Daily Papers

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) excel in photorealistically rendering static scenes. However, rendering dynamic, long-duration radiance fields on ubiquitous devices remains challenging, due to data storage and computational constraints. In this paper, we introduce VideoRF, the first approach to enable real-time streaming and rendering of dynamic radiance fields on mobile platforms. At the core is a serialized 2D feature image stream representing the 4D radiance field all in one. We introduce a tailored training scheme directly applied to this 2D domain to impose the temporal and spatial redundancy of the feature image stream. By leveraging the redundancy, we show that the feature image stream can be efficiently compressed by 2D video codecs, which allows us to exploit video hardware accelerators to achieve real-time decoding. On the other hand, based on the feature image stream, we propose a novel rendering pipeline for VideoRF, which has specialized space mappings to query radiance properties efficiently. Paired with a deferred shading model, VideoRF has the capability of real-time rendering on mobile devices thanks to its efficiency. We have developed a real-time interactive player that enables online streaming and rendering of dynamic scenes, offering a seamless and immersive free-viewpoint experience across a range of devices, from desktops to mobile phones.

World modeling is a crucial task for enabling intelligent agents to effectively interact with humans and operate in dynamic environments. In this work, we propose MineWorld, a real-time interactive world model on Minecraft, an open-ended sandbox game which has been utilized as a common testbed for world modeling. MineWorld is driven by a visual-action autoregressive Transformer, which takes paired game scenes and corresponding actions as input, and generates consequent new scenes following the actions. Specifically, by transforming visual game scenes and actions into discrete token ids with an image tokenizer and an action tokenizer correspondingly, we consist the model input with the concatenation of the two kinds of ids interleaved. The model is then trained with next token prediction to learn rich representations of game states as well as the conditions between states and actions simultaneously. In inference, we develop a novel parallel decoding algorithm that predicts the spatial redundant tokens in each frame at the same time, letting models in different scales generate 4 to 7 frames per second and enabling real-time interactions with game players. In evaluation, we propose new metrics to assess not only visual quality but also the action following capacity when generating new scenes, which is crucial for a world model. Our comprehensive evaluation shows the efficacy of MineWorld, outperforming SoTA open-sourced diffusion based world models significantly. The code and model have been released.

We introduce RealPlay, a neural network-based real-world game engine that enables interactive video generation from user control signals. Unlike prior works focused on game-style visuals, RealPlay aims to produce photorealistic, temporally consistent video sequences that resemble real-world footage. It operates in an interactive loop: users observe a generated scene, issue a control command, and receive a short video chunk in response. To enable such realistic and responsive generation, we address key challenges including iterative chunk-wise prediction for low-latency feedback, temporal consistency across iterations, and accurate control response. RealPlay is trained on a combination of labeled game data and unlabeled real-world videos, without requiring real-world action annotations. Notably, we observe two forms of generalization: (1) control transfer-RealPlay effectively maps control signals from virtual to real-world scenarios; and (2) entity transfer-although training labels originate solely from a car racing game, RealPlay generalizes to control diverse real-world entities, including bicycles and pedestrians, beyond vehicles. Project page can be found: https://wenqsun.github.io/RealPlay/

In recent years, Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) has advanced from text-to-image generation to text-to-video and multimodal video synthesis. However, generating playable games presents significant challenges due to the stringent requirements for real-time interaction, high visual quality, and accurate simulation of game mechanics. Existing approaches often fall short, either lacking real-time capabilities or failing to accurately simulate interactive mechanics. To tackle the playability issue, we propose a novel method called PlayGen, which encompasses game data generation, an autoregressive DiT-based diffusion model, and a comprehensive playability-based evaluation framework. Validated on well-known 2D and 3D games, PlayGen achieves real-time interaction, ensures sufficient visual quality, and provides accurate interactive mechanics simulation. Notably, these results are sustained even after over 1000 frames of gameplay on an NVIDIA RTX 2060 GPU. Our code is publicly available: https://github.com/GreatX3/Playable-Game-Generation. Our playable demo generated by AI is: http://124.156.151.207.

Active Real-time interaction with video LLMs introduces a new paradigm for human-computer interaction, where the model not only understands user intent but also responds while continuously processing streaming video on the fly. Unlike offline video LLMs, which analyze the entire video before answering questions, active real-time interaction requires three capabilities: 1) Perception: real-time video monitoring and interaction capturing. 2) Decision: raising proactive interaction in proper situations, 3) Reaction: continuous interaction with users. However, inherent conflicts exist among the desired capabilities. The Decision and Reaction require a contrary Perception scale and grain, and the autoregressive decoding blocks the real-time Perception and Decision during the Reaction. To unify the conflicted capabilities within a harmonious system, we present Dispider, a system that disentangles Perception, Decision, and Reaction. Dispider features a lightweight proactive streaming video processing module that tracks the video stream and identifies optimal moments for interaction. Once the interaction is triggered, an asynchronous interaction module provides detailed responses, while the processing module continues to monitor the video in the meantime. Our disentangled and asynchronous design ensures timely, contextually accurate, and computationally efficient responses, making Dispider ideal for active real-time interaction for long-duration video streams. Experiments show that Dispider not only maintains strong performance in conventional video QA tasks, but also significantly surpasses previous online models in streaming scenario responses, thereby validating the effectiveness of our architecture. The code and model are released at https://github.com/Mark12Ding/Dispider.

Creating high-quality and interactive virtual environments, such as games and simulators, often involves complex and costly manual modeling processes. In this paper, we present Video2Game, a novel approach that automatically converts videos of real-world scenes into realistic and interactive game environments. At the heart of our system are three core components:(i) a neural radiance fields (NeRF) module that effectively captures the geometry and visual appearance of the scene; (ii) a mesh module that distills the knowledge from NeRF for faster rendering; and (iii) a physics module that models the interactions and physical dynamics among the objects. By following the carefully designed pipeline, one can construct an interactable and actionable digital replica of the real world. We benchmark our system on both indoor and large-scale outdoor scenes. We show that we can not only produce highly-realistic renderings in real-time, but also build interactive games on top.

Recent advances in interactive video generations have demonstrated diffusion model's potential as world models by capturing complex physical dynamics and interactive behaviors. However, existing interactive world models depend on bidirectional attention and lengthy inference steps, severely limiting real-time performance. Consequently, they are hard to simulate real-world dynamics, where outcomes must update instantaneously based on historical context and current actions. To address this, we present Matrix-Game 2.0, an interactive world model generates long videos on-the-fly via few-step auto-regressive diffusion. Our framework consists of three key components: (1) A scalable data production pipeline for Unreal Engine and GTA5 environments to effectively produce massive amounts (about 1200 hours) of video data with diverse interaction annotations; (2) An action injection module that enables frame-level mouse and keyboard inputs as interactive conditions; (3) A few-step distillation based on the casual architecture for real-time and streaming video generation. Matrix Game 2.0 can generate high-quality minute-level videos across diverse scenes at an ultra-fast speed of 25 FPS. We open-source our model weights and codebase to advance research in interactive world modeling.

We introduce InteractiveVideo, a user-centric framework for video generation. Different from traditional generative approaches that operate based on user-provided images or text, our framework is designed for dynamic interaction, allowing users to instruct the generative model through various intuitive mechanisms during the whole generation process, e.g. text and image prompts, painting, drag-and-drop, etc. We propose a Synergistic Multimodal Instruction mechanism, designed to seamlessly integrate users' multimodal instructions into generative models, thus facilitating a cooperative and responsive interaction between user inputs and the generative process. This approach enables iterative and fine-grained refinement of the generation result through precise and effective user instructions. With InteractiveVideo, users are given the flexibility to meticulously tailor key aspects of a video. They can paint the reference image, edit semantics, and adjust video motions until their requirements are fully met. Code, models, and demo are available at https://github.com/invictus717/InteractiveVideo

We present The Matrix, the first foundational realistic world simulator capable of generating continuous 720p high-fidelity real-scene video streams with real-time, responsive control in both first- and third-person perspectives, enabling immersive exploration of richly dynamic environments. Trained on limited supervised data from AAA games like Forza Horizon 5 and Cyberpunk 2077, complemented by large-scale unsupervised footage from real-world settings like Tokyo streets, The Matrix allows users to traverse diverse terrains -- deserts, grasslands, water bodies, and urban landscapes -- in continuous, uncut hour-long sequences. Operating at 16 FPS, the system supports real-time interactivity and demonstrates zero-shot generalization, translating virtual game environments to real-world contexts where collecting continuous movement data is often infeasible. For example, The Matrix can simulate a BMW X3 driving through an office setting--an environment present in neither gaming data nor real-world sources. This approach showcases the potential of AAA game data to advance robust world models, bridging the gap between simulations and real-world applications in scenarios with limited data.

Recent advances in diffusion-based and controllable video generation have enabled high-quality and temporally coherent video synthesis, laying the groundwork for immersive interactive gaming experiences. However, current methods face limitations in dynamics, generality, long-term consistency, and efficiency, which limit the ability to create various gameplay videos. To address these gaps, we introduce Hunyuan-GameCraft, a novel framework for high-dynamic interactive video generation in game environments. To achieve fine-grained action control, we unify standard keyboard and mouse inputs into a shared camera representation space, facilitating smooth interpolation between various camera and movement operations. Then we propose a hybrid history-conditioned training strategy that extends video sequences autoregressively while preserving game scene information. Additionally, to enhance inference efficiency and playability, we achieve model distillation to reduce computational overhead while maintaining consistency across long temporal sequences, making it suitable for real-time deployment in complex interactive environments. The model is trained on a large-scale dataset comprising over one million gameplay recordings across over 100 AAA games, ensuring broad coverage and diversity, then fine-tuned on a carefully annotated synthetic dataset to enhance precision and control. The curated game scene data significantly improves the visual fidelity, realism and action controllability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Hunyuan-GameCraft significantly outperforms existing models, advancing the realism and playability of interactive game video generation.

Recent researches on video large language models (VideoLLM) predominantly focus on model architectures and training datasets, leaving the interaction format between the user and the model under-explored. In existing works, users often interact with VideoLLMs by using the entire video and a query as input, after which the model generates a response. This interaction format constrains the application of VideoLLMs in scenarios such as live-streaming comprehension where videos do not end and responses are required in a real-time manner, and also results in unsatisfactory performance on time-sensitive tasks that requires localizing video segments. In this paper, we focus on a video-text duet interaction format. This interaction format is characterized by the continuous playback of the video, and both the user and the model can insert their text messages at any position during the video playback. When a text message ends, the video continues to play, akin to the alternative of two performers in a duet. We construct MMDuetIT, a video-text training dataset designed to adapt VideoLLMs to video-text duet interaction format. We also introduce the Multi-Answer Grounded Video Question Answering (MAGQA) task to benchmark the real-time response ability of VideoLLMs. Trained on MMDuetIT, MMDuet demonstrates that adopting the video-text duet interaction format enables the model to achieve significant improvements in various time-sensitive tasks (76% CIDEr on YouCook2 dense video captioning, 90\% mAP on QVHighlights highlight detection and 25% [email protected] on Charades-STA temporal video grounding) with minimal training efforts, and also enable VideoLLMs to reply in a real-time manner as the video plays. Code, data and demo are available at: https://github.com/yellow-binary-tree/MMDuet.

Face-to-face communication, as a common human activity, motivates the research on interactive head generation. A virtual agent can generate motion responses with both listening and speaking capabilities based on the audio or motion signals of the other user and itself. However, previous clip-wise generation paradigm or explicit listener/speaker generator-switching methods have limitations in future signal acquisition, contextual behavioral understanding, and switching smoothness, making it challenging to be real-time and realistic. In this paper, we propose an autoregressive (AR) based frame-wise framework called ARIG to realize the real-time generation with better interaction realism. To achieve real-time generation, we model motion prediction as a non-vector-quantized AR process. Unlike discrete codebook-index prediction, we represent motion distribution using diffusion procedure, achieving more accurate predictions in continuous space. To improve interaction realism, we emphasize interactive behavior understanding (IBU) and detailed conversational state understanding (CSU). In IBU, based on dual-track dual-modal signals, we summarize short-range behaviors through bidirectional-integrated learning and perform contextual understanding over long ranges. In CSU, we use voice activity signals and context features of IBU to understand the various states (interruption, feedback, pause, etc.) that exist in actual conversations. These serve as conditions for the final progressive motion prediction. Extensive experiments have verified the effectiveness of our model.

LLM-based Interactive Drama is a novel AI-based dialogue scenario, where the user (i.e. the player) plays the role of a character in the story, has conversations with characters played by LLM agents, and experiences an unfolding story. This paper begins with understanding interactive drama from two aspects: Immersion, the player's feeling of being present in the story, and Agency, the player's ability to influence the story world. Both are crucial to creating an enjoyable interactive experience, while they have been underexplored in previous work. To enhance these two aspects, we first propose Playwriting-guided Generation, a novel method that helps LLMs craft dramatic stories with substantially improved structures and narrative quality. Additionally, we introduce Plot-based Reflection for LLM agents to refine their reactions to align with the player's intentions. Our evaluation relies on human judgment to assess the gains of our methods in terms of immersion and agency.

The advent of immersive Virtual Reality applications has transformed various domains, yet their integration with advanced artificial intelligence technologies like Visual Language Models remains underexplored. This study introduces a pioneering approach utilizing VLMs within VR environments to enhance user interaction and task efficiency. Leveraging the Unity engine and a custom-developed VLM, our system facilitates real-time, intuitive user interactions through natural language processing, without relying on visual text instructions. The incorporation of speech-to-text and text-to-speech technologies allows for seamless communication between the user and the VLM, enabling the system to guide users through complex tasks effectively. Preliminary experimental results indicate that utilizing VLMs not only reduces task completion times but also improves user comfort and task engagement compared to traditional VR interaction methods.

Predicting the dynamics of interacting objects is essential for both humans and intelligent systems. However, existing approaches are limited to simplified, toy settings and lack generalizability to complex, real-world environments. Recent advances in generative models have enabled the prediction of state transitions based on interventions, but focus on generating a single future state which neglects the continuous dynamics resulting from the interaction. To address this gap, we propose InterDyn, a novel framework that generates videos of interactive dynamics given an initial frame and a control signal encoding the motion of a driving object or actor. Our key insight is that large video generation models can act as both neural renderers and implicit physics ``simulators'', having learned interactive dynamics from large-scale video data. To effectively harness this capability, we introduce an interactive control mechanism that conditions the video generation process on the motion of the driving entity. Qualitative results demonstrate that InterDyn generates plausible, temporally consistent videos of complex object interactions while generalizing to unseen objects. Quantitative evaluations show that InterDyn outperforms baselines that focus on static state transitions. This work highlights the potential of leveraging video generative models as implicit physics engines. Project page: https://interdyn.is.tue.mpg.de/

We present Yan, a foundational framework for interactive video generation, covering the entire pipeline from simulation and generation to editing. Specifically, Yan comprises three core modules. AAA-level Simulation: We design a highly-compressed, low-latency 3D-VAE coupled with a KV-cache-based shift-window denoising inference process, achieving real-time 1080P/60FPS interactive simulation. Multi-Modal Generation: We introduce a hierarchical autoregressive caption method that injects game-specific knowledge into open-domain multi-modal video diffusion models (VDMs), then transforming the VDM into a frame-wise, action-controllable, real-time infinite interactive video generator. Notably, when the textual and visual prompts are sourced from different domains, the model demonstrates strong generalization, allowing it to blend and compose the style and mechanics across domains flexibly according to user prompts. Multi-Granularity Editing: We propose a hybrid model that explicitly disentangles interactive mechanics simulation from visual rendering, enabling multi-granularity video content editing during interaction through text. Collectively, Yan offers an integration of these modules, pushing interactive video generation beyond isolated capabilities toward a comprehensive AI-driven interactive creation paradigm, paving the way for the next generation of creative tools, media, and entertainment. The project page is: https://greatx3.github.io/Yan/.

We introduce PlayerOne, the first egocentric realistic world simulator, facilitating immersive and unrestricted exploration within vividly dynamic environments. Given an egocentric scene image from the user, PlayerOne can accurately construct the corresponding world and generate egocentric videos that are strictly aligned with the real scene human motion of the user captured by an exocentric camera. PlayerOne is trained in a coarse-to-fine pipeline that first performs pretraining on large-scale egocentric text-video pairs for coarse-level egocentric understanding, followed by finetuning on synchronous motion-video data extracted from egocentric-exocentric video datasets with our automatic construction pipeline. Besides, considering the varying importance of different components, we design a part-disentangled motion injection scheme, enabling precise control of part-level movements. In addition, we devise a joint reconstruction framework that progressively models both the 4D scene and video frames, ensuring scene consistency in the long-form video generation. Experimental results demonstrate its great generalization ability in precise control of varying human movements and worldconsistent modeling of diverse scenarios. It marks the first endeavor into egocentric real-world simulation and can pave the way for the community to delve into fresh frontiers of world modeling and its diverse applications.

