimator that predicts the appropriate components of a domain for a new task and a search algorithm that refines this prediction, reducing the size and ensuring the utility of the inferred domain. Our method is able to generate new domains from minimal demonstrations at test time, enabling robots to handle complex tasks more efficiently. We demonstrate that our approach outperforms behavior cloning baselines, which directly imitate planner behavior, in terms of planning performance and generalization across a variety of tasks. Additionally, our method reduces computational costs and data amount requirements at test time for inferring new planning domains. △ Less

Submitted 8 September, 2025; v1 submitted 21 October, 2024; originally announced October 2024.

Comments: Published in the Proceedings of the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)

Journal ref: Proc. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Atlanta, GA, USA, May 2025, pp. 12534-12540

OMCAT: Omni Context Aware Transformer

Authors: Arushi Goel, Karan Sapra, Matthieu Le, Rafael Valle, Andrew Tao, Bryan Catanzaro

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant strides in text generation and comprehension, with recent advancements extending into multimodal LLMs that integrate visual and audio inputs. However, these models continue to struggle with fine-grained, cross-modal temporal understanding, particularly when correlating events across audio and video streams. We address these challenges with two key… ▽ More Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant strides in text generation and comprehension, with recent advancements extending into multimodal LLMs that integrate visual and audio inputs. However, these models continue to struggle with fine-grained, cross-modal temporal understanding, particularly when correlating events across audio and video streams. We address these challenges with two key contributions: a new dataset and model, called OCTAV and OMCAT respectively. OCTAV (Omni Context and Temporal Audio Video) is a novel dataset designed to capture event transitions across audio and video. Second, OMCAT (Omni Context Aware Transformer) is a powerful model that leverages RoTE (Rotary Time Embeddings), an innovative extension of RoPE, to enhance temporal grounding and computational efficiency in time-anchored tasks. Through a robust three-stage training pipeline-feature alignment, instruction tuning, and OCTAV-specific training-OMCAT excels in cross-modal temporal understanding. Our model demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on Audio-Visual Question Answering (AVQA) tasks and the OCTAV benchmark, showcasing significant gains in temporal reasoning and cross-modal alignment, as validated through comprehensive experiments and ablation studies. Our dataset and code will be made publicly available. The link to our demo page is https://om-cat.github.io. △ Less

Submitted 15 October, 2024; originally announced October 2024.

Comments: Demo page: https://om-cat.github.io

PHI-S: Distribution Balancing for Label-Free Multi-Teacher Distillation

Authors: Mike Ranzinger, Jon Barker, Greg Heinrich, Pavlo Molchanov, Bryan Catanzaro, Andrew Tao

Abstract: Various visual foundation models have distinct strengths and weaknesses, both of which can be improved through heterogeneous multi-teacher knowledge distillation without labels, termed "agglomerative models." We build upon this body of work by studying the effect of the teachers' activation statistics, particularly the impact of the loss function on the resulting student model quality. We explore… ▽ More Various visual foundation models have distinct strengths and weaknesses, both of which can be improved through heterogeneous multi-teacher knowledge distillation without labels, termed "agglomerative models." We build upon this body of work by studying the effect of the teachers' activation statistics, particularly the impact of the loss function on the resulting student model quality. We explore a standard toolkit of statistical normalization techniques to better align the different distributions and assess their effects. Further, we examine the impact on downstream teacher-matching metrics, which motivates the use of Hadamard matrices. With these matrices, we demonstrate useful properties, showing how they can be used for isotropic standardization, where each dimension of a multivariate distribution is standardized using the same scale. We call this technique "PHI Standardization" (PHI-S) and empirically demonstrate that it produces the best student model across the suite of methods studied. △ Less

Submitted 2 October, 2024; originally announced October 2024.

