arXiv subjects

An Lanji

Publications and source records attributed to An Lanji.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

AWM-VLA: AlignedWorld Modeling for Efficient and Explainable Vision-Language-Action Policies

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have become a powerful paradigm for generalist robotic manipulation, yet they are often reactive: the policy maps the current observation directly to an action chunk without reasoning about the long-term consequences of its decisions. Prior attempts to endow policies with world models either reconstruct future frames in pixel space---expensive and dominated by task-irrelevant detail---or decouple the world model from the policy, weakening control. We present AWM-VLA, a unified framework that embeds aligned world modeling directly inside a diffusion-transformer policy. Following the Future Latent REpresentation Alignment (FLARE) principle, we add learnable future tokens whose intermediate activations are aligned with vision-language embeddings of future observations, enabling the policy to anticipate long-term consequences while generating actions. We extend this paradigm in two ways. First, we introduce an object-centric decoupled alignment objective that predicts future object-level semantics alongside the global future embedding, improving both interpretability and multi-instruction generalization. Second, we balance the global and object-centric alignment terms against the action flow-matching loss through a principled weighting, yielding a controllable accuracy--interpretability trade-off. On RoboCasa and humanoid tabletop manipulation benchmarks, AWM-VLA outperforms prior VLA and world-model baselines by up to 21% in success rate, improves generalization to novel objects and instructions, and produces object-centric rationales that are preferred by human raters in 83 of cases. Our approach adds only a few learnable tokens to the policy and is compatible with any diffusion or flow-matching policy, making aligned world modeling an inexpensive, broadly applicable component of generalist manipulation.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

UniJEPA: A Unified Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture for Task-Agnostic Visual World Modeling

Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) have emerged as a principled framework for self-supervised learning of world models in compact latent spaces, yet existing methods are fragmented: some predict masked parts of a single image in latent space (I-JEPA), others learn to predict global photometric transformations (Image World Models), while video-scale JEPAs predict future temporal states and are post-trained for action-conditioned planning (V-JEPA~2, DINO-World, DINO-WM). These objectives are treated as distinct recipes with separate encoders, predictors, and anti-collapse regularizers, hindering a single model from unifying image-level and video-level world modeling. We present UniJEPA, a unified JEPA that jointly learns photometric prediction (image-level transformations) and temporal prediction (video-level next-state dynamics) in one shared latent space. A single end-to-end objective, composed of a next-embedding prediction loss and a Gaussian regularizer, yields a provably anti-collapse encoder-predictor pair trainable from raw pixels without EMA, stop-gradient, or pre-trained encoders. We show that the same latent space supports controllable abstraction: photometric prediction learns invariant structure while temporal prediction learns equivariant dynamics. After action-conditioned post-training on offline trajectories, UniJEPA enables zero-shot planning by treating goal features as prediction targets. On image, video, and control benchmarks, UniJEPA matches or surpasses task-specific JEPAs while requiring a single loss hyperparameter, and plans up to tens of times faster than generative world models at comparable accuracy.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

DiffuseAgent-MI: Distributionally-Grounded,Tool-Integrated Self-Evolving Agents for Faithful Visual Reasoning

Tool-integrated vision-language agents have made remarkable progress on compositional and multi-step visual reasoning. Yet their outputs frequently exhibit unfaithfulness: the stated reasoning path diverges from the computation that actually produced the answer, undermining reliability in safety-critical applications. We present DiffuseAgent-MI, a self-evolving agent whose perceptual grounding is governed by a KL-minimal energy model over feature units, providing a distributional view of visual mechanistic interpretability. The agent learns an energy landscape that softly constrains generated samples to lie near the native prior conditioned on the chosen interpretable unit, closing the gap between the explanation and the internal representation. A verifier then supplies trajectory-level faithfulness rewards, and a repair branch re-conditions the energy when the verifier flags an unfaithful step. On GeoQA, SciVis, VQA-v2 and an in-house multimodal reasoning set, DiffuseAgent-MI improves accuracy by up to 5.1 points over prior self-evolving agents while more than doubling mutual-information faithfulness and human-interpretability agreement. Our analysis shows the energy term and the verifier are complementary: the former guarantees distributional faithfulness, the latter trajectory-level faithfulness, and only their combination closes both gaps.

cs.CV↗