Existing large-scale video generation models are computationally intensive, preventing adoption in real-time and interactive applications. In this work, we propose autoregressive adversarial post-training (AAPT) to transform a pre-trained latent video diffusion model into a real-time, interactive video generator. Our model autoregressively generates a latent frame at a time using a single neural function evaluation (1NFE). The model can stream the result to the user in real time and receive interactive responses as controls to generate the next latent frame. Unlike existing approaches, our method explores adversarial training as an effective paradigm for autoregressive generation. This not only allows us to design an architecture that is more efficient for one-step generation while fully utilizing the KV cache, but also enables training the model in a student-forcing manner that proves to be effective in reducing error accumulation during long video generation. Our experiments demonstrate that our 8B model achieves real-time, 24fps, streaming video generation at 736x416 resolution on a single H100, or 1280x720 on 8xH100 up to a minute long (1440 frames). Visit our research website at https://seaweed-apt.com/2

The rapid growth of online video platforms, particularly live streaming services, has created an urgent need for real-time video understanding systems. These systems must process continuous video streams and respond to user queries instantaneously, presenting unique challenges for current Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs). While existing VideoLLMs excel at processing complete videos, they face significant limitations in streaming scenarios due to their inability to handle dense, redundant frames efficiently. We introduce TimeChat-Online, a novel online VideoLLM that revolutionizes real-time video interaction. At its core lies our innovative Differential Token Drop (DTD) module, which addresses the fundamental challenge of visual redundancy in streaming videos. Drawing inspiration from human visual perception's Change Blindness phenomenon, DTD preserves meaningful temporal changes while filtering out static, redundant content between frames. Remarkably, our experiments demonstrate that DTD achieves an 82.8% reduction in video tokens while maintaining 98% performance on StreamingBench, revealing that over 80% of visual content in streaming videos is naturally redundant without requiring language guidance. To enable seamless real-time interaction, we present TimeChat-Online-139K, a comprehensive streaming video dataset featuring diverse interaction patterns including backward-tracing, current-perception, and future-responding scenarios. TimeChat-Online's unique Proactive Response capability, naturally achieved through continuous monitoring of video scene transitions via DTD, sets it apart from conventional approaches. Our extensive evaluation demonstrates TimeChat-Online's superior performance on streaming benchmarks (StreamingBench and OvOBench) and maintaining competitive results on long-form video tasks such as Video-MME and MLVU.

Interactive Generative Video (IGV) has emerged as a crucial technology in response to the growing demand for high-quality, interactive video content across various domains. In this paper, we define IGV as a technology that combines generative capabilities to produce diverse high-quality video content with interactive features that enable user engagement through control signals and responsive feedback. We survey the current landscape of IGV applications, focusing on three major domains: 1) gaming, where IGV enables infinite exploration in virtual worlds; 2) embodied AI, where IGV serves as a physics-aware environment synthesizer for training agents in multimodal interaction with dynamically evolving scenes; and 3) autonomous driving, where IGV provides closed-loop simulation capabilities for safety-critical testing and validation. To guide future development, we propose a comprehensive framework that decomposes an ideal IGV system into five essential modules: Generation, Control, Memory, Dynamics, and Intelligence. Furthermore, we systematically analyze the technical challenges and future directions in realizing each component for an ideal IGV system, such as achieving real-time generation, enabling open-domain control, maintaining long-term coherence, simulating accurate physics, and integrating causal reasoning. We believe that this systematic analysis will facilitate future research and development in the field of IGV, ultimately advancing the technology toward more sophisticated and practical applications.

In this paper, we introduce NarrativePlay, a novel system that allows users to role-play a fictional character and interact with other characters in narratives such as novels in an immersive environment. We leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate human-like responses, guided by personality traits extracted from narratives. The system incorporates auto-generated visual display of narrative settings, character portraits, and character speech, greatly enhancing user experience. Our approach eschews predefined sandboxes, focusing instead on main storyline events extracted from narratives from the perspective of a user-selected character. NarrativePlay has been evaluated on two types of narratives, detective and adventure stories, where users can either explore the world or improve their favorability with the narrative characters through conversations.

Modern game development faces significant challenges in creativity and cost due to predetermined content in traditional game engines. Recent breakthroughs in video generation models, capable of synthesizing realistic and interactive virtual environments, present an opportunity to revolutionize game creation. In this position paper, we propose Interactive Generative Video (IGV) as the foundation for Generative Game Engines (GGE), enabling unlimited novel content generation in next-generation gaming. GGE leverages IGV's unique strengths in unlimited high-quality content synthesis, physics-aware world modeling, user-controlled interactivity, long-term memory capabilities, and causal reasoning. We present a comprehensive framework detailing GGE's core modules and a hierarchical maturity roadmap (L0-L4) to guide its evolution. Our work charts a new course for game development in the AI era, envisioning a future where AI-powered generative systems fundamentally reshape how games are created and experienced.

We propose Framer for interactive frame interpolation, which targets producing smoothly transitioning frames between two images as per user creativity. Concretely, besides taking the start and end frames as inputs, our approach supports customizing the transition process by tailoring the trajectory of some selected keypoints. Such a design enjoys two clear benefits. First, incorporating human interaction mitigates the issue arising from numerous possibilities of transforming one image to another, and in turn enables finer control of local motions. Second, as the most basic form of interaction, keypoints help establish the correspondence across frames, enhancing the model to handle challenging cases (e.g., objects on the start and end frames are of different shapes and styles). It is noteworthy that our system also offers an "autopilot" mode, where we introduce a module to estimate the keypoints and refine the trajectory automatically, to simplify the usage in practice. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the appealing performance of Framer on various applications, such as image morphing, time-lapse video generation, cartoon interpolation, etc. The code, the model, and the interface will be released to facilitate further research.

We present GameNGen, the first game engine powered entirely by a neural model that enables real-time interaction with a complex environment over long trajectories at high quality. GameNGen can interactively simulate the classic game DOOM at over 20 frames per second on a single TPU. Next frame prediction achieves a PSNR of 29.4, comparable to lossy JPEG compression. Human raters are only slightly better than random chance at distinguishing short clips of the game from clips of the simulation. GameNGen is trained in two phases: (1) an RL-agent learns to play the game and the training sessions are recorded, and (2) a diffusion model is trained to produce the next frame, conditioned on the sequence of past frames and actions. Conditioning augmentations enable stable auto-regressive generation over long trajectories.

Interactive 3D generation is gaining momentum and capturing extensive attention for its potential to create immersive virtual experiences. However, a critical challenge in current 3D generation technologies lies in achieving real-time interactivity. To address this issue, we introduce WonderTurbo, the first real-time interactive 3D scene generation framework capable of generating novel perspectives of 3D scenes within 0.72 seconds. Specifically, WonderTurbo accelerates both geometric and appearance modeling in 3D scene generation. In terms of geometry, we propose StepSplat, an innovative method that constructs efficient 3D geometric representations through dynamic updates, each taking only 0.26 seconds. Additionally, we design QuickDepth, a lightweight depth completion module that provides consistent depth input for StepSplat, further enhancing geometric accuracy. For appearance modeling, we develop FastPaint, a 2-steps diffusion model tailored for instant inpainting, which focuses on maintaining spatial appearance consistency. Experimental results demonstrate that WonderTurbo achieves a remarkable 15X speedup compared to baseline methods, while preserving excellent spatial consistency and delivering high-quality output.

Recent advancements in image and video synthesis have opened up new promise in generative games. One particularly intriguing application is transforming characters from anime films into interactive, playable entities. This allows players to immerse themselves in the dynamic anime world as their favorite characters for life simulation through language instructions. Such games are defined as infinite game since they eliminate predetermined boundaries and fixed gameplay rules, where players can interact with the game world through open-ended language and experience ever-evolving storylines and environments. Recently, a pioneering approach for infinite anime life simulation employs large language models (LLMs) to translate multi-turn text dialogues into language instructions for image generation. However, it neglects historical visual context, leading to inconsistent gameplay. Furthermore, it only generates static images, failing to incorporate the dynamics necessary for an engaging gaming experience. In this work, we propose AnimeGamer, which is built upon Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to generate each game state, including dynamic animation shots that depict character movements and updates to character states, as illustrated in Figure 1. We introduce novel action-aware multimodal representations to represent animation shots, which can be decoded into high-quality video clips using a video diffusion model. By taking historical animation shot representations as context and predicting subsequent representations, AnimeGamer can generate games with contextual consistency and satisfactory dynamics. Extensive evaluations using both automated metrics and human evaluations demonstrate that AnimeGamer outperforms existing methods in various aspects of the gaming experience. Codes and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/TencentARC/AnimeGamer.

We introduce the concept of a generative infinite game, a video game that transcends the traditional boundaries of finite, hard-coded systems by using generative models. Inspired by James P. Carse's distinction between finite and infinite games, we leverage recent advances in generative AI to create Unbounded: a game of character life simulation that is fully encapsulated in generative models. Specifically, Unbounded draws inspiration from sandbox life simulations and allows you to interact with your autonomous virtual character in a virtual world by feeding, playing with and guiding it - with open-ended mechanics generated by an LLM, some of which can be emergent. In order to develop Unbounded, we propose technical innovations in both the LLM and visual generation domains. Specifically, we present: (1) a specialized, distilled large language model (LLM) that dynamically generates game mechanics, narratives, and character interactions in real-time, and (2) a new dynamic regional image prompt Adapter (IP-Adapter) for vision models that ensures consistent yet flexible visual generation of a character across multiple environments. We evaluate our system through both qualitative and quantitative analysis, showing significant improvements in character life simulation, user instruction following, narrative coherence, and visual consistency for both characters and the environments compared to traditional related approaches.

Avatars are important to create interactive and immersive experiences in virtual worlds. One challenge in animating these characters to mimic a user's motion is that commercial AR/VR products consist only of a headset and controllers, providing very limited sensor data of the user's pose. Another challenge is that an avatar might have a different skeleton structure than a human and the mapping between them is unclear. In this work we address both of these challenges. We introduce a method to retarget motions in real-time from sparse human sensor data to characters of various morphologies. Our method uses reinforcement learning to train a policy to control characters in a physics simulator. We only require human motion capture data for training, without relying on artist-generated animations for each avatar. This allows us to use large motion capture datasets to train general policies that can track unseen users from real and sparse data in real-time. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach on three characters with different skeleton structure: a dinosaur, a mouse-like creature and a human. We show that the avatar poses often match the user surprisingly well, despite having no sensor information of the lower body available. We discuss and ablate the important components in our framework, specifically the kinematic retargeting step, the imitation, contact and action reward as well as our asymmetric actor-critic observations. We further explore the robustness of our method in a variety of settings including unbalancing, dancing and sports motions.

We introduce a new class of generative models for music called live music models that produce a continuous stream of music in real-time with synchronized user control. We release Magenta RealTime, an open-weights live music model that can be steered using text or audio prompts to control acoustic style. On automatic metrics of music quality, Magenta RealTime outperforms other open-weights music generation models, despite using fewer parameters and offering first-of-its-kind live generation capabilities. We also release Lyria RealTime, an API-based model with extended controls, offering access to our most powerful model with wide prompt coverage. These models demonstrate a new paradigm for AI-assisted music creation that emphasizes human-in-the-loop interaction for live music performance.

This paper presents a game master AI for single-player role-playing games. The AI is designed to deliver interactive text-based narratives and experiences typically associated with multiplayer tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons. We report on the design process and the series of experiments to improve the functionality and experience design, resulting in two functional versions of the system. While v1 of our system uses simplified prompt engineering, v2 leverages a multi-agent architecture and the ReAct framework to include reasoning and action. A comparative evaluation demonstrates that v2 as an agentic system maintains play while significantly improving modularity and game experience, including immersion and curiosity. Our findings contribute to the evolution of AI-driven interactive fiction, highlighting new avenues for enhancing solo role-playing experiences.

Although large-scale text-to-image generative models have shown promising performance in synthesizing high-quality images, directly applying these models to image editing remains a significant challenge. This challenge is further amplified in video editing due to the additional dimension of time. Especially for editing real videos as it necessitates maintaining a stable semantic layout across the frames while executing localized edits precisely without disrupting the existing backgrounds. In this paper, we propose RealCraft, an attention-control-based method for zero-shot editing in real videos. By employing the object-centric manipulation of cross-attention between prompts and frames and spatial-temporal attention within the frames, we achieve precise shape-wise editing along with enhanced consistency. Our model can be used directly with Stable Diffusion and operates without the need for additional localized information. We showcase our zero-shot attention-control-based method across a range of videos, demonstrating localized, high-fidelity, shape-precise and time-consistent editing in videos of various lengths, up to 64 frames.

To date, the majority of video retrieval systems have been optimized for a "single-shot" scenario in which the user submits a query in isolation, ignoring previous interactions with the system. Recently, there has been renewed interest in interactive systems to enhance retrieval, but existing approaches are complex and deliver limited gains in performance. In this work, we revisit this topic and propose several simple yet effective baselines for interactive video retrieval via question-answering. We employ a VideoQA model to simulate user interactions and show that this enables the productive study of the interactive retrieval task without access to ground truth dialogue data. Experiments on MSR-VTT, MSVD, and AVSD show that our framework using question-based interaction significantly improves the performance of text-based video retrieval systems.

World models empower model-based agents to interactively explore, reason, and plan within imagined environments for real-world decision-making. However, the high demand for interactivity poses challenges in harnessing recent advancements in video generative models for developing world models at scale. This work introduces Interactive VideoGPT (iVideoGPT), a scalable autoregressive transformer framework that integrates multimodal signals--visual observations, actions, and rewards--into a sequence of tokens, facilitating an interactive experience of agents via next-token prediction. iVideoGPT features a novel compressive tokenization technique that efficiently discretizes high-dimensional visual observations. Leveraging its scalable architecture, we are able to pre-train iVideoGPT on millions of human and robotic manipulation trajectories, establishing a versatile foundation that is adaptable to serve as interactive world models for a wide range of downstream tasks. These include action-conditioned video prediction, visual planning, and model-based reinforcement learning, where iVideoGPT achieves competitive performance compared with state-of-the-art methods. Our work advances the development of interactive general world models, bridging the gap between generative video models and practical model-based reinforcement learning applications.

Diffusion-based models have gained wide adoption in the virtual human generation due to their outstanding expressiveness. However, their substantial computational requirements have constrained their deployment in real-time interactive avatar applications, where stringent speed, latency, and duration requirements are paramount. We present a novel audio-driven portrait video generation framework based on the diffusion model to address these challenges. Firstly, we propose robust variable-length video generation to reduce the minimum time required to generate the initial video clip or state transitions, which significantly enhances the user experience. Secondly, we propose a consistency model training strategy for Audio-Image-to-Video to ensure real-time performance, enabling a fast few-step generation. Model quantization and pipeline parallelism are further employed to accelerate the inference speed. To mitigate the stability loss incurred by the diffusion process and model quantization, we introduce a new inference strategy tailored for long-duration video generation. These methods ensure real-time performance and low latency while maintaining high-fidelity output. Thirdly, we incorporate class labels as a conditional input to seamlessly switch between speaking, listening, and idle states. Lastly, we design a novel mechanism for fine-grained facial expression control to exploit our model's inherent capacity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves low-latency, fluid, and authentic two-way communication. On an NVIDIA RTX 4090D, our model achieves a maximum of 78 FPS at a resolution of 384x384 and 45 FPS at a resolution of 512x512, with an initial video generation latency of 140 ms and 215 ms, respectively.

Gameplay videos contain rich information about how players interact with the game and how the game responds. Sharing gameplay videos on social media platforms, such as Reddit, has become a common practice for many players. Often, players will share gameplay videos that showcase video game bugs. Such gameplay videos are software artifacts that can be utilized for game testing, as they provide insight for bug analysis. Although large repositories of gameplay videos exist, parsing and mining them in an effective and structured fashion has still remained a big challenge. In this paper, we propose a search method that accepts any English text query as input to retrieve relevant videos from large repositories of gameplay videos. Our approach does not rely on any external information (such as video metadata); it works solely based on the content of the video. By leveraging the zero-shot transfer capabilities of the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) model, our approach does not require any data labeling or training. To evaluate our approach, we present the GamePhysics dataset consisting of 26,954 videos from 1,873 games, that were collected from the GamePhysics section on the Reddit website. Our approach shows promising results in our extensive analysis of simple queries, compound queries, and bug queries, indicating that our approach is useful for object and event detection in gameplay videos. An example application of our approach is as a gameplay video search engine to aid in reproducing video game bugs. Please visit the following link for the code and the data: https://asgaardlab.github.io/CLIPxGamePhysics/

We introduce GameGen-X, the first diffusion transformer model specifically designed for both generating and interactively controlling open-world game videos. This model facilitates high-quality, open-domain generation by simulating an extensive array of game engine features, such as innovative characters, dynamic environments, complex actions, and diverse events. Additionally, it provides interactive controllability, predicting and altering future content based on the current clip, thus allowing for gameplay simulation. To realize this vision, we first collected and built an Open-World Video Game Dataset from scratch. It is the first and largest dataset for open-world game video generation and control, which comprises over a million diverse gameplay video clips sampling from over 150 games with informative captions from GPT-4o. GameGen-X undergoes a two-stage training process, consisting of foundation model pre-training and instruction tuning. Firstly, the model was pre-trained via text-to-video generation and video continuation, endowing it with the capability for long-sequence, high-quality open-domain game video generation. Further, to achieve interactive controllability, we designed InstructNet to incorporate game-related multi-modal control signal experts. This allows the model to adjust latent representations based on user inputs, unifying character interaction and scene content control for the first time in video generation. During instruction tuning, only the InstructNet is updated while the pre-trained foundation model is frozen, enabling the integration of interactive controllability without loss of diversity and quality of generated video content.