Equivariant Filter for Tightly Coupled LiDAR-Inertial Odometry

Authors: Anbo Tao, Yarong Luo, Chunxi Xia, Chi Guo, Xingxing Li

Abstract: Pose estimation is a crucial problem in simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). However, developing a robust and consistent state estimator remains a significant challenge, as the traditional extended Kalman filter (EKF) struggles to handle the model nonlinearity, especially for inertial measurement unit (IMU) and light detection and ranging (LiDAR). To provide a consistent and efficient sol… ▽ More Pose estimation is a crucial problem in simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). However, developing a robust and consistent state estimator remains a significant challenge, as the traditional extended Kalman filter (EKF) struggles to handle the model nonlinearity, especially for inertial measurement unit (IMU) and light detection and ranging (LiDAR). To provide a consistent and efficient solution of pose estimation, we propose Eq-LIO, a robust state estimator for tightly coupled LIO systems based on an equivariant filter (EqF). Compared with the invariant Kalman filter based on the $\SE_2(3)$ group structure, the EqF uses the symmetry of the semi-direct product group to couple the system state including IMU bias, navigation state and LiDAR extrinsic calibration state, thereby suppressing linearization error and improving the behavior of the estimator in the event of unexpected state changes. The proposed Eq-LIO owns natural consistency and higher robustness, which is theoretically proven with mathematical derivation and experimentally verified through a series of tests on both public and private datasets. △ Less

Submitted 4 March, 2025; v1 submitted 10 September, 2024; originally announced September 2024.

Comments: Accepted by ICRA 2025

MakeWay: Object-Aware Costmaps for Proactive Indoor Navigation Using LiDAR

Authors: Binbin Xu, Allen Tao, Hugues Thomas, Jian Zhang, Timothy D. Barfoot

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce a LiDAR-based robot navigation system, based on novel object-aware affordance-based costmaps. Utilizing a 3D object detection network, our system identifies objects of interest in LiDAR keyframes, refines their 3D poses with the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm, and tracks them via Kalman filters and the Hungarian algorithm for data association. It then updates e… ▽ More In this paper, we introduce a LiDAR-based robot navigation system, based on novel object-aware affordance-based costmaps. Utilizing a 3D object detection network, our system identifies objects of interest in LiDAR keyframes, refines their 3D poses with the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm, and tracks them via Kalman filters and the Hungarian algorithm for data association. It then updates existing object poses with new associated detections and creates new object maps for unmatched detections. Using the maintained object-level mapping system, our system creates affordance-driven object costmaps for proactive collision avoidance in path planning. Additionally, we address the scarcity of indoor semantic LiDAR data by introducing an automated labeling technique. This method utilizes a CAD model database for accurate ground-truth annotations, encompassing bounding boxes, positions, orientations, and point-wise semantics of each object in LiDAR sequences. Our extensive evaluations, conducted in both simulated and real-world robot platforms, highlights the effectiveness of proactive object avoidance by using object affordance costmaps, enhancing robotic navigation safety and efficiency. The system can operate in real-time onboard and we intend to release our code and data for public use. △ Less

Submitted 30 August, 2024; originally announced August 2024.

Comments: 8 pages, 11 figures

Eagle: Exploring The Design Space for Multimodal LLMs with Mixture of Encoders

Authors: Min Shi, Fuxiao Liu, Shihao Wang, Shijia Liao, Subhashree Radhakrishnan, Yilin Zhao, De-An Huang, Hongxu Yin, Karan Sapra, Yaser Yacoob, Humphrey Shi, Bryan Catanzaro, Andrew Tao, Jan Kautz, Zhiding Yu, Guilin Liu

Abstract: The ability to accurately interpret complex visual information is a crucial topic of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Recent work indicates that enhanced visual perception significantly reduces hallucinations and improves performance on resolution-sensitive tasks, such as optical character recognition and document analysis. A number of recent MLLMs achieve this goal using a mixture of vis… ▽ More The ability to accurately interpret complex visual information is a crucial topic of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Recent work indicates that enhanced visual perception significantly reduces hallucinations and improves performance on resolution-sensitive tasks, such as optical character recognition and document analysis. A number of recent MLLMs achieve this goal using a mixture of vision encoders. Despite their success, there is a lack of systematic comparisons and detailed ablation studies addressing critical aspects, such as expert selection and the integration of multiple vision experts. This study provides an extensive exploration of the design space for MLLMs using a mixture of vision encoders and resolutions. Our findings reveal several underlying principles common to various existing strategies, leading to a streamlined yet effective design approach. We discover that simply concatenating visual tokens from a set of complementary vision encoders is as effective as more complex mixing architectures or strategies. We additionally introduce Pre-Alignment to bridge the gap between vision-focused encoders and language tokens, enhancing model coherence. The resulting family of MLLMs, Eagle, surpasses other leading open-source models on major MLLM benchmarks. △ Less

Submitted 2 March, 2025; v1 submitted 28 August, 2024; originally announced August 2024.