Drag-based image editing has recently gained popularity for its interactivity and precision. However, despite the ability of text-to-image models to generate samples within a second, drag editing still lags behind due to the challenge of accurately reflecting user interaction while maintaining image content. Some existing approaches rely on computationally intensive per-image optimization or intricate guidance-based methods, requiring additional inputs such as masks for movable regions and text prompts, thereby compromising the interactivity of the editing process. We introduce InstantDrag, an optimization-free pipeline that enhances interactivity and speed, requiring only an image and a drag instruction as input. InstantDrag consists of two carefully designed networks: a drag-conditioned optical flow generator (FlowGen) and an optical flow-conditioned diffusion model (FlowDiffusion). InstantDrag learns motion dynamics for drag-based image editing in real-world video datasets by decomposing the task into motion generation and motion-conditioned image generation. We demonstrate InstantDrag's capability to perform fast, photo-realistic edits without masks or text prompts through experiments on facial video datasets and general scenes. These results highlight the efficiency of our approach in handling drag-based image editing, making it a promising solution for interactive, real-time applications.

We introduce Matrix-Game, an interactive world foundation model for controllable game world generation. Matrix-Game is trained using a two-stage pipeline that first performs large-scale unlabeled pretraining for environment understanding, followed by action-labeled training for interactive video generation. To support this, we curate Matrix-Game-MC, a comprehensive Minecraft dataset comprising over 2,700 hours of unlabeled gameplay video clips and over 1,000 hours of high-quality labeled clips with fine-grained keyboard and mouse action annotations. Our model adopts a controllable image-to-world generation paradigm, conditioned on a reference image, motion context, and user actions. With over 17 billion parameters, Matrix-Game enables precise control over character actions and camera movements, while maintaining high visual quality and temporal coherence. To evaluate performance, we develop GameWorld Score, a unified benchmark measuring visual quality, temporal quality, action controllability, and physical rule understanding for Minecraft world generation. Extensive experiments show that Matrix-Game consistently outperforms prior open-source Minecraft world models (including Oasis and MineWorld) across all metrics, with particularly strong gains in controllability and physical consistency. Double-blind human evaluations further confirm the superiority of Matrix-Game, highlighting its ability to generate perceptually realistic and precisely controllable videos across diverse game scenarios. To facilitate future research on interactive image-to-world generation, we will open-source the Matrix-Game model weights and the GameWorld Score benchmark at https://github.com/SkyworkAI/Matrix-Game.

Recent advances in conversational AI have been substantial, but developing real-time systems for perceptual task guidance remains challenging. These systems must provide interactive, proactive assistance based on streaming visual inputs, yet their development is constrained by the costly and labor-intensive process of data collection and system evaluation. To address these limitations, we present a comprehensive framework with three key contributions. First, we introduce a novel data curation pipeline that synthesizes dialogues from annotated egocentric videos, resulting in \dataset, a large-scale synthetic dialogue dataset spanning multiple domains. Second, we develop a suite of automatic evaluation metrics, validated through extensive human studies. Third, we propose an end-to-end model that processes streaming video inputs to generate contextually appropriate responses, incorporating novel techniques for handling data imbalance and long-duration videos. This work lays the foundation for developing real-time, proactive AI assistants capable of guiding users through diverse tasks. Project page: https://pro-assist.github.io/

Recently, interactive digital human video generation has attracted widespread attention and achieved remarkable progress. However, building such a practical system that can interact with diverse input signals in real time remains challenging to existing methods, which often struggle with high latency, heavy computational cost, and limited controllability. In this work, we introduce an autoregressive video generation framework that enables interactive multimodal control and low-latency extrapolation in a streaming manner. With minimal modifications to a standard large language model (LLM), our framework accepts multimodal condition encodings including audio, pose, and text, and outputs spatially and semantically coherent representations to guide the denoising process of a diffusion head. To support this, we construct a large-scale dialogue dataset of approximately 20,000 hours from multiple sources, providing rich conversational scenarios for training. We further introduce a deep compression autoencoder with up to 64times reduction ratio, which effectively alleviates the long-horizon inference burden of the autoregressive model. Extensive experiments on duplex conversation, multilingual human synthesis, and interactive world model highlight the advantages of our approach in low latency, high efficiency, and fine-grained multimodal controllability.

Video has become a popular media form for information sharing and consumption. However, taking notes while watching a video requires significant time and effort. To address this, we propose a novel interactive system, NoTeeline, for taking real-time, personalized notes. NoTeeline lets users quickly jot down keypoints (micronotes), which are automatically expanded into full-fledged notes that capture the content of the user's micronotes and are consistent with the user's writing style. In a within-subjects study (N=12), we found that NoTeeline helps users create high-quality notes that capture the essence of their micronotes with a higher factual correctness (93.2%) while accurately reflecting their writing style. While using NoTeeline, participants experienced significantly reduced mental effort, captured satisfactory notes while writing 47% less text, and completed notetaking with 43.9% less time compared to a manual notetaking baseline.

We present Large Language Model for Mixed Reality (LLMR), a framework for the real-time creation and modification of interactive Mixed Reality experiences using LLMs. LLMR leverages novel strategies to tackle difficult cases where ideal training data is scarce, or where the design goal requires the synthesis of internal dynamics, intuitive analysis, or advanced interactivity. Our framework relies on text interaction and the Unity game engine. By incorporating techniques for scene understanding, task planning, self-debugging, and memory management, LLMR outperforms the standard GPT-4 by 4x in average error rate. We demonstrate LLMR's cross-platform interoperability with several example worlds, and evaluate it on a variety of creation and modification tasks to show that it can produce and edit diverse objects, tools, and scenes. Finally, we conducted a usability study (N=11) with a diverse set that revealed participants had positive experiences with the system and would use it again.

Creating virtual digital replicas from real-world data unlocks significant potential across domains like gaming and robotics. In this paper, we present DRAWER, a novel framework that converts a video of a static indoor scene into a photorealistic and interactive digital environment. Our approach centers on two main contributions: (i) a reconstruction module based on a dual scene representation that reconstructs the scene with fine-grained geometric details, and (ii) an articulation module that identifies articulation types and hinge positions, reconstructs simulatable shapes and appearances and integrates them into the scene. The resulting virtual environment is photorealistic, interactive, and runs in real time, with compatibility for game engines and robotic simulation platforms. We demonstrate the potential of DRAWER by using it to automatically create an interactive game in Unreal Engine and to enable real-to-sim-to-real transfer for robotics applications.

Live animation has gained immense popularity for enhancing online engagement, yet achieving high-quality, real-time, and stable animation with diffusion models remains challenging, especially on consumer-grade GPUs. Existing methods struggle with generating long, consistent video streams efficiently, often being limited by latency issues and degraded visual quality over extended periods. In this paper, we introduce RAIN, a pipeline solution capable of animating infinite video streams in real-time with low latency using a single RTX 4090 GPU. The core idea of RAIN is to efficiently compute frame-token attention across different noise levels and long time-intervals while simultaneously denoising a significantly larger number of frame-tokens than previous stream-based methods. This design allows RAIN to generate video frames with much shorter latency and faster speed, while maintaining long-range attention over extended video streams, resulting in enhanced continuity and consistency. Consequently, a Stable Diffusion model fine-tuned with RAIN in just a few epochs can produce video streams in real-time and low latency without much compromise in quality or consistency, up to infinite long. Despite its advanced capabilities, the RAIN only introduces a few additional 1D attention blocks, imposing minimal additional burden. Experiments in benchmark datasets and generating super-long videos demonstrating that RAIN can animate characters in real-time with much better quality, accuracy, and consistency than competitors while costing less latency. All code and models will be made publicly available.

We propose a neural physics system for real-time, interactive fluid simulations. Traditional physics-based methods, while accurate, are computationally intensive and suffer from latency issues. Recent machine-learning methods reduce computational costs while preserving fidelity; yet most still fail to satisfy the latency constraints for real-time use and lack support for interactive applications. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel hybrid method that integrates numerical simulation, neural physics, and generative control. Our neural physics jointly pursues low-latency simulation and high physical fidelity by employing a fallback safeguard to classical numerical solvers. Furthermore, we develop a diffusion-based controller that is trained using a reverse modeling strategy to generate external dynamic force fields for fluid manipulation. Our system demonstrates robust performance across diverse 2D/3D scenarios, material types, and obstacle interactions, achieving real-time simulations at high frame rates (11~29% latency) while enabling fluid control guided by user-friendly freehand sketches. We present a significant step towards practical, controllable, and physically plausible fluid simulations for real-time interactive applications. We promise to release both models and data upon acceptance.

Transforming static images into interactive experiences remains a challenging task in computer vision. Tackling this challenge holds the potential to elevate mobile user experiences, notably through interactive and AR/VR applications. Current approaches aim to achieve this either using pre-recorded video responses or requiring multi-view images as input. In this paper, we present PhysID, that streamlines the creation of physics-based interactive dynamics from a single-view image by leveraging large generative models for 3D mesh generation and physical property prediction. This significantly reduces the expertise required for engineering-intensive tasks like 3D modeling and intrinsic property calibration, enabling the process to be scaled with minimal manual intervention. We integrate an on-device physics-based engine for physically plausible real-time rendering with user interactions. PhysID represents a leap forward in mobile-based interactive dynamics, offering real-time, non-deterministic interactions and user-personalization with efficient on-device memory consumption. Experiments evaluate the zero-shot capabilities of various Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) on diverse tasks and the performance of 3D reconstruction models. These results demonstrate the cohesive functioning of all modules within the end-to-end framework, contributing to its effectiveness.

This paper presents StreamChat, a novel approach that enhances the interaction capabilities of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) with streaming video content. In streaming interaction scenarios, existing methods rely solely on visual information available at the moment a question is posed, resulting in significant delays as the model remains unaware of subsequent changes in the streaming video. StreamChat addresses this limitation by innovatively updating the visual context at each decoding step, ensuring that the model utilizes up-to-date video content throughout the decoding process. Additionally, we introduce a flexible and efficient crossattention-based architecture to process dynamic streaming inputs while maintaining inference efficiency for streaming interactions. Furthermore, we construct a new dense instruction dataset to facilitate the training of streaming interaction models, complemented by a parallel 3D-RoPE mechanism that encodes the relative temporal information of visual and text tokens. Experimental results demonstrate that StreamChat achieves competitive performance on established image and video benchmarks and exhibits superior capabilities in streaming interaction scenarios compared to state-of-the-art video LMM.

We study the problem of building a controller that can follow open-ended instructions in open-world environments. We propose to follow reference videos as instructions, which offer expressive goal specifications while eliminating the need for expensive text-gameplay annotations. A new learning framework is derived to allow learning such instruction-following controllers from gameplay videos while producing a video instruction encoder that induces a structured goal space. We implement our agent GROOT in a simple yet effective encoder-decoder architecture based on causal transformers. We evaluate GROOT against open-world counterparts and human players on a proposed Minecraft SkillForge benchmark. The Elo ratings clearly show that GROOT is closing the human-machine gap as well as exhibiting a 70% winning rate over the best generalist agent baseline. Qualitative analysis of the induced goal space further demonstrates some interesting emergent properties, including the goal composition and complex gameplay behavior synthesis. Code and video can be found on the website https://craftjarvis-groot.github.io.

Much of the previous work towards digital agents for graphical user interfaces (GUIs) has relied on text-based representations (derived from HTML or other structured data sources), which are not always readily available. These input representations have been often coupled with custom, task-specific action spaces. This paper focuses on creating agents that interact with the digital world using the same conceptual interface that humans commonly use -- via pixel-based screenshots and a generic action space corresponding to keyboard and mouse actions. Building upon recent progress in pixel-based pretraining, we show, for the first time, that it is possible for such agents to outperform human crowdworkers on the MiniWob++ benchmark of GUI-based instruction following tasks.

Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved strong results on coding and math benchmarks that are challenging for humans, yet their ability to perform tasks that come naturally to humans--such as perception, spatial navigation, and memory management--remains understudied. Real video games are crafted to be intuitive for humans to learn and master by leveraging innate inductive biases, making them an ideal testbed for evaluating such capabilities in VLMs. To this end, we introduce VideoGameBench, a benchmark consisting of 10 popular video games from the 1990s that VLMs directly interact with in real-time. VideoGameBench challenges models to complete entire games with access to only raw visual inputs and a high-level description of objectives and controls, a significant departure from existing setups that rely on game-specific scaffolding and auxiliary information. We keep three of the games secret to encourage solutions that generalize to unseen environments. Our experiments show that frontier vision-language models struggle to progress beyond the beginning of each game. We find inference latency to be a major limitation of frontier models in the real-time setting; therefore, we introduce VideoGameBench Lite, a setting where the game pauses while waiting for the LM's next action. The best performing model, Gemini 2.5 Pro, completes only 0.48% of VideoGameBench and 1.6% of VideoGameBench Lite. We hope that the formalization of the human skills mentioned above into this benchmark motivates progress in these research directions.

We propose TextToon, a method to generate a drivable toonified avatar. Given a short monocular video sequence and a written instruction about the avatar style, our model can generate a high-fidelity toonified avatar that can be driven in real-time by another video with arbitrary identities. Existing related works heavily rely on multi-view modeling to recover geometry via texture embeddings, presented in a static manner, leading to control limitations. The multi-view video input also makes it difficult to deploy these models in real-world applications. To address these issues, we adopt a conditional embedding Tri-plane to learn realistic and stylized facial representations in a Gaussian deformation field. Additionally, we expand the stylization capabilities of 3D Gaussian Splatting by introducing an adaptive pixel-translation neural network and leveraging patch-aware contrastive learning to achieve high-quality images. To push our work into consumer applications, we develop a real-time system that can operate at 48 FPS on a GPU machine and 15-18 FPS on a mobile machine. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in generating textual avatars over existing methods in terms of quality and real-time animation. Please refer to our project page for more details: https://songluchuan.github.io/TextToon/.

Real-time interactive video-chat portraits have been increasingly recognized as the future trend, particularly due to the remarkable progress made in text and voice chat technologies. However, existing methods primarily focus on real-time generation of head movements, but struggle to produce synchronized body motions that match these head actions. Additionally, achieving fine-grained control over the speaking style and nuances of facial expressions remains a challenge. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel framework for stylized real-time portrait video generation, enabling expressive and flexible video chat that extends from talking head to upper-body interaction. Our approach consists of the following two stages. The first stage involves efficient hierarchical motion diffusion models, that take both explicit and implicit motion representations into account based on audio inputs, which can generate a diverse range of facial expressions with stylistic control and synchronization between head and body movements. The second stage aims to generate portrait video featuring upper-body movements, including hand gestures. We inject explicit hand control signals into the generator to produce more detailed hand movements, and further perform face refinement to enhance the overall realism and expressiveness of the portrait video. Additionally, our approach supports efficient and continuous generation of upper-body portrait video in maximum 512 * 768 resolution at up to 30fps on 4090 GPU, supporting interactive video-chat in real-time. Experimental results demonstrate the capability of our approach to produce portrait videos with rich expressiveness and natural upper-body movements.

While AI excels at generating text, audio, images, and videos, creating interactive audio-visual content such as video games remains challenging. Current LLMs can generate JavaScript games and animations, but lack automated evaluation metrics and struggle with complex content that normally requires teams of humans working for many months (multi-shot, multi-agents) using assets made by artists. To tackle these issues, we built a new metric and a multi-agent system. We propose AVR-Eval, a relative metric for multimedia content quality using Audio-Visual Recordings (AVRs). An omni-modal model (processing text, video, and audio) compares the AVRs of two contents, with a text model reviewing evaluations to determine superiority. We show that AVR-Eval properly identifies good from broken or mismatched content. We built AVR-Agent, a multi-agent system generating JavaScript code from a bank of multimedia assets (audio, images, 3D models). The coding agent selects relevant assets, generates multiple initial codes, uses AVR-Eval to identify the best version, and iteratively improves it through omni-modal agent feedback from the AVR. We run experiments on games and animations with AVR-Eval (win rate of content A against B). We find that content generated by AVR-Agent has a significantly higher win rate against content made through one-shot generation. However, models struggle to leverage custom assets and AVR feedback effectively, showing no higher win rate. This reveals a critical gap: while humans benefit from high-quality assets and audio-visual feedback, current coding models do not seem to utilize these resources as effectively, highlighting fundamental differences between human and machine content creation approaches.

In this paper, we present TalkingMachines -- an efficient framework that transforms pretrained video generation models into real-time, audio-driven character animators. TalkingMachines enables natural conversational experiences by integrating an audio large language model (LLM) with our video generation foundation model. Our primary contributions include: (1) We adapt a pretrained SOTA image-to-video DiT into an audio-driven avatar generation model of 18 billion parameters; (2) We enable infinite video streaming without error accumulation through asymmetric knowledge distillation from a bidirectional teacher model into a sparse causal, autoregressive student model; (3) We design a high-throughput, low-latency inference pipeline incorporating several key engineering optimizations such as: (a) disaggregation of the DiT and VAE decoder across separate devices, (b) efficient overlap of inter-device communication and computation using CUDA streams, (c) elimination of redundant recomputations to maximize frame-generation throughput. Please see demo videos here - https://aaxwaz.github.io/TalkingMachines/

With the growing research focus on multimodal dialogue systems, the capability for proactive interaction is gradually gaining recognition. As an alternative to conventional turn-by-turn dialogue, users increasingly expect multimodal systems to be more initiative, for example, by autonomously determining the timing of multi-turn responses in real time during video playback. To facilitate progress in this emerging area, we introduce ProactiveBench, the first comprehensive benchmark to evaluate a system's ability to engage in proactive interaction. Since model responses are generated at varying timestamps, we further propose PAUC, the first metric that accounts for the temporal dynamics of model responses. This enables a more accurate evaluation of systems operating in proactive settings. Through extensive benchmarking of various baseline systems on ProactiveBench and a user study of human preferences, we show that PAUC is in better agreement with human preferences than traditional evaluation metrics, which typically only consider the textual content of responses. These findings demonstrate that PAUC provides a more faithful assessment of user experience in proactive interaction scenarios. Project homepage: https://github.com/yellow-binary-tree/ProactiveBench

Interactive fiction games have emerged as an important application to improve the generalization capabilities of language-based reinforcement learning (RL) agents. Existing environments for interactive fiction games are domain-specific or time-consuming to generate and do not train the RL agents to master a specific set of skills. In this work, we introduce an interactive environment for self-supervised RL, STARLING, for text-based games that bootstraps the text-based RL agents with automatically generated games (based on the seed set of game ideas) to boost the performance and generalization capabilities to reach a goal of the target environment. These games let the agent hone their skills on a predefined set of tasks. We create and test an environment with 100 games, generated using this automated framework that uses large language models (GPT-3) and an interactive fiction game engine (based on Inform7) to provide the user with the ability to generate more games under minimal human supervision. Experimental results based on both the human participants and baseline text-based RL agents reveal that current state-of-the-art text-based RL agents cannot use previously learned skills in new situations at the level humans can. These results enforce STARLING's potential to serve as a sandbox environment for further research in self-supervised text-based RL.

Modern conversational agents, including anime-themed chatbots, are frequently reactive and personality-driven but fail to capture the dynamic nature of human interactions. We propose an event-driven dialogue framework to address these limitations by embedding dynamic events in conversation prompts and fine-tuning models on character-specific data. Evaluations on GPT-4 and comparisons with industry-leading baselines demonstrate that event-driven prompts significantly improve conversational engagement and naturalness while reducing hallucinations. This paper explores the application of this approach in creating lifelike chatbot interactions within the context of Honkai: Star Rail, showcasing the potential for dynamic event-based systems to transform role-playing and interactive dialogue.

We introduce WebGames, a comprehensive benchmark suite designed to evaluate general-purpose web-browsing AI agents through a collection of 50+ interactive challenges. These challenges are specifically crafted to be straightforward for humans while systematically testing the limitations of current AI systems across fundamental browser interactions, advanced input processing, cognitive tasks, workflow automation, and interactive entertainment. Our framework eliminates external dependencies through a hermetic testing environment, ensuring reproducible evaluation with verifiable ground-truth solutions. We evaluate leading vision-language models including GPT-4o, Claude Computer-Use, Gemini-1.5-Pro, and Qwen2-VL against human performance. Results reveal a substantial capability gap, with the best AI system achieving only 43.1% success rate compared to human performance of 95.7%, highlighting fundamental limitations in current AI systems' ability to handle common web interaction patterns that humans find intuitive. The benchmark is publicly available at webgames.convergence.ai, offering a lightweight, client-side implementation that facilitates rapid evaluation cycles. Through its modular architecture and standardized challenge specifications, WebGames provides a robust foundation for measuring progress in development of more capable web-browsing agents.

Despite recent advances in image-to-video generation, better controllability and local animation are less explored. Most existing image-to-video methods are not locally aware and tend to move the entire scene. However, human artists may need to control the movement of different objects or regions. Additionally, current I2V methods require users not only to describe the target motion but also to provide redundant detailed descriptions of frame contents. These two issues hinder the practical utilization of current I2V tools. In this paper, we propose a practical framework, named Follow-Your-Click, to achieve image animation with a simple user click (for specifying what to move) and a short motion prompt (for specifying how to move). Technically, we propose the first-frame masking strategy, which significantly improves the video generation quality, and a motion-augmented module equipped with a short motion prompt dataset to improve the short prompt following abilities of our model. To further control the motion speed, we propose flow-based motion magnitude control to control the speed of target movement more precisely. Our framework has simpler yet precise user control and better generation performance than previous methods. Extensive experiments compared with 7 baselines, including both commercial tools and research methods on 8 metrics, suggest the superiority of our approach. Project Page: https://follow-your-click.github.io/

Interactive image editing allows users to modify images through visual interaction operations such as drawing, clicking, and dragging. Existing methods construct such supervision signals from videos, as they capture how objects change with various physical interactions. However, these models are usually built upon text-to-image diffusion models, so necessitate (i) massive training samples and (ii) an additional reference encoder to learn real-world dynamics and visual consistency. In this paper, we reformulate this task as an image-to-video generation problem, so that inherit powerful video diffusion priors to reduce training costs and ensure temporal consistency. Specifically, we introduce FramePainter as an efficient instantiation of this formulation. Initialized with Stable Video Diffusion, it only uses a lightweight sparse control encoder to inject editing signals. Considering the limitations of temporal attention in handling large motion between two frames, we further propose matching attention to enlarge the receptive field while encouraging dense correspondence between edited and source image tokens. We highlight the effectiveness and efficiency of FramePainter across various of editing signals: it domainantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods with far less training data, achieving highly seamless and coherent editing of images, \eg, automatically adjust the reflection of the cup. Moreover, FramePainter also exhibits exceptional generalization in scenarios not present in real-world videos, \eg, transform the clownfish into shark-like shape. Our code will be available at https://github.com/YBYBZhang/FramePainter.

Despite the recent progress in text-to-video generation, existing studies usually overlook the issue that only spatial contents but not temporal motions in synthesized videos are under the control of text. Towards such a challenge, this work presents a practical system, named LivePhoto, which allows users to animate an image of their interest with text descriptions. We first establish a strong baseline that helps a well-learned text-to-image generator (i.e., Stable Diffusion) take an image as a further input. We then equip the improved generator with a motion module for temporal modeling and propose a carefully designed training pipeline to better link texts and motions. In particular, considering the facts that (1) text can only describe motions roughly (e.g., regardless of the moving speed) and (2) text may include both content and motion descriptions, we introduce a motion intensity estimation module as well as a text re-weighting module to reduce the ambiguity of text-to-motion mapping. Empirical evidence suggests that our approach is capable of well decoding motion-related textual instructions into videos, such as actions, camera movements, or even conjuring new contents from thin air (e.g., pouring water into an empty glass). Interestingly, thanks to the proposed intensity learning mechanism, our system offers users an additional control signal (i.e., the motion intensity) besides text for video customization.

Developing a consistent and reliable AI game master for text-based games is a challenging task due to the limitations of large language models (LLMs) and the complexity of the game master's role. This paper presents a novel approach to enhance AI game masters by leveraging function calling in the context of the table-top role-playing game "Jim Henson's Labyrinth: The Adventure Game." Our methodology involves integrating game-specific controls through functions, which we show improves the narrative quality and state update consistency of the AI game master. The experimental results, based on human evaluations and unit tests, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in enhancing gameplay experience and maintaining coherence with the game state. This work contributes to the advancement of game AI and interactive storytelling, offering insights into the design of more engaging and consistent AI-driven game masters.

Audio-driven portrait animation aims to synthesize realistic and natural talking head videos from an input audio signal and a single reference image. While existing methods achieve high-quality results by leveraging high-dimensional intermediate representations and explicitly modeling motion dynamics, their computational complexity renders them unsuitable for real-time deployment. Real-time inference imposes stringent latency and memory constraints, often necessitating the use of highly compressed latent representations. However, operating in such compact spaces hinders the preservation of fine-grained spatiotemporal details, thereby complicating audio-visual synchronization RAP (Real-time Audio-driven Portrait animation), a unified framework for generating high-quality talking portraits under real-time constraints. Specifically, RAP introduces a hybrid attention mechanism for fine-grained audio control, and a static-dynamic training-inference paradigm that avoids explicit motion supervision. Through these techniques, RAP achieves precise audio-driven control, mitigates long-term temporal drift, and maintains high visual fidelity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RAP achieves state-of-the-art performance while operating under real-time constraints.

We present MM-VID, an integrated system that harnesses the capabilities of GPT-4V, combined with specialized tools in vision, audio, and speech, to facilitate advanced video understanding. MM-VID is designed to address the challenges posed by long-form videos and intricate tasks such as reasoning within hour-long content and grasping storylines spanning multiple episodes. MM-VID uses a video-to-script generation with GPT-4V to transcribe multimodal elements into a long textual script. The generated script details character movements, actions, expressions, and dialogues, paving the way for large language models (LLMs) to achieve video understanding. This enables advanced capabilities, including audio description, character identification, and multimodal high-level comprehension. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of MM-VID in handling distinct video genres with various video lengths. Additionally, we showcase its potential when applied to interactive environments, such as video games and graphic user interfaces.

Pretraining on noisy, internet-scale datasets has been heavily studied as a technique for training models with broad, general capabilities for text, images, and other modalities. However, for many sequential decision domains such as robotics, video games, and computer use, publicly available data does not contain the labels required to train behavioral priors in the same way. We extend the internet-scale pretraining paradigm to sequential decision domains through semi-supervised imitation learning wherein agents learn to act by watching online unlabeled videos. Specifically, we show that with a small amount of labeled data we can train an inverse dynamics model accurate enough to label a huge unlabeled source of online data -- here, online videos of people playing Minecraft -- from which we can then train a general behavioral prior. Despite using the native human interface (mouse and keyboard at 20Hz), we show that this behavioral prior has nontrivial zero-shot capabilities and that it can be fine-tuned, with both imitation learning and reinforcement learning, to hard-exploration tasks that are impossible to learn from scratch via reinforcement learning. For many tasks our models exhibit human-level performance, and we are the first to report computer agents that can craft diamond tools, which can take proficient humans upwards of 20 minutes (24,000 environment actions) of gameplay to accomplish.

We present a system that transforms a monocular video of a soccer game into a moving 3D reconstruction, in which the players and field can be rendered interactively with a 3D viewer or through an Augmented Reality device. At the heart of our paper is an approach to estimate the depth map of each player, using a CNN that is trained on 3D player data extracted from soccer video games. We compare with state of the art body pose and depth estimation techniques, and show results on both synthetic ground truth benchmarks, and real YouTube soccer footage.

Crafting a single, versatile physics-based controller that can breathe life into interactive characters across a wide spectrum of scenarios represents an exciting frontier in character animation. An ideal controller should support diverse control modalities, such as sparse target keyframes, text instructions, and scene information. While previous works have proposed physically simulated, scene-aware control models, these systems have predominantly focused on developing controllers that each specializes in a narrow set of tasks and control modalities. This work presents MaskedMimic, a novel approach that formulates physics-based character control as a general motion inpainting problem. Our key insight is to train a single unified model to synthesize motions from partial (masked) motion descriptions, such as masked keyframes, objects, text descriptions, or any combination thereof. This is achieved by leveraging motion tracking data and designing a scalable training method that can effectively utilize diverse motion descriptions to produce coherent animations. Through this process, our approach learns a physics-based controller that provides an intuitive control interface without requiring tedious reward engineering for all behaviors of interest. The resulting controller supports a wide range of control modalities and enables seamless transitions between disparate tasks. By unifying character control through motion inpainting, MaskedMimic creates versatile virtual characters. These characters can dynamically adapt to complex scenes and compose diverse motions on demand, enabling more interactive and immersive experiences.

A demonstration of a real-time and continuous turn-taking prediction system is presented. The system is based on a voice activity projection (VAP) model, which directly maps dialogue stereo audio to future voice activities. The VAP model includes contrastive predictive coding (CPC) and self-attention transformers, followed by a cross-attention transformer. We examine the effect of the input context audio length and demonstrate that the proposed system can operate in real-time with CPU settings, with minimal performance degradation.

3D object generation has undergone significant advancements, yielding high-quality results. However, fall short of achieving precise user control, often yielding results that do not align with user expectations, thus limiting their applicability. User-envisioning 3D object generation faces significant challenges in realizing its concepts using current generative models due to limited interaction capabilities. Existing methods mainly offer two approaches: (i) interpreting textual instructions with constrained controllability, or (ii) reconstructing 3D objects from 2D images. Both of them limit customization to the confines of the 2D reference and potentially introduce undesirable artifacts during the 3D lifting process, restricting the scope for direct and versatile 3D modifications. In this work, we introduce Interactive3D, an innovative framework for interactive 3D generation that grants users precise control over the generative process through extensive 3D interaction capabilities. Interactive3D is constructed in two cascading stages, utilizing distinct 3D representations. The first stage employs Gaussian Splatting for direct user interaction, allowing modifications and guidance of the generative direction at any intermediate step through (i) Adding and Removing components, (ii) Deformable and Rigid Dragging, (iii) Geometric Transformations, and (iv) Semantic Editing. Subsequently, the Gaussian splats are transformed into InstantNGP. We introduce a novel (v) Interactive Hash Refinement module to further add details and extract the geometry in the second stage. Our experiments demonstrate that Interactive3D markedly improves the controllability and quality of 3D generation. Our project webpage is available at https://interactive-3d.github.io/.

In this work, we present Digital Life Project, a framework utilizing language as the universal medium to build autonomous 3D characters, who are capable of engaging in social interactions and expressing with articulated body motions, thereby simulating life in a digital environment. Our framework comprises two primary components: 1) SocioMind: a meticulously crafted digital brain that models personalities with systematic few-shot exemplars, incorporates a reflection process based on psychology principles, and emulates autonomy by initiating dialogue topics; 2) MoMat-MoGen: a text-driven motion synthesis paradigm for controlling the character's digital body. It integrates motion matching, a proven industry technique to ensure motion quality, with cutting-edge advancements in motion generation for diversity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that each module achieves state-of-the-art performance in its respective domain. Collectively, they enable virtual characters to initiate and sustain dialogues autonomously, while evolving their socio-psychological states. Concurrently, these characters can perform contextually relevant bodily movements. Additionally, a motion captioning module further allows the virtual character to recognize and appropriately respond to human players' actions. Homepage: https://digital-life-project.com/

Recent techniques for real-time view synthesis have rapidly advanced in fidelity and speed, and modern methods are capable of rendering near-photorealistic scenes at interactive frame rates. At the same time, a tension has arisen between explicit scene representations amenable to rasterization and neural fields built on ray marching, with state-of-the-art instances of the latter surpassing the former in quality while being prohibitively expensive for real-time applications. In this work, we introduce SMERF, a view synthesis approach that achieves state-of-the-art accuracy among real-time methods on large scenes with footprints up to 300 m^2 at a volumetric resolution of 3.5 mm^3. Our method is built upon two primary contributions: a hierarchical model partitioning scheme, which increases model capacity while constraining compute and memory consumption, and a distillation training strategy that simultaneously yields high fidelity and internal consistency. Our approach enables full six degrees of freedom (6DOF) navigation within a web browser and renders in real-time on commodity smartphones and laptops. Extensive experiments show that our method exceeds the current state-of-the-art in real-time novel view synthesis by 0.78 dB on standard benchmarks and 1.78 dB on large scenes, renders frames three orders of magnitude faster than state-of-the-art radiance field models, and achieves real-time performance across a wide variety of commodity devices, including smartphones. We encourage readers to explore these models interactively at our project website: https://smerf-3d.github.io.

In this work, we present Conditional Adversarial Latent Models (CALM), an approach for generating diverse and directable behaviors for user-controlled interactive virtual characters. Using imitation learning, CALM learns a representation of movement that captures the complexity and diversity of human motion, and enables direct control over character movements. The approach jointly learns a control policy and a motion encoder that reconstructs key characteristics of a given motion without merely replicating it. The results show that CALM learns a semantic motion representation, enabling control over the generated motions and style-conditioning for higher-level task training. Once trained, the character can be controlled using intuitive interfaces, akin to those found in video games.