Comments: Github: https://github.com/NVlabs/Eagle, HuggingFace: https://huggingface.co/NVEagle

Wolf: Dense Video Captioning with a World Summarization Framework

Authors: Boyi Li, Ligeng Zhu, Ran Tian, Shuhan Tan, Yuxiao Chen, Yao Lu, Yin Cui, Sushant Veer, Max Ehrlich, Jonah Philion, Xinshuo Weng, Fuzhao Xue, Linxi Fan, Yuke Zhu, Jan Kautz, Andrew Tao, Ming-Yu Liu, Sanja Fidler, Boris Ivanovic, Trevor Darrell, Jitendra Malik, Song Han, Marco Pavone

Abstract: We propose Wolf, a WOrLd summarization Framework for accurate video captioning. Wolf is an automated captioning framework that adopts a mixture-of-experts approach, leveraging complementary strengths of Vision Language Models (VLMs). By utilizing both image and video models, our framework captures different levels of information and summarizes them efficiently. Our approach can be applied to enhan… ▽ More We propose Wolf, a WOrLd summarization Framework for accurate video captioning. Wolf is an automated captioning framework that adopts a mixture-of-experts approach, leveraging complementary strengths of Vision Language Models (VLMs). By utilizing both image and video models, our framework captures different levels of information and summarizes them efficiently. Our approach can be applied to enhance video understanding, auto-labeling, and captioning. To evaluate caption quality, we introduce CapScore, an LLM-based metric to assess the similarity and quality of generated captions compared to the ground truth captions. We further build four human-annotated datasets in three domains: autonomous driving, general scenes, and robotics, to facilitate comprehensive comparisons. We show that Wolf achieves superior captioning performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches from the research community (VILA1.5, CogAgent) and commercial solutions (Gemini-Pro-1.5, GPT-4V). For instance, in comparison with GPT-4V, Wolf improves CapScore both quality-wise by 55.6% and similarity-wise by 77.4% on challenging driving videos. Finally, we establish a benchmark for video captioning and introduce a leaderboard, aiming to accelerate advancements in video understanding, captioning, and data alignment. Webpage: https://wolfv0.github.io/. △ Less

Submitted 20 March, 2025; v1 submitted 26 July, 2024; originally announced July 2024.

X-VILA: Cross-Modality Alignment for Large Language Model

Authors: Hanrong Ye, De-An Huang, Yao Lu, Zhiding Yu, Wei Ping, Andrew Tao, Jan Kautz, Song Han, Dan Xu, Pavlo Molchanov, Hongxu Yin

Abstract: We introduce X-VILA, an omni-modality model designed to extend the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by incorporating image, video, and audio modalities. By aligning modality-specific encoders with LLM inputs and diffusion decoders with LLM outputs, X-VILA achieves cross-modality understanding, reasoning, and generation. To facilitate this cross-modality alignment, we curate an effectiv… ▽ More We introduce X-VILA, an omni-modality model designed to extend the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by incorporating image, video, and audio modalities. By aligning modality-specific encoders with LLM inputs and diffusion decoders with LLM outputs, X-VILA achieves cross-modality understanding, reasoning, and generation. To facilitate this cross-modality alignment, we curate an effective interleaved any-to-any modality instruction-following dataset. Furthermore, we identify a significant problem with the current cross-modality alignment method, which results in visual information loss. To address the issue, we propose a visual alignment mechanism with a visual embedding highway module. We then introduce a resource-efficient recipe for training X-VILA, that exhibits proficiency in any-to-any modality conversation, surpassing previous approaches by large margins. X-VILA also showcases emergent properties across modalities even in the absence of similar training data. The project will be made open-source. △ Less

Submitted 29 May, 2024; originally announced May 2024.