We present Instant Volumetric Head Avatars (INSTA), a novel approach for reconstructing photo-realistic digital avatars instantaneously. INSTA models a dynamic neural radiance field based on neural graphics primitives embedded around a parametric face model. Our pipeline is trained on a single monocular RGB portrait video that observes the subject under different expressions and views. While state-of-the-art methods take up to several days to train an avatar, our method can reconstruct a digital avatar in less than 10 minutes on modern GPU hardware, which is orders of magnitude faster than previous solutions. In addition, it allows for the interactive rendering of novel poses and expressions. By leveraging the geometry prior of the underlying parametric face model, we demonstrate that INSTA extrapolates to unseen poses. In quantitative and qualitative studies on various subjects, INSTA outperforms state-of-the-art methods regarding rendering quality and training time.

We introduce a real-time strategy game environment based on Generals.io, a game with thousands of weekly active players. Our environment is fully compatible with Gymnasium and PettingZoo and is capable of running thousands of frames per second on commodity hardware. We also present a reference agent, trained with supervised pre-training and self-play, which reached the top 0.003% of the 1v1 human leaderboard after only 36 hours on a single H100 GPU. To accelerate learning, we incorporate potential-based reward shaping and memory features. Our contributions of a modular RTS benchmark and a competitive baseline agent provide an accessible yet challenging platform for advancing multi-agent reinforcement learning research. The documented code, together with examples and tutorials, is available at https://github.com/strakam/generals-bots.

Diffusion-based image editing models have made remarkable progress in recent years. However, achieving high-quality video editing remains a significant challenge. One major hurdle is the absence of open-source, large-scale video editing datasets based on real-world data, as constructing such datasets is both time-consuming and costly. Moreover, video data requires a significantly larger number of tokens for representation, which substantially increases the training costs for video editing models. Lastly, current video editing models offer limited interactivity, often making it difficult for users to express their editing requirements effectively in a single attempt. To address these challenges, this paper introduces a dataset VIVID-10M and a baseline model VIVID. VIVID-10M is the first large-scale hybrid image-video local editing dataset aimed at reducing data construction and model training costs, which comprises 9.7M samples that encompass a wide range of video editing tasks. VIVID is a Versatile and Interactive VIdeo local eDiting model trained on VIVID-10M, which supports entity addition, modification, and deletion. At its core, a keyframe-guided interactive video editing mechanism is proposed, enabling users to iteratively edit keyframes and propagate it to other frames, thereby reducing latency in achieving desired outcomes. Extensive experimental evaluations show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in video local editing, surpassing baseline methods in both automated metrics and user studies. The VIVID-10M dataset and the VIVID editing model will be available at https://inkosizhong.github.io/VIVID/.

Accurate Story visualization requires several necessary elements, such as identity consistency across frames, the alignment between plain text and visual content, and a reasonable layout of objects in images. Most previous works endeavor to meet these requirements by fitting a text-to-image (T2I) model on a set of videos in the same style and with the same characters, e.g., the FlintstonesSV dataset. However, the learned T2I models typically struggle to adapt to new characters, scenes, and styles, and often lack the flexibility to revise the layout of the synthesized images. This paper proposes a system for generic interactive story visualization, capable of handling multiple novel characters and supporting the editing of layout and local structure. It is developed by leveraging the prior knowledge of large language and T2I models, trained on massive corpora. The system comprises four interconnected components: story-to-prompt generation (S2P), text-to-layout generation (T2L), controllable text-to-image generation (C-T2I), and image-to-video animation (I2V). First, the S2P module converts concise story information into detailed prompts required for subsequent stages. Next, T2L generates diverse and reasonable layouts based on the prompts, offering users the ability to adjust and refine the layout to their preference. The core component, C-T2I, enables the creation of images guided by layouts, sketches, and actor-specific identifiers to maintain consistency and detail across visualizations. Finally, I2V enriches the visualization process by animating the generated images. Extensive experiments and a user study are conducted to validate the effectiveness and flexibility of interactive editing of the proposed system.

Recent Large Language Models have been enhanced with vision capabilities, enabling them to comprehend images, videos, and interleaved vision-language content. However, the learning methods of these large multimodal models typically treat videos as predetermined clips, making them less effective and efficient at handling streaming video inputs. In this paper, we propose a novel Learning-In-Video-Stream (LIVE) framework, which enables temporally aligned, long-context, and real-time conversation within a continuous video stream. Our LIVE framework comprises comprehensive approaches to achieve video streaming dialogue, encompassing: (1) a training objective designed to perform language modeling for continuous streaming inputs, (2) a data generation scheme that converts offline temporal annotations into a streaming dialogue format, and (3) an optimized inference pipeline to speed up the model responses in real-world video streams. With our LIVE framework, we built VideoLLM-online model upon Llama-2/Llama-3 and demonstrate its significant advantages in processing streaming videos. For instance, on average, our model can support streaming dialogue in a 5-minute video clip at over 10 FPS on an A100 GPU. Moreover, it also showcases state-of-the-art performance on public offline video benchmarks, such as recognition, captioning, and forecasting. The code, model, data, and demo have been made available at https://showlab.github.io/videollm-online.

We present PACE, a novel method for modifying motion-captured virtual agents to interact with and move throughout dense, cluttered 3D scenes. Our approach changes a given motion sequence of a virtual agent as needed to adjust to the obstacles and objects in the environment. We first take the individual frames of the motion sequence most important for modeling interactions with the scene and pair them with the relevant scene geometry, obstacles, and semantics such that interactions in the agents motion match the affordances of the scene (e.g., standing on a floor or sitting in a chair). We then optimize the motion of the human by directly altering the high-DOF pose at each frame in the motion to better account for the unique geometric constraints of the scene. Our formulation uses novel loss functions that maintain a realistic flow and natural-looking motion. We compare our method with prior motion generating techniques and highlight the benefits of our method with a perceptual study and physical plausibility metrics. Human raters preferred our method over the prior approaches. Specifically, they preferred our method 57.1% of the time versus the state-of-the-art method using existing motions, and 81.0% of the time versus a state-of-the-art motion synthesis method. Additionally, our method performs significantly higher on established physical plausibility and interaction metrics. Specifically, we outperform competing methods by over 1.2% in terms of the non-collision metric and by over 18% in terms of the contact metric. We have integrated our interactive system with Microsoft HoloLens and demonstrate its benefits in real-world indoor scenes. Our project website is available at https://gamma.umd.edu/pace/.

Text-conditioned human motion generation, which allows for user interaction through natural language, has become increasingly popular. Existing methods typically generate short, isolated motions based on a single input sentence. However, human motions are continuous and can extend over long periods, carrying rich semantics. Creating long, complex motions that precisely respond to streams of text descriptions, particularly in an online and real-time setting, remains a significant challenge. Furthermore, incorporating spatial constraints into text-conditioned motion generation presents additional challenges, as it requires aligning the motion semantics specified by text descriptions with geometric information, such as goal locations and 3D scene geometry. To address these limitations, we propose DartControl, in short DART, a Diffusion-based Autoregressive motion primitive model for Real-time Text-driven motion control. Our model effectively learns a compact motion primitive space jointly conditioned on motion history and text inputs using latent diffusion models. By autoregressively generating motion primitives based on the preceding history and current text input, DART enables real-time, sequential motion generation driven by natural language descriptions. Additionally, the learned motion primitive space allows for precise spatial motion control, which we formulate either as a latent noise optimization problem or as a Markov decision process addressed through reinforcement learning. We present effective algorithms for both approaches, demonstrating our model's versatility and superior performance in various motion synthesis tasks. Experiments show our method outperforms existing baselines in motion realism, efficiency, and controllability. Video results are available on the project page: https://zkf1997.github.io/DART/.

Contrastive learning-based video-language representation learning approaches, e.g., CLIP, have achieved outstanding performance, which pursue semantic interaction upon pre-defined video-text pairs. To clarify this coarse-grained global interaction and move a step further, we have to encounter challenging shell-breaking interactions for fine-grained cross-modal learning. In this paper, we creatively model video-text as game players with multivariate cooperative game theory to wisely handle the uncertainty during fine-grained semantic interaction with diverse granularity, flexible combination, and vague intensity. Concretely, we propose Hierarchical Banzhaf Interaction (HBI) to value possible correspondence between video frames and text words for sensitive and explainable cross-modal contrast. To efficiently realize the cooperative game of multiple video frames and multiple text words, the proposed method clusters the original video frames (text words) and computes the Banzhaf Interaction between the merged tokens. By stacking token merge modules, we achieve cooperative games at different semantic levels. Extensive experiments on commonly used text-video retrieval and video-question answering benchmarks with superior performances justify the efficacy of our HBI. More encouragingly, it can also serve as a visualization tool to promote the understanding of cross-modal interaction, which have a far-reaching impact on the community. Project page is available at https://jpthu17.github.io/HBI/.

This work demonstrates that natural language transformers can support more generic strategic modeling, particularly for text-archived games. In addition to learning natural language skills, the abstract transformer architecture can generate meaningful moves on a chessboard. With further fine-tuning, the transformer learns complex gameplay by training on 2.8 million chess games in Portable Game Notation. After 30,000 training steps, OpenAI's Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT-2) optimizes weights for 774 million parameters. This fine-tuned Chess Transformer generates plausible strategies and displays game formations identifiable as classic openings, such as English or the Slav Exchange. Finally, in live play, the novel model demonstrates a human-to-transformer interface that correctly filters illegal moves and provides a novel method to challenge the transformer's chess strategies. We anticipate future work will build on this transformer's promise, particularly in other strategy games where features can capture the underlying complex rule syntax from simple but expressive player annotations.

Advances in video generation have significantly improved the realism and quality of created scenes. This has fueled interest in developing intuitive tools that let users leverage video generation as world simulators. Text-to-video (T2V) generation is one such approach, enabling video creation from text descriptions only. Yet, due to the inherent ambiguity in texts and the limited temporal information offered by text prompts, researchers have explored additional control signals like trajectory-guided systems, for more accurate T2V generation. Nonetheless, methods to evaluate whether T2V models can generate realistic interactions between multiple objects are lacking. We introduce InTraGen, a pipeline for improved trajectory-based generation of object interaction scenarios. We propose 4 new datasets and a novel trajectory quality metric to evaluate the performance of the proposed InTraGen. To achieve object interaction, we introduce a multi-modal interaction encoding pipeline with an object ID injection mechanism that enriches object-environment interactions. Our results demonstrate improvements in both visual fidelity and quantitative performance. Code and datasets are available at https://github.com/insait-institute/InTraGen

This paper presents SANA-Sprint, an efficient diffusion model for ultra-fast text-to-image (T2I) generation. SANA-Sprint is built on a pre-trained foundation model and augmented with hybrid distillation, dramatically reducing inference steps from 20 to 1-4. We introduce three key innovations: (1) We propose a training-free approach that transforms a pre-trained flow-matching model for continuous-time consistency distillation (sCM), eliminating costly training from scratch and achieving high training efficiency. Our hybrid distillation strategy combines sCM with latent adversarial distillation (LADD): sCM ensures alignment with the teacher model, while LADD enhances single-step generation fidelity. (2) SANA-Sprint is a unified step-adaptive model that achieves high-quality generation in 1-4 steps, eliminating step-specific training and improving efficiency. (3) We integrate ControlNet with SANA-Sprint for real-time interactive image generation, enabling instant visual feedback for user interaction. SANA-Sprint establishes a new Pareto frontier in speed-quality tradeoffs, achieving state-of-the-art performance with 7.59 FID and 0.74 GenEval in only 1 step - outperforming FLUX-schnell (7.94 FID / 0.71 GenEval) while being 10x faster (0.1s vs 1.1s on H100). It also achieves 0.1s (T2I) and 0.25s (ControlNet) latency for 1024 x 1024 images on H100, and 0.31s (T2I) on an RTX 4090, showcasing its exceptional efficiency and potential for AI-powered consumer applications (AIPC). Code and pre-trained models will be open-sourced.

3D Content Generation is at the heart of many computer graphics applications, including video gaming, film-making, virtual and augmented reality, etc. This paper proposes a novel deep-learning based approach for automatically generating interactive and playable 3D game scenes, all from the user's casual prompts such as a hand-drawn sketch. Sketch-based input offers a natural, and convenient way to convey the user's design intention in the content creation process. To circumvent the data-deficient challenge in learning (i.e. the lack of large training data of 3D scenes), our method leverages a pre-trained 2D denoising diffusion model to generate a 2D image of the scene as the conceptual guidance. In this process, we adopt the isometric projection mode to factor out unknown camera poses while obtaining the scene layout. From the generated isometric image, we use a pre-trained image understanding method to segment the image into meaningful parts, such as off-ground objects, trees, and buildings, and extract the 2D scene layout. These segments and layouts are subsequently fed into a procedural content generation (PCG) engine, such as a 3D video game engine like Unity or Unreal, to create the 3D scene. The resulting 3D scene can be seamlessly integrated into a game development environment and is readily playable. Extensive tests demonstrate that our method can efficiently generate high-quality and interactive 3D game scenes with layouts that closely follow the user's intention.

GUI agents powered by LLMs show promise in interacting with diverse digital environments. Among these, video games offer a valuable testbed due to their varied interfaces, with adventure games posing additional challenges through complex, narrative-driven interactions. Existing game benchmarks, however, lack diversity and rarely evaluate agents on completing entire storylines. To address this, we introduce FlashAdventure, a benchmark of 34 Flash-based adventure games designed to test full story arc completion and tackle the observation-behavior gap: the challenge of remembering and acting on earlier gameplay information. We also propose CUA-as-a-Judge, an automated gameplay evaluator, and COAST, an agentic framework leveraging long-term clue memory to better plan and solve sequential tasks. Experiments show current GUI agents struggle with full story arcs, while COAST improves milestone completion by bridging the observation-behavior gap. Nonetheless, a marked discrepancy between humans and best-performing agents warrants continued research efforts to narrow this divide.

As video games evolve into expansive, detailed worlds, visual quality becomes essential, yet increasingly challenging. Traditional testing methods, limited by resources, face difficulties in addressing the plethora of potential bugs. Machine learning offers scalable solutions; however, heavy reliance on large labeled datasets remains a constraint. Addressing this challenge, we propose a novel method, utilizing unlabeled gameplay and domain-specific augmentations to generate datasets & self-supervised objectives used during pre-training or multi-task settings for downstream visual bug detection. Our methodology uses weak-supervision to scale datasets for the crafted objectives and facilitates both autonomous and interactive weak-supervision, incorporating unsupervised clustering and/or an interactive approach based on text and geometric prompts. We demonstrate on first-person player clipping/collision bugs (FPPC) within the expansive Giantmap game world, that our approach is very effective, improving over a strong supervised baseline in a practical, very low-prevalence, low data regime (0.336 rightarrow 0.550 F1 score). With just 5 labeled "good" exemplars (i.e., 0 bugs), our self-supervised objective alone captures enough signal to outperform the low-labeled supervised settings. Building on large-pretrained vision models, our approach is adaptable across various visual bugs. Our results suggest applicability in curating datasets for broader image and video tasks within video games beyond visual bugs.

Competitive Pok\'emon Singles (CPS) is a popular strategy game where players learn to exploit their opponent based on imperfect information in battles that can last more than one hundred stochastic turns. AI research in CPS has been led by heuristic tree search and online self-play, but the game may also create a platform to study adaptive policies trained offline on large datasets. We develop a pipeline to reconstruct the first-person perspective of an agent from logs saved from the third-person perspective of a spectator, thereby unlocking a dataset of real human battles spanning more than a decade that grows larger every day. This dataset enables a black-box approach where we train large sequence models to adapt to their opponent based solely on their input trajectory while selecting moves without explicit search of any kind. We study a progression from imitation learning to offline RL and offline fine-tuning on self-play data in the hardcore competitive setting of Pok\'emon's four oldest (and most partially observed) game generations. The resulting agents outperform a recent LLM Agent approach and a strong heuristic search engine. While playing anonymously in online battles against humans, our best agents climb to rankings inside the top 10% of active players.

Generative models trained on internet data have revolutionized how text, image, and video content can be created. Perhaps the next milestone for generative models is to simulate realistic experience in response to actions taken by humans, robots, and other interactive agents. Applications of a real-world simulator range from controllable content creation in games and movies, to training embodied agents purely in simulation that can be directly deployed in the real world. We explore the possibility of learning a universal simulator (UniSim) of real-world interaction through generative modeling. We first make the important observation that natural datasets available for learning a real-world simulator are often rich along different axes (e.g., abundant objects in image data, densely sampled actions in robotics data, and diverse movements in navigation data). With careful orchestration of diverse datasets, each providing a different aspect of the overall experience, UniSim can emulate how humans and agents interact with the world by simulating the visual outcome of both high-level instructions such as "open the drawer" and low-level controls such as "move by x, y" from otherwise static scenes and objects. There are numerous use cases for such a real-world simulator. As an example, we use UniSim to train both high-level vision-language planners and low-level reinforcement learning policies, each of which exhibit zero-shot real-world transfer after training purely in a learned real-world simulator. We also show that other types of intelligence such as video captioning models can benefit from training with simulated experience in UniSim, opening up even wider applications. Video demos can be found at https://universal-simulator.github.io.