Comments: Technical Report

Symmetric Linear Bandits with Hidden Symmetry

Authors: Nam Phuong Tran, The Anh Ta, Debmalya Mandal, Long Tran-Thanh

Abstract: High-dimensional linear bandits with low-dimensional structure have received considerable attention in recent studies due to their practical significance. The most common structure in the literature is sparsity. However, it may not be available in practice. Symmetry, where the reward is invariant under certain groups of transformations on the set of arms, is another important inductive bias in the… ▽ More High-dimensional linear bandits with low-dimensional structure have received considerable attention in recent studies due to their practical significance. The most common structure in the literature is sparsity. However, it may not be available in practice. Symmetry, where the reward is invariant under certain groups of transformations on the set of arms, is another important inductive bias in the high-dimensional case that covers many standard structures, including sparsity. In this work, we study high-dimensional symmetric linear bandits where the symmetry is hidden from the learner, and the correct symmetry needs to be learned in an online setting. We examine the structure of a collection of hidden symmetry and provide a method based on model selection within the collection of low-dimensional subspaces. Our algorithm achieves a regret bound of $ O(d_0^{2/3} T^{2/3} \log(d))$, where $d$ is the ambient dimension which is potentially very large, and $d_0$ is the dimension of the true low-dimensional subspace such that $d_0 \ll d$. With an extra assumption on well-separated models, we can further improve the regret to $ O(d_0\sqrt{T\log(d)} )$. △ Less

Submitted 31 December, 2025; v1 submitted 22 May, 2024; originally announced May 2024.

Learning the Expected Core of Strictly Convex Stochastic Cooperative Games

Authors: Nam Phuong Tran, The Anh Ta, Shuqing Shi, Debmalya Mandal, Yali Du, Long Tran-Thanh

Abstract: Reward allocation, also known as the credit assignment problem, has been an important topic in economics, engineering, and machine learning. An important concept in reward allocation is the core, which is the set of stable allocations where no agent has the motivation to deviate from the grand coalition. In previous works, computing the core requires either knowledge of the reward function in dete… ▽ More Reward allocation, also known as the credit assignment problem, has been an important topic in economics, engineering, and machine learning. An important concept in reward allocation is the core, which is the set of stable allocations where no agent has the motivation to deviate from the grand coalition. In previous works, computing the core requires either knowledge of the reward function in deterministic games or the reward distribution in stochastic games. However, this is unrealistic, as the reward function or distribution is often only partially known and may be subject to uncertainty. In this paper, we consider the core learning problem in stochastic cooperative games, where the reward distribution is unknown. Our goal is to learn the expected core, that is, the set of allocations that are stable in expectation, given an oracle that returns a stochastic reward for an enquired coalition each round. Within the class of strictly convex games, we present an algorithm named \texttt{Common-Points-Picking} that returns a point in the expected core given a polynomial number of samples, with high probability. To analyse the algorithm, we develop a new extension of the separation hyperplane theorem for multiple convex sets. △ Less

Submitted 30 October, 2024; v1 submitted 10 February, 2024; originally announced February 2024.

VILA: On Pre-training for Visual Language Models

Authors: Ji Lin, Hongxu Yin, Wei Ping, Yao Lu, Pavlo Molchanov, Andrew Tao, Huizi Mao, Jan Kautz, Mohammad Shoeybi, Song Han

Abstract: Visual language models (VLMs) rapidly progressed with the recent success of large language models. There have been growing efforts on visual instruction tuning to extend the LLM with visual inputs, but lacks an in-depth study of the visual language pre-training process, where the model learns to perform joint modeling on both modalities. In this work, we examine the design options for VLM pre-trai… ▽ More Visual language models (VLMs) rapidly progressed with the recent success of large language models. There have been growing efforts on visual instruction tuning to extend the LLM with visual inputs, but lacks an in-depth study of the visual language pre-training process, where the model learns to perform joint modeling on both modalities. In this work, we examine the design options for VLM pre-training by augmenting LLM towards VLM through step-by-step controllable comparisons. We introduce three main findings: (1) freezing LLMs during pre-training can achieve decent zero-shot performance, but lack in-context learning capability, which requires unfreezing the LLM; (2) interleaved pre-training data is beneficial whereas image-text pairs alone are not optimal; (3) re-blending text-only instruction data to image-text data during instruction fine-tuning not only remedies the degradation of text-only tasks, but also boosts VLM task accuracy. With an enhanced pre-training recipe we build VILA, a Visual Language model family that consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art models, e.g., LLaVA-1.5, across main benchmarks without bells and whistles. Multi-modal pre-training also helps unveil appealing properties of VILA, including multi-image reasoning, enhanced in-context learning, and better world knowledge. △ Less