Interactive video object segmentation is a crucial video task, having various applications from video editing to data annotating. However, current approaches struggle to accurately segment objects across diverse domains. Recently, Segment Anything Model (SAM) introduces interactive visual prompts and demonstrates impressive performance across different domains. In this paper, we propose a training-free prompt tracking framework for interactive video object segmentation (I-PT), leveraging the powerful generalization of SAM. Although point tracking efficiently captures the pixel-wise information of objects in a video, points tend to be unstable when tracked over a long period, resulting in incorrect segmentation. Towards fast and robust interaction, we jointly adopt sparse points and boxes tracking, filtering out unstable points and capturing object-wise information. To better integrate reference information from multiple interactions, we introduce a cross-round space-time module (CRSTM), which adaptively aggregates mask features from previous rounds and frames, enhancing the segmentation stability. Our framework has demonstrated robust zero-shot video segmentation results on popular VOS datasets with interaction types, including DAVIS 2017, YouTube-VOS 2018, and MOSE 2023, maintaining a good tradeoff between performance and interaction time.

This paper presents InteractEdit, a novel framework for zero-shot Human-Object Interaction (HOI) editing, addressing the challenging task of transforming an existing interaction in an image into a new, desired interaction while preserving the identities of the subject and object. Unlike simpler image editing scenarios such as attribute manipulation, object replacement or style transfer, HOI editing involves complex spatial, contextual, and relational dependencies inherent in humans-objects interactions. Existing methods often overfit to the source image structure, limiting their ability to adapt to the substantial structural modifications demanded by new interactions. To address this, InteractEdit decomposes each scene into subject, object, and background components, then employs Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and selective fine-tuning to preserve pretrained interaction priors while learning the visual identity of the source image. This regularization strategy effectively balances interaction edits with identity consistency. We further introduce IEBench, the most comprehensive benchmark for HOI editing, which evaluates both interaction editing and identity preservation. Our extensive experiments show that InteractEdit significantly outperforms existing methods, establishing a strong baseline for future HOI editing research and unlocking new possibilities for creative and practical applications. Code will be released upon publication.

Real-world user-generated short videos, especially those distributed on platforms such as WeChat Channel and TikTok, dominate the mobile internet. However, current large multimodal models lack essential temporally-structured, detailed, and in-depth video comprehension capabilities, which are the cornerstone of effective video search and recommendation, as well as emerging video applications. Understanding real-world shorts is actually challenging due to their complex visual elements, high information density in both visuals and audio, and fast pacing that focuses on emotional expression and viewpoint delivery. This requires advanced reasoning to effectively integrate multimodal information, including visual, audio, and text. In this work, we introduce ARC-Hunyuan-Video, a multimodal model that processes visual, audio, and textual signals from raw video inputs end-to-end for structured comprehension. The model is capable of multi-granularity timestamped video captioning and summarization, open-ended video question answering, temporal video grounding, and video reasoning. Leveraging high-quality data from an automated annotation pipeline, our compact 7B-parameter model is trained through a comprehensive regimen: pre-training, instruction fine-tuning, cold start, reinforcement learning (RL) post-training, and final instruction fine-tuning. Quantitative evaluations on our introduced benchmark ShortVid-Bench and qualitative comparisons demonstrate its strong performance in real-world video comprehension, and it supports zero-shot or fine-tuning with a few samples for diverse downstream applications. The real-world production deployment of our model has yielded tangible and measurable improvements in user engagement and satisfaction, a success supported by its remarkable efficiency, with stress tests indicating an inference time of just 10 seconds for a one-minute video on H20 GPU.

Generating videos for visual storytelling can be a tedious and complex process that typically requires either live-action filming or graphics animation rendering. To bypass these challenges, our key idea is to utilize the abundance of existing video clips and synthesize a coherent storytelling video by customizing their appearances. We achieve this by developing a framework comprised of two functional modules: (i) Motion Structure Retrieval, which provides video candidates with desired scene or motion context described by query texts, and (ii) Structure-Guided Text-to-Video Synthesis, which generates plot-aligned videos under the guidance of motion structure and text prompts. For the first module, we leverage an off-the-shelf video retrieval system and extract video depths as motion structure. For the second module, we propose a controllable video generation model that offers flexible controls over structure and characters. The videos are synthesized by following the structural guidance and appearance instruction. To ensure visual consistency across clips, we propose an effective concept personalization approach, which allows the specification of the desired character identities through text prompts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach exhibits significant advantages over various existing baselines.

AI Video Chat emerges as a new paradigm for Real-time Communication (RTC), where one peer is not a human, but a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM). This makes interaction between humans and AI more intuitive, as if chatting face-to-face with a real person. However, this poses significant challenges to latency, because the MLLM inference takes up most of the response time, leaving very little time for video streaming. Due to network uncertainty and instability, transmission latency becomes a critical bottleneck preventing AI from being like a real person. To address this, we propose Artic, an AI-oriented Real-time Communication framework, exploring the network requirement shift from "humans watching video" to "AI understanding video". To reduce bitrate dramatically while maintaining MLLM accuracy, we propose Context-Aware Video Streaming that recognizes the importance of each video region for chat and allocates bitrate almost exclusively to chat-important regions. To avoid packet retransmission, we propose Loss-Resilient Adaptive Frame Rate that leverages previous frames to substitute for lost/delayed frames while avoiding bitrate waste. To evaluate the impact of video streaming quality on MLLM accuracy, we build the first benchmark, named Degraded Video Understanding Benchmark (DeViBench). Finally, we discuss some open questions and ongoing solutions for AI Video Chat.

It is a long-lasting goal to design a generalist-embodied agent that can follow diverse instructions in human-like ways. However, existing approaches often fail to steadily follow instructions due to difficulties in understanding abstract and sequential natural language instructions. To this end, we introduce MineDreamer, an open-ended embodied agent built upon the challenging Minecraft simulator with an innovative paradigm that enhances instruction-following ability in low-level control signal generation. Specifically, MineDreamer is developed on top of recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and diffusion models, and we employ a Chain-of-Imagination (CoI) mechanism to envision the step-by-step process of executing instructions and translating imaginations into more precise visual prompts tailored to the current state; subsequently, the agent generates keyboard-and-mouse actions to efficiently achieve these imaginations, steadily following the instructions at each step. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MineDreamer follows single and multi-step instructions steadily, significantly outperforming the best generalist agent baseline and nearly doubling its performance. Moreover, qualitative analysis of the agent's imaginative ability reveals its generalization and comprehension of the open world.

Recently, great progress has been achieved in text-to-video (T2V) generation by scaling transformer-based diffusion models to billions of parameters, which can generate high-quality videos. However, existing models typically produce only short clips offline, restricting their use cases in interactive and real-time applications. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing StreamDiT, a streaming video generation model. StreamDiT training is based on flow matching by adding a moving buffer. We design mixed training with different partitioning schemes of buffered frames to boost both content consistency and visual quality. StreamDiT modeling is based on adaLN DiT with varying time embedding and window attention. To practice the proposed method, we train a StreamDiT model with 4B parameters. In addition, we propose a multistep distillation method tailored for StreamDiT. Sampling distillation is performed in each segment of a chosen partitioning scheme. After distillation, the total number of function evaluations (NFEs) is reduced to the number of chunks in a buffer. Finally, our distilled model reaches real-time performance at 16 FPS on one GPU, which can generate video streams at 512p resolution. We evaluate our method through both quantitative metrics and human evaluation. Our model enables real-time applications, e.g. streaming generation, interactive generation, and video-to-video. We provide video results and more examples in our project website: <a href="https://cumulo-autumn.github.io/StreamDiT/">this https URL.</a>

Recent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated great potential toward intelligent agents and next-gen automation, but there currently lacks a systematic benchmark for evaluating LLMs' abilities as agents. We introduce SmartPlay: both a challenging benchmark and a methodology for evaluating LLMs as agents. SmartPlay consists of 6 different games, including Rock-Paper-Scissors, Tower of Hanoi, Minecraft. Each game features a unique setting, providing up to 20 evaluation settings and infinite environment variations. Each game in SmartPlay uniquely challenges a subset of 9 important capabilities of an intelligent LLM agent, including reasoning with object dependencies, planning ahead, spatial reasoning, learning from history, and understanding randomness. The distinction between the set of capabilities each game test allows us to analyze each capability separately. SmartPlay serves not only as a rigorous testing ground for evaluating the overall performance of LLM agents but also as a road-map for identifying gaps in current methodologies. We release our benchmark at github.com/LLMsmartplay/SmartPlay

We introduce Genie, the first generative interactive environment trained in an unsupervised manner from unlabelled Internet videos. The model can be prompted to generate an endless variety of action-controllable virtual worlds described through text, synthetic images, photographs, and even sketches. At 11B parameters, Genie can be considered a foundation world model. It is comprised of a spatiotemporal video tokenizer, an autoregressive dynamics model, and a simple and scalable latent action model. Genie enables users to act in the generated environments on a frame-by-frame basis despite training without any ground-truth action labels or other domain-specific requirements typically found in the world model literature. Further the resulting learned latent action space facilitates training agents to imitate behaviors from unseen videos, opening the path for training generalist agents of the future.

In this work, we address the task of video background music generation. Some previous works achieve effective music generation but are unable to generate melodious music tailored to a particular video, and none of them considers the video-music rhythmic consistency. To generate the background music that matches the given video, we first establish the rhythmic relations between video and background music. In particular, we connect timing, motion speed, and motion saliency from video with beat, simu-note density, and simu-note strength from music, respectively. We then propose CMT, a Controllable Music Transformer that enables local control of the aforementioned rhythmic features and global control of the music genre and instruments. Objective and subjective evaluations show that the generated background music has achieved satisfactory compatibility with the input videos, and at the same time, impressive music quality. Code and models are available at https://github.com/wzk1015/video-bgm-generation.

NPCs in traditional games are often limited by static dialogue trees and a single platform for interaction. To overcome these constraints, this study presents a prototype system that enables large language model (LLM)-powered NPCs to communicate with players both in the game en vironment (Unity) and on a social platform (Discord). Dialogue logs are stored in a cloud database (LeanCloud), allowing the system to synchronize memory between platforms and keep conversa tions coherent. Our initial experiments show that cross-platform interaction is technically feasible and suggest a solid foundation for future developments such as emotional modeling and persistent memory support.

Text-adventure games and text role-playing games are grand challenges for reinforcement learning game playing agents. Text role-playing games are open-ended environments where an agent must faithfully play a particular character. We consider the distinction between characters and actors, where an actor agent has the ability to play multiple characters. We present a framework we call a thespian agent that can learn to emulate multiple characters along with a soft prompt that can be used to direct it as to which character to play at any time. We further describe an attention mechanism that allows the agent to learn new characters that are based on previously learned characters in a few-shot fashion. We show that our agent outperforms the state of the art agent framework in multi-character learning and few-shot learning.

It is a long-lasting goal to design an embodied system that can solve long-horizon open-world tasks in human-like ways. However, existing approaches usually struggle with compound difficulties caused by the logic-aware decomposition and context-aware execution of these tasks. To this end, we introduce MP5, an open-ended multimodal embodied system built upon the challenging Minecraft simulator, which can decompose feasible sub-objectives, design sophisticated situation-aware plans, and perform embodied action control, with frequent communication with a goal-conditioned active perception scheme. Specifically, MP5 is developed on top of recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), and the system is modulated into functional modules that can be scheduled and collaborated to ultimately solve pre-defined context- and process-dependent tasks. Extensive experiments prove that MP5 can achieve a 22% success rate on difficult process-dependent tasks and a 91% success rate on tasks that heavily depend on the context. Moreover, MP5 exhibits a remarkable ability to address many open-ended tasks that are entirely novel.

We present Interactive Neural Video Editing (INVE), a real-time video editing solution, which can assist the video editing process by consistently propagating sparse frame edits to the entire video clip. Our method is inspired by the recent work on Layered Neural Atlas (LNA). LNA, however, suffers from two major drawbacks: (1) the method is too slow for interactive editing, and (2) it offers insufficient support for some editing use cases, including direct frame editing and rigid texture tracking. To address these challenges we leverage and adopt highly efficient network architectures, powered by hash-grids encoding, to substantially improve processing speed. In addition, we learn bi-directional functions between image-atlas and introduce vectorized editing, which collectively enables a much greater variety of edits in both the atlas and the frames directly. Compared to LNA, our INVE reduces the learning and inference time by a factor of 5, and supports various video editing operations that LNA cannot. We showcase the superiority of INVE over LNA in interactive video editing through a comprehensive quantitative and qualitative analysis, highlighting its numerous advantages and improved performance. For video results, please see https://gabriel-huang.github.io/inve/

In recent years, social media users have spent significant amounts of time on short-form video platforms. As a result, established platforms in other domains, such as e-commerce, have begun introducing short-form video content to engage users and increase their time spent on the platform. The success of these experiences is due not only to the content itself but also to a unique UI innovation: instead of offering users a list of choices to click, platforms actively recommend content for users to watch one at a time. This creates new challenges for recommender systems, especially when launching a new video experience. Beyond the limited interaction data, immersive feed experiences introduce stronger position bias due to the UI and duration bias when optimizing for watch-time, as models tend to favor shorter videos. These issues, together with the feedback loop inherent in recommender systems, make it difficult to build effective solutions. In this paper, we highlight the challenges faced when introducing a new short-form video experience and present our experience showing that, even with sufficient video interaction data, it can be more beneficial to leverage a video retrieval system using a fine-tuned multimodal vision-language model to overcome these challenges. This approach demonstrated greater effectiveness compared to conventional supervised learning methods in online experiments conducted on our e-commerce platform.

Recently there has been a lot of progress in text-to-video generation, with state-of-the-art models being capable of generating high quality, realistic videos. However, these models lack the capability for users to interactively control and generate videos, which can potentially unlock new areas of application. As a first step towards this goal, we tackle the problem of endowing diffusion-based video generation models with interactive spatio-temporal control over their output. To this end, we take inspiration from the recent advances in segmentation literature to propose a novel spatio-temporal masked attention module - Peekaboo. This module is a training-free, no-inference-overhead addition to off-the-shelf video generation models which enables spatio-temporal control. We also propose an evaluation benchmark for the interactive video generation task. Through extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluation, we establish that Peekaboo enables control video generation and even obtains a gain of upto 3.8x in mIoU over baseline models.

Video generation models have achieved remarkable progress in creating high-quality, photorealistic content. However, their ability to accurately simulate physical phenomena remains a critical and unresolved challenge. This paper presents PhyWorldBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate video generation models based on their adherence to the laws of physics. The benchmark covers multiple levels of physical phenomena, ranging from fundamental principles like object motion and energy conservation to more complex scenarios involving rigid body interactions and human or animal motion. Additionally, we introduce a novel ""Anti-Physics"" category, where prompts intentionally violate real-world physics, enabling the assessment of whether models can follow such instructions while maintaining logical consistency. Besides large-scale human evaluation, we also design a simple yet effective method that could utilize current MLLM to evaluate the physics realism in a zero-shot fashion. We evaluate 12 state-of-the-art text-to-video generation models, including five open-source and five proprietary models, with a detailed comparison and analysis. we identify pivotal challenges models face in adhering to real-world physics. Through systematic testing of their outputs across 1,050 curated prompts-spanning fundamental, composite, and anti-physics scenarios-we identify pivotal challenges these models face in adhering to real-world physics. We then rigorously examine their performance on diverse physical phenomena with varying prompt types, deriving targeted recommendations for crafting prompts that enhance fidelity to physical principles.

This paper aims to advance the progress of physical world interactive scene reconstruction by extending the interactive object reconstruction from single object level to complex scene level. To this end, we first construct one simulated and one real scene-level physical interaction dataset containing 28 scenes with multiple interactive objects per scene. Furthermore, to accurately model the interactive motions of multiple objects in complex scenes, we propose LiveScene, the first scene-level language-embedded interactive neural radiance field that efficiently reconstructs and controls multiple interactive objects in complex scenes. LiveScene introduces an efficient factorization that decomposes the interactive scene into multiple local deformable fields to separately reconstruct individual interactive objects, achieving the first accurate and independent control on multiple interactive objects in a complex scene. Moreover, we introduce an interaction-aware language embedding method that generates varying language embeddings to localize individual interactive objects under different interactive states, enabling arbitrary control of interactive objects using natural language. Finally, we evaluate LiveScene on the constructed datasets OminiSim and InterReal with various simulated and real-world complex scenes. Extensive experiment results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves SOTA novel view synthesis and language grounding performance, surpassing existing methods by +9.89, +1.30, and +1.99 in PSNR on CoNeRF Synthetic, OminiSim #chanllenging, and InterReal #chanllenging datasets, and +65.12 of mIOU on OminiSim, respectively. Project page: https://livescenes.github.io{https://livescenes.github.io}.

Motion control is crucial for generating expressive and compelling video content; however, most existing video generation models rely mainly on text prompts for control, which struggle to capture the nuances of dynamic actions and temporal compositions. To this end, we train a video generation model conditioned on spatio-temporally sparse or dense motion trajectories. In contrast to prior motion conditioning work, this flexible representation can encode any number of trajectories, object-specific or global scene motion, and temporally sparse motion; due to its flexibility we refer to this conditioning as motion prompts. While users may directly specify sparse trajectories, we also show how to translate high-level user requests into detailed, semi-dense motion prompts, a process we term motion prompt expansion. We demonstrate the versatility of our approach through various applications, including camera and object motion control, "interacting" with an image, motion transfer, and image editing. Our results showcase emergent behaviors, such as realistic physics, suggesting the potential of motion prompts for probing video models and interacting with future generative world models. Finally, we evaluate quantitatively, conduct a human study, and demonstrate strong performance. Video results are available on our webpage: https://motion-prompting.github.io/

The game industry is challenged to cope with increasing growth in demand and game complexity while maintaining acceptable quality standards for released games. Classic approaches solely depending on human efforts for quality assurance and game testing do not scale effectively in terms of time and cost. Game-testing AI agents that learn by interaction with the environment have the potential to mitigate these challenges with good scalability properties on time and costs. However, most recent work in this direction depends on game state information for the agent's state representation, which limits generalization across different game scenarios. Moreover, game test engineers usually prefer exploring a game in a specific style, such as exploring the golden path. However, current game testing AI agents do not provide an explicit way to satisfy such a preference. This paper addresses these limitations by proposing an agent design that mainly depends on pixel-based state observations while exploring the environment conditioned on a user's preference specified by demonstration trajectories. In addition, we propose an imitation learning method that couples self-supervised and supervised learning objectives to enhance the quality of imitation behaviors. Our agent significantly outperforms state-of-the-art pixel-based game testing agents over exploration coverage and test execution quality when evaluated on a complex open-world environment resembling many aspects of real AAA games.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents, powered by Large Foundation Models, have emerged as a transformative approach to automating human-computer interaction. These agents autonomously interact with digital systems or software applications via GUIs, emulating human actions such as clicking, typing, and navigating visual elements across diverse platforms. Motivated by the growing interest and fundamental importance of GUI agents, we provide a comprehensive survey that categorizes their benchmarks, evaluation metrics, architectures, and training methods. We propose a unified framework that delineates their perception, reasoning, planning, and acting capabilities. Furthermore, we identify important open challenges and discuss key future directions. Finally, this work serves as a basis for practitioners and researchers to gain an intuitive understanding of current progress, techniques, benchmarks, and critical open problems that remain to be addressed.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have expanded their capabilities beyond traditional text-based tasks to multimodal domains, integrating visual, auditory, and textual data. While multimodal LLMs have been extensively explored for high-level planning in domains like robotics and games, their potential as low-level controllers remains largely untapped. This paper explores the application of multimodal LLMs as low-level controllers in the domain of Atari video games, introducing Atari game performance as a new benchmark for evaluating the ability of multimodal LLMs to perform low-level control tasks. Unlike traditional reinforcement learning (RL) and imitation learning (IL) methods that require extensive computational resources as well as reward function specification, these LLMs utilize pre-existing multimodal knowledge to directly engage with game environments. Our study assesses multiple multimodal LLMs performance against traditional RL agents, human players, and random agents, focusing on their ability to understand and interact with complex visual scenes and formulate strategic responses. Additionally, we examine the impact of In-Context Learning (ICL) by incorporating human-demonstrated game-play trajectories to enhance the models contextual understanding. Through this investigation, we aim to determine the extent to which multimodal LLMs can leverage their extensive training to effectively function as low-level controllers, thereby redefining potential applications in dynamic and visually complex environments. Additional results and videos are available at our project webpage: https://sites.google.com/view/atari-gpt/.

We present a novel task called online video editing, which is designed to edit streaming frames while maintaining temporal consistency. Unlike existing offline video editing assuming all frames are pre-established and accessible, online video editing is tailored to real-life applications such as live streaming and online chat, requiring (1) fast continual step inference, (2) long-term temporal modeling, and (3) zero-shot video editing capability. To solve these issues, we propose Streaming Video Diffusion (SVDiff), which incorporates the compact spatial-aware temporal recurrence into off-the-shelf Stable Diffusion and is trained with the segment-level scheme on large-scale long videos. This simple yet effective setup allows us to obtain a single model that is capable of executing a broad range of videos and editing each streaming frame with temporal coherence. Our experiments indicate that our model can edit long, high-quality videos with remarkable results, achieving a real-time inference speed of 15.2 FPS at a resolution of 512x512.

In this study, our goal is to create interactive avatar agents that can autonomously plan and animate nuanced facial movements realistically, from both visual and behavioral perspectives. Given high-level inputs about the environment and agent profile, our framework harnesses LLMs to produce a series of detailed text descriptions of the avatar agents' facial motions. These descriptions are then processed by our task-agnostic driving engine into motion token sequences, which are subsequently converted into continuous motion embeddings that are further consumed by our standalone neural-based renderer to generate the final photorealistic avatar animations. These streamlined processes allow our framework to adapt to a variety of non-verbal avatar interactions, both monadic and dyadic. Our extensive study, which includes experiments on both newly compiled and existing datasets featuring two types of agents -- one capable of monadic interaction with the environment, and the other designed for dyadic conversation -- validates the effectiveness and versatility of our approach. To our knowledge, we advanced a leap step by combining LLMs and neural rendering for generalized non-verbal prediction and photo-realistic rendering of avatar agents.

Interactive digital agents (IDAs) leverage APIs of stateful digital environments to perform tasks in response to user requests. While IDAs powered by instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) can react to feedback from interface invocations in multi-step exchanges, they have not been trained in their respective digital environments. Prior methods accomplish less than half of tasks in sophisticated benchmarks such as AppWorld. We present a reinforcement learning (RL) approach that trains IDAs directly in their target environments. We formalize this training as a partially observable Markov decision process and derive LOOP, a data- and memory-efficient variant of proximal policy optimization. LOOP uses no value network and maintains exactly one copy of the underlying LLM in memory, making its implementation straightforward and as memory-efficient as fine-tuning a single LLM. A 32-billion-parameter agent trained with LOOP in the AppWorld environment outperforms the much larger OpenAI o1 agent by 9 percentage points (15% relative). To our knowledge, this is the first reported application of RL to IDAs that interact with a stateful, multi-domain, multi-app environment via direct API calls. Our analysis sheds light on the effectiveness of RL in this area, showing that the agent learns to consult the API documentation, avoid unwarranted assumptions, minimize confabulation, and recover from setbacks.

Generative game engines have the potential to revolutionize game development by autonomously creating new content and reducing manual workload. However, existing video-based game generation methods fail to address the critical challenge of scene generalization, limiting their applicability to existing games with fixed styles and scenes. In this paper, we present GameFactory, a framework focused on exploring scene generalization in game video generation. To enable the creation of entirely new and diverse games, we leverage pre-trained video diffusion models trained on open-domain video data. To bridge the domain gap between open-domain priors and small-scale game dataset, we propose a multi-phase training strategy that decouples game style learning from action control, preserving open-domain generalization while achieving action controllability. Using Minecraft as our data source, we release GF-Minecraft, a high-quality and diversity action-annotated video dataset for research. Furthermore, we extend our framework to enable autoregressive action-controllable game video generation, allowing the production of unlimited-length interactive game videos. Experimental results demonstrate that GameFactory effectively generates open-domain, diverse, and action-controllable game videos, representing a significant step forward in AI-driven game generation. Our dataset and project page are publicly available at https://vvictoryuki.github.io/gamefactory/.

Creating digital avatars from textual prompts has long been a desirable yet challenging task. Despite the promising outcomes obtained through 2D diffusion priors in recent works, current methods face challenges in achieving high-quality and animated avatars effectively. In this paper, we present HeadStudio, a novel framework that utilizes 3D Gaussian splatting to generate realistic and animated avatars from text prompts. Our method drives 3D Gaussians semantically to create a flexible and achievable appearance through the intermediate FLAME representation. Specifically, we incorporate the FLAME into both 3D representation and score distillation: 1) FLAME-based 3D Gaussian splatting, driving 3D Gaussian points by rigging each point to a FLAME mesh. 2) FLAME-based score distillation sampling, utilizing FLAME-based fine-grained control signal to guide score distillation from the text prompt. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of HeadStudio in generating animatable avatars from textual prompts, exhibiting visually appealing appearances. The avatars are capable of rendering high-quality real-time (geq 40 fps) novel views at a resolution of 1024. They can be smoothly controlled by real-world speech and video. We hope that HeadStudio can advance digital avatar creation and that the present method can widely be applied across various domains.

Constructing AI models that respond to text instructions is challenging, especially for sequential decision-making tasks. This work introduces an instruction-tuned Video Pretraining (VPT) model for Minecraft called STEVE-1, demonstrating that the unCLIP approach, utilized in DALL-E 2, is also effective for creating instruction-following sequential decision-making agents. STEVE-1 is trained in two steps: adapting the pretrained VPT model to follow commands in MineCLIP's latent space, then training a prior to predict latent codes from text. This allows us to finetune VPT through self-supervised behavioral cloning and hindsight relabeling, bypassing the need for costly human text annotations. By leveraging pretrained models like VPT and MineCLIP and employing best practices from text-conditioned image generation, STEVE-1 costs just $60 to train and can follow a wide range of short-horizon open-ended text and visual instructions in Minecraft. STEVE-1 sets a new bar for open-ended instruction following in Minecraft with low-level controls (mouse and keyboard) and raw pixel inputs, far outperforming previous baselines. We provide experimental evidence highlighting key factors for downstream performance, including pretraining, classifier-free guidance, and data scaling. All resources, including our model weights, training scripts, and evaluation tools are made available for further research.

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

We present WonderWorld, a novel framework for interactive 3D scene generation that enables users to interactively specify scene contents and layout and see the created scenes in low latency. The major challenge lies in achieving fast generation of 3D scenes. Existing scene generation approaches fall short of speed as they often require (1) progressively generating many views and depth maps, and (2) time-consuming optimization of the scene geometry representations. We introduce the Fast Layered Gaussian Surfels (FLAGS) as our scene representation and an algorithm to generate it from a single view. Our approach does not need multiple views, and it leverages a geometry-based initialization that significantly reduces optimization time. Another challenge is generating coherent geometry that allows all scenes to be connected. We introduce the guided depth diffusion that allows partial conditioning of depth estimation. WonderWorld generates connected and diverse 3D scenes in less than 10 seconds on a single A6000 GPU, enabling real-time user interaction and exploration. We demonstrate the potential of WonderWorld for user-driven content creation and exploration in virtual environments. We will release full code and software for reproducibility. Project website: https://kovenyu.com/WonderWorld/.

To generate accurate videos, algorithms have to understand the spatial and temporal dependencies in the world. Current algorithms enable accurate predictions over short horizons but tend to suffer from temporal inconsistencies. When generated content goes out of view and is later revisited, the model invents different content instead. Despite this severe limitation, no established benchmarks on complex data exist for rigorously evaluating video generation with long temporal dependencies. In this paper, we curate 3 challenging video datasets with long-range dependencies by rendering walks through 3D scenes of procedural mazes, Minecraft worlds, and indoor scans. We perform a comprehensive evaluation of current models and observe their limitations in temporal consistency. Moreover, we introduce the Temporally Consistent Transformer (TECO), a generative model that substantially improves long-term consistency while also reducing sampling time. By compressing its input sequence into fewer embeddings, applying a temporal transformer, and expanding back using a spatial MaskGit, TECO outperforms existing models across many metrics. Videos are available on the website: https://wilson1yan.github.io/teco

Recent advances in generative models have significantly impacted game generation. However, despite producing high-quality graphics and adequately receiving player input, existing models often fail to maintain fundamental game properties such as numerical and spatial consistency. Numerical consistency ensures gameplay mechanics correctly reflect score changes and other quantitative elements, while spatial consistency prevents jarring scene transitions, providing seamless player experiences. In this paper, we revisit the paradigm of generative games to explore what truly constitutes a Model as a Game (MaaG) with a well-developed mechanism. We begin with an empirical study on ``Traveler'', a 2D game created by an LLM featuring minimalist rules yet challenging generative models in maintaining consistency. Based on the DiT architecture, we design two specialized modules: (1) a numerical module that integrates a LogicNet to determine event triggers, with calculations processed externally as conditions for image generation; and (2) a spatial module that maintains a map of explored areas, retrieving location-specific information during generation and linking new observations to ensure continuity. Experiments across three games demonstrate that our integrated modules significantly enhance performance on consistency metrics compared to baselines, while incurring minimal time overhead during inference.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are reshaping the game industry, particularly with more intelligent and human-preferable game characters. However, existing game benchmarks fall short of practical needs: they lack evaluations of diverse LLM capabilities across various game genres, studies of agentic modules crucial for complex gameplay, and fine-tuning datasets for aligning pre-trained LLMs into gaming agents. To fill these gaps, we present \benchname{}, a foundational benchmark designed to train and evaluate LLM agents across diverse real-world video games. Unlike existing benchmarks, Orak includes 12 popular video games spanning all major genres, enabling comprehensive studies of LLM capabilities and agentic modules essential for intricate game scenarios. To support consistent evaluation of LLMs, we introduce a plug-and-play interface based on Model Context Protocol (MCP) that enables LLMs to seamlessly connect with games and manipulate agentic modules. Additionally, we propose a fine-tuning dataset, consisting of LLM gameplay trajectories across diverse game genres. Orak offers a comprehensive evaluation framework, encompassing general game score leaderboards, LLM battle arenas, and in-depth analyses of visual input state, agentic strategies, and fine-tuning effects, establishing a foundation towards building generic gaming agents. Code is available at https://github.com/krafton-ai/Orak.

Controllable character animation remains a challenging problem, particularly in handling rare poses, stylized characters, character-object interactions, complex illumination, and dynamic scenes. To tackle these issues, prior work has largely focused on injecting pose and appearance guidance via elaborate bypass networks, but often struggles to generalize to open-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a new perspective that, as long as the foundation model is powerful enough, straightforward model modifications with flexible fine-tuning strategies can largely address the above challenges, taking a step towards controllable character animation in the wild. Specifically, we introduce RealisDance-DiT, built upon the Wan-2.1 video foundation model. Our sufficient analysis reveals that the widely adopted Reference Net design is suboptimal for large-scale DiT models. Instead, we demonstrate that minimal modifications to the foundation model architecture yield a surprisingly strong baseline. We further propose the low-noise warmup and "large batches and small iterations" strategies to accelerate model convergence during fine-tuning while maximally preserving the priors of the foundation model. In addition, we introduce a new test dataset that captures diverse real-world challenges, complementing existing benchmarks such as TikTok dataset and UBC fashion video dataset, to comprehensively evaluate the proposed method. Extensive experiments show that RealisDance-DiT outperforms existing methods by a large margin.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly boosted the rise of Role-Playing Language Agents (RPLAs), i.e., specialized AI systems designed to simulate assigned personas. By harnessing multiple advanced abilities of LLMs, including in-context learning, instruction following, and social intelligence, RPLAs achieve a remarkable sense of human likeness and vivid role-playing performance. RPLAs can mimic a wide range of personas, ranging from historical figures and fictional characters to real-life individuals. Consequently, they have catalyzed numerous AI applications, such as emotional companions, interactive video games, personalized assistants and copilots, and digital clones. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive survey of this field, illustrating the evolution and recent progress in RPLAs integrating with cutting-edge LLM technologies. We categorize personas into three types: 1) Demographic Persona, which leverages statistical stereotypes; 2) Character Persona, focused on well-established figures; and 3) Individualized Persona, customized through ongoing user interactions for personalized services. We begin by presenting a comprehensive overview of current methodologies for RPLAs, followed by the details for each persona type, covering corresponding data sourcing, agent construction, and evaluation. Afterward, we discuss the fundamental risks, existing limitations, and future prospects of RPLAs. Additionally, we provide a brief review of RPLAs in AI applications, which reflects practical user demands that shape and drive RPLA research. Through this work, we aim to establish a clear taxonomy of RPLA research and applications, and facilitate future research in this critical and ever-evolving field, and pave the way for a future where humans and RPLAs coexist in harmony.

Mobile agents that can leverage help from humans can potentially accomplish more complex tasks than they could entirely on their own. We develop "Help, Anna!" (HANNA), an interactive photo-realistic simulator in which an agent fulfills object-finding tasks by requesting and interpreting natural language-and-vision assistance. An agent solving tasks in a HANNA environment can leverage simulated human assistants, called ANNA (Automatic Natural Navigation Assistants), which, upon request, provide natural language and visual instructions to direct the agent towards the goals. To address the HANNA problem, we develop a memory-augmented neural agent that hierarchically models multiple levels of decision-making, and an imitation learning algorithm that teaches the agent to avoid repeating past mistakes while simultaneously predicting its own chances of making future progress. Empirically, our approach is able to ask for help more effectively than competitive baselines and, thus, attains higher task success rate on both previously seen and previously unseen environments. We publicly release code and data at https://github.com/khanhptnk/hanna . A video demo is available at https://youtu.be/18P94aaaLKg .