Submitted 16 May, 2024; v1 submitted 12 December, 2023; originally announced December 2023.

Comments: CVPR 2024

What is the Impact of Releasing Code with Publications? Statistics from the Machine Learning, Robotics, and Control Communities

Authors: Siqi Zhou, Lukas Brunke, Allen Tao, Adam W. Hall, Federico Pizarro Bejarano, Jacopo Panerati, Angela P. Schoellig

Abstract: Open-sourcing research publications is a key enabler for the reproducibility of studies and the collective scientific progress of a research community. As all fields of science develop more advanced algorithms, we become more dependent on complex computational toolboxes -- sharing research ideas solely through equations and proofs is no longer sufficient to communicate scientific developments. Ove… ▽ More Open-sourcing research publications is a key enabler for the reproducibility of studies and the collective scientific progress of a research community. As all fields of science develop more advanced algorithms, we become more dependent on complex computational toolboxes -- sharing research ideas solely through equations and proofs is no longer sufficient to communicate scientific developments. Over the past years, several efforts have highlighted the importance and challenges of transparent and reproducible research; code sharing is one of the key necessities in such efforts. In this article, we study the impact of code release on scientific research and present statistics from three research communities: machine learning, robotics, and control. We found that, over a six-year period (2016-2021), the percentages of papers with code at major machine learning, robotics, and control conferences have at least doubled. Moreover, high-impact papers were generally supported by open-source codes. As an example, the top 1% of most cited papers at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) consistently included open-source codes. In addition, our analysis shows that popular code repositories generally come with high paper citations, which further highlights the coupling between code sharing and the impact of scientific research. While the trends are encouraging, we would like to continue to promote and increase our efforts toward transparent, reproducible research that accelerates innovation -- releasing code with our papers is a clear first step. △ Less

Submitted 19 August, 2023; originally announced August 2023.

FasterViT: Fast Vision Transformers with Hierarchical Attention

Authors: Ali Hatamizadeh, Greg Heinrich, Hongxu Yin, Andrew Tao, Jose M. Alvarez, Jan Kautz, Pavlo Molchanov

Abstract: We design a new family of hybrid CNN-ViT neural networks, named FasterViT, with a focus on high image throughput for computer vision (CV) applications. FasterViT combines the benefits of fast local representation learning in CNNs and global modeling properties in ViT. Our newly introduced Hierarchical Attention (HAT) approach decomposes global self-attention with quadratic complexity into a multi-… ▽ More We design a new family of hybrid CNN-ViT neural networks, named FasterViT, with a focus on high image throughput for computer vision (CV) applications. FasterViT combines the benefits of fast local representation learning in CNNs and global modeling properties in ViT. Our newly introduced Hierarchical Attention (HAT) approach decomposes global self-attention with quadratic complexity into a multi-level attention with reduced computational costs. We benefit from efficient window-based self-attention. Each window has access to dedicated carrier tokens that participate in local and global representation learning. At a high level, global self-attentions enable the efficient cross-window communication at lower costs. FasterViT achieves a SOTA Pareto-front in terms of accuracy and image throughput. We have extensively validated its effectiveness on various CV tasks including classification, object detection and segmentation. We also show that HAT can be used as a plug-and-play module for existing networks and enhance them. We further demonstrate significantly faster and more accurate performance than competitive counterparts for images with high resolution. Code is available at https://github.com/NVlabs/FasterViT. △ Less

Submitted 1 April, 2024; v1 submitted 9 June, 2023; originally announced June 2023.

Comments: ICLR'24 Accepted Paper