We propose Point'n Move, a method that achieves interactive scene object manipulation with exposed region inpainting. Interactivity here further comes from intuitive object selection and real-time editing. To achieve this, we adopt Gaussian Splatting Radiance Field as the scene representation and fully leverage its explicit nature and speed advantage. Its explicit representation formulation allows us to devise a 2D prompt points to 3D mask dual-stage self-prompting segmentation algorithm, perform mask refinement and merging, minimize change as well as provide good initialization for scene inpainting and perform editing in real-time without per-editing training, all leads to superior quality and performance. We test our method by performing editing on both forward-facing and 360 scenes. We also compare our method against existing scene object removal methods, showing superior quality despite being more capable and having a speed advantage.

This paper presents a web-based tool that facilitates the production of tailored summaries for online sharing on social media. Through an interactive user interface, it supports a ``one-click'' video summarization process. Based on the integrated AI models for video summarization and aspect ratio transformation, it facilitates the generation of multiple summaries of a full-length video according to the needs of target platforms with regard to the video's length and aspect ratio.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has enabled agents to master complex video games, from first-person shooters like Counter-Strike to real-time strategy games such as StarCraft II and racing games like Gran Turismo. While these achievements are notable, applying these AI methods in commercial video game production remains challenging due to computational constraints. In commercial scenarios, the majority of computational resources are allocated to 3D rendering, leaving limited capacity for AI methods, which often demand high computational power, particularly those relying on pixel-based sensors. Moreover, the gaming industry prioritizes creating human-like behavior in AI agents to enhance player experience, unlike academic models that focus on maximizing game performance. This paper introduces a novel methodology for training neural networks via imitation learning to play a complex, commercial-standard, VALORANT-like 2v2 tactical shooter game, requiring only modest CPU hardware during inference. Our approach leverages an innovative, pixel-free perception architecture using a small set of ray-cast sensors, which capture essential spatial information efficiently. These sensors allow AI to perform competently without the computational overhead of traditional methods. Models are trained to mimic human behavior using supervised learning on human trajectory data, resulting in realistic and engaging AI agents. Human evaluation tests confirm that our AI agents provide human-like gameplay experiences while operating efficiently under computational constraints. This offers a significant advancement in AI model development for tactical shooter games and possibly other genres.

The fashion e-commerce industry has witnessed significant growth in recent years, prompting exploring image-based virtual try-on techniques to incorporate Augmented Reality (AR) experiences into online shopping platforms. However, existing research has primarily overlooked a crucial aspect - the runtime of the underlying machine-learning model. While existing methods prioritize enhancing output quality, they often disregard the execution time, which restricts their applications on a limited range of devices. To address this gap, we propose Distilled Mobile Real-time Virtual Try-On (DM-VTON), a novel virtual try-on framework designed to achieve simplicity and efficiency. Our approach is based on a knowledge distillation scheme that leverages a strong Teacher network as supervision to guide a Student network without relying on human parsing. Notably, we introduce an efficient Mobile Generative Module within the Student network, significantly reducing the runtime while ensuring high-quality output. Additionally, we propose Virtual Try-on-guided Pose for Data Synthesis to address the limited pose variation observed in training images. Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve 40 frames per second on a single Nvidia Tesla T4 GPU and only take up 37 MB of memory while producing almost the same output quality as other state-of-the-art methods. DM-VTON stands poised to facilitate the advancement of real-time AR applications, in addition to the generation of lifelike attired human figures tailored for diverse specialized training tasks. https://sites.google.com/view/ltnghia/research/DMVTON

Real-time video frame interpolation (VFI) is very useful in video processing, media players, and display devices. We propose RIFE, a Real-time Intermediate Flow Estimation algorithm for VFI. To realize a high-quality flow-based VFI method, RIFE uses a neural network named IFNet that can estimate the intermediate flows end-to-end with much faster speed. A privileged distillation scheme is designed for stable IFNet training and improve the overall performance. RIFE does not rely on pre-trained optical flow models and can support arbitrary-timestep frame interpolation with the temporal encoding input. Experiments demonstrate that RIFE achieves state-of-the-art performance on several public benchmarks. Compared with the popular SuperSlomo and DAIN methods, RIFE is 4--27 times faster and produces better results. Furthermore, RIFE can be extended to wider applications thanks to temporal encoding. The code is available at https://github.com/megvii-research/ECCV2022-RIFE.

Customized text-to-video generation aims to produce high-quality videos that incorporate user-specified subject identities or motion patterns. However, existing methods mainly focus on personalizing a single concept, either subject identity or motion pattern, limiting their effectiveness for multiple subjects with the desired motion patterns. To tackle this challenge, we propose a unified framework VideoMage for video customization over both multiple subjects and their interactive motions. VideoMage employs subject and motion LoRAs to capture personalized content from user-provided images and videos, along with an appearance-agnostic motion learning approach to disentangle motion patterns from visual appearance. Furthermore, we develop a spatial-temporal composition scheme to guide interactions among subjects within the desired motion patterns. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VideoMage outperforms existing methods, generating coherent, user-controlled videos with consistent subject identities and interactions.

As consumer Virtual Reality (VR) and Mixed Reality (MR) technologies gain momentum, there's a growing focus on the development of engagements with 3D virtual content. Unfortunately, traditional techniques for content creation, editing, and interaction within these virtual spaces are fraught with difficulties. They tend to be not only engineering-intensive but also require extensive expertise, which adds to the frustration and inefficiency in virtual object manipulation. Our proposed VR-GS system represents a leap forward in human-centered 3D content interaction, offering a seamless and intuitive user experience. By developing a physical dynamics-aware interactive Gaussian Splatting in a Virtual Reality setting, and constructing a highly efficient two-level embedding strategy alongside deformable body simulations, VR-GS ensures real-time execution with highly realistic dynamic responses. The components of our Virtual Reality system are designed for high efficiency and effectiveness, starting from detailed scene reconstruction and object segmentation, advancing through multi-view image in-painting, and extending to interactive physics-based editing. The system also incorporates real-time deformation embedding and dynamic shadow casting, ensuring a comprehensive and engaging virtual experience.Our project page is available at: https://yingjiang96.github.io/VR-GS/.

Text-to-video generative models have made remarkable advancements in recent years. However, generating RGBA videos with alpha channels for transparency and visual effects remains a significant challenge due to the scarcity of suitable datasets and the complexity of adapting existing models for this purpose. To address these limitations, we present TransAnimate, an innovative framework that integrates RGBA image generation techniques with video generation modules, enabling the creation of dynamic and transparent videos. TransAnimate efficiently leverages pre-trained text-to-transparent image model weights and combines them with temporal models and controllability plugins trained on RGB videos, adapting them for controllable RGBA video generation tasks. Additionally, we introduce an interactive motion-guided control mechanism, where directional arrows define movement and colors adjust scaling, offering precise and intuitive control for designing game effects. To further alleviate data scarcity, we have developed a pipeline for creating an RGBA video dataset, incorporating high-quality game effect videos, extracted foreground objects, and synthetic transparent videos. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that TransAnimate generates high-quality RGBA videos, establishing it as a practical and effective tool for applications in gaming and visual effects.

Traffic monitoring is crucial for urban mobility, road safety, and intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Deep learning has advanced video-based traffic monitoring through video question answering (VideoQA) models, enabling structured insight extraction from traffic videos. However, existing VideoQA models struggle with the complexity of real-world traffic scenes, where multiple concurrent events unfold across spatiotemporal dimensions. To address these challenges, this paper introduces InterAct VideoQA, a curated dataset designed to benchmark and enhance VideoQA models for traffic monitoring tasks. The InterAct VideoQA dataset comprises 8 hours of real-world traffic footage collected from diverse intersections, segmented into 10-second video clips, with over 25,000 question-answer (QA) pairs covering spatiotemporal dynamics, vehicle interactions, incident detection, and other critical traffic attributes. State-of-the-art VideoQA models are evaluated on InterAct VideoQA, exposing challenges in reasoning over fine-grained spatiotemporal dependencies within complex traffic scenarios. Additionally, fine-tuning these models on InterAct VideoQA yields notable performance improvements, demonstrating the necessity of domain-specific datasets for VideoQA. InterAct VideoQA is publicly available as a benchmark dataset to facilitate future research in real-world deployable VideoQA models for intelligent transportation systems. GitHub Repo: https://github.com/joe-rabbit/InterAct_VideoQA

Character video synthesis aims to produce realistic videos of animatable characters within lifelike scenes. As a fundamental problem in the computer vision and graphics community, 3D works typically require multi-view captures for per-case training, which severely limits their applicability of modeling arbitrary characters in a short time. Recent 2D methods break this limitation via pre-trained diffusion models, but they struggle for pose generality and scene interaction. To this end, we propose MIMO, a novel framework which can not only synthesize character videos with controllable attributes (i.e., character, motion and scene) provided by simple user inputs, but also simultaneously achieve advanced scalability to arbitrary characters, generality to novel 3D motions, and applicability to interactive real-world scenes in a unified framework. The core idea is to encode the 2D video to compact spatial codes, considering the inherent 3D nature of video occurrence. Concretely, we lift the 2D frame pixels into 3D using monocular depth estimators, and decompose the video clip to three spatial components (i.e., main human, underlying scene, and floating occlusion) in hierarchical layers based on the 3D depth. These components are further encoded to canonical identity code, structured motion code and full scene code, which are utilized as control signals of synthesis process. The design of spatial decomposed modeling enables flexible user control, complex motion expression, as well as 3D-aware synthesis for scene interactions. Experimental results demonstrate effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method.

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has enabled role-playing language agents to demonstrate significant potential in various applications. However, relying solely on prompts and contextual inputs often proves insufficient for achieving deep immersion in specific roles, particularly well-known fictional or public figures. On the other hand, fine-tuning-based approaches face limitations due to the challenges associated with data collection and the computational resources required for training, thereby restricting their broader applicability. To address these issues, we propose Test-Time-Matching (TTM), a training-free role-playing framework through test-time scaling and context engineering. TTM uses LLM agents to automatically decouple a character's features into personality, memory, and linguistic style. Our framework involves a structured, three-stage generation pipeline that utilizes these features for controlled role-playing. It achieves high-fidelity role-playing performance, also enables seamless combinations across diverse linguistic styles and even variations in personality and memory. We evaluate our framework through human assessment, and the results demonstrate that our method achieves the outstanding performance in generating expressive and stylistically consistent character dialogues.

We present a novel method for populating 3D indoor scenes with virtual humans that can navigate in the environment and interact with objects in a realistic manner. Existing approaches rely on training sequences that contain captured human motions and the 3D scenes they interact with. However, such interaction data are costly, difficult to capture, and can hardly cover all plausible human-scene interactions in complex environments. To address these challenges, we propose a reinforcement learning-based approach that enables virtual humans to navigate in 3D scenes and interact with objects realistically and autonomously, driven by learned motion control policies. The motion control policies employ latent motion action spaces, which correspond to realistic motion primitives and are learned from large-scale motion capture data using a powerful generative motion model. For navigation in a 3D environment, we propose a scene-aware policy with novel state and reward designs for collision avoidance. Combined with navigation mesh-based path-finding algorithms to generate intermediate waypoints, our approach enables the synthesis of diverse human motions navigating in 3D indoor scenes and avoiding obstacles. To generate fine-grained human-object interactions, we carefully curate interaction goal guidance using a marker-based body representation and leverage features based on the signed distance field (SDF) to encode human-scene proximity relations. Our method can synthesize realistic and diverse human-object interactions (e.g.,~sitting on a chair and then getting up) even for out-of-distribution test scenarios with different object shapes, orientations, starting body positions, and poses. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of both motion naturalness and diversity. Code and video results are available at: https://zkf1997.github.io/DIMOS.

Text-driven video generation witnesses rapid progress. However, merely using text prompts is not enough to depict the desired subject appearance that accurately aligns with users' intents, especially for customized content creation. In this paper, we study the task of video generation with image prompts, which provide more accurate and direct content control beyond the text prompts. Specifically, we propose a feed-forward framework VideoBooth, with two dedicated designs: 1) We propose to embed image prompts in a coarse-to-fine manner. Coarse visual embeddings from image encoder provide high-level encodings of image prompts, while fine visual embeddings from the proposed attention injection module provide multi-scale and detailed encoding of image prompts. These two complementary embeddings can faithfully capture the desired appearance. 2) In the attention injection module at fine level, multi-scale image prompts are fed into different cross-frame attention layers as additional keys and values. This extra spatial information refines the details in the first frame and then it is propagated to the remaining frames, which maintains temporal consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VideoBooth achieves state-of-the-art performance in generating customized high-quality videos with subjects specified in image prompts. Notably, VideoBooth is a generalizable framework where a single model works for a wide range of image prompts with feed-forward pass.

This paper introduces SC2LE (StarCraft II Learning Environment), a reinforcement learning environment based on the StarCraft II game. This domain poses a new grand challenge for reinforcement learning, representing a more difficult class of problems than considered in most prior work. It is a multi-agent problem with multiple players interacting; there is imperfect information due to a partially observed map; it has a large action space involving the selection and control of hundreds of units; it has a large state space that must be observed solely from raw input feature planes; and it has delayed credit assignment requiring long-term strategies over thousands of steps. We describe the observation, action, and reward specification for the StarCraft II domain and provide an open source Python-based interface for communicating with the game engine. In addition to the main game maps, we provide a suite of mini-games focusing on different elements of StarCraft II gameplay. For the main game maps, we also provide an accompanying dataset of game replay data from human expert players. We give initial baseline results for neural networks trained from this data to predict game outcomes and player actions. Finally, we present initial baseline results for canonical deep reinforcement learning agents applied to the StarCraft II domain. On the mini-games, these agents learn to achieve a level of play that is comparable to a novice player. However, when trained on the main game, these agents are unable to make significant progress. Thus, SC2LE offers a new and challenging environment for exploring deep reinforcement learning algorithms and architectures.

Behavioural cloning uses a dataset of demonstrations to learn a behavioural policy. To overcome various learning and policy adaptation problems, we propose to use latent space to index a demonstration dataset, instantly access similar relevant experiences, and copy behavior from these situations. Actions from a selected similar situation can be performed by the agent until representations of the agent's current situation and the selected experience diverge in the latent space. Thus, we formulate our control problem as a search problem over a dataset of experts' demonstrations. We test our approach on BASALT MineRL-dataset in the latent representation of a Video PreTraining model. We compare our model to state-of-the-art Minecraft agents. Our approach can effectively recover meaningful demonstrations and show human-like behavior of an agent in the Minecraft environment in a wide variety of scenarios. Experimental results reveal that performance of our search-based approach is comparable to trained models, while allowing zero-shot task adaptation by changing the demonstration examples.

The sound effects that designers add to videos are designed to convey a particular artistic effect and, thus, may be quite different from a scene's true sound. Inspired by the challenges of creating a soundtrack for a video that differs from its true sound, but that nonetheless matches the actions occurring on screen, we propose the problem of conditional Foley. We present the following contributions to address this problem. First, we propose a pretext task for training our model to predict sound for an input video clip using a conditional audio-visual clip sampled from another time within the same source video. Second, we propose a model for generating a soundtrack for a silent input video, given a user-supplied example that specifies what the video should "sound like". We show through human studies and automated evaluation metrics that our model successfully generates sound from video, while varying its output according to the content of a supplied example. Project site: https://xypb.github.io/CondFoleyGen/

We present a method for augmenting real-world videos with newly generated dynamic content. Given an input video and a simple user-provided text instruction describing the desired content, our method synthesizes dynamic objects or complex scene effects that naturally interact with the existing scene over time. The position, appearance, and motion of the new content are seamlessly integrated into the original footage while accounting for camera motion, occlusions, and interactions with other dynamic objects in the scene, resulting in a cohesive and realistic output video. We achieve this via a zero-shot, training-free framework that harnesses a pre-trained text-to-video diffusion transformer to synthesize the new content and a pre-trained Vision Language Model to envision the augmented scene in detail. Specifically, we introduce a novel inference-based method that manipulates features within the attention mechanism, enabling accurate localization and seamless integration of the new content while preserving the integrity of the original scene. Our method is fully automated, requiring only a simple user instruction. We demonstrate its effectiveness on a wide range of edits applied to real-world videos, encompassing diverse objects and scenarios involving both camera and object motion.

The prototyping of computer games, particularly card games, requires extensive human effort in creative ideation and gameplay evaluation. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) offer opportunities to automate and streamline these processes. However, it remains challenging for LLMs to design novel game mechanics beyond existing databases, generate consistent gameplay environments, and develop scalable gameplay AI for large-scale evaluations. This paper addresses these challenges by introducing a comprehensive automated card game prototyping framework. The approach highlights a graph-based indexing method for generating novel game designs, an LLM-driven system for consistent game code generation validated by gameplay records, and a gameplay AI constructing method that uses an ensemble of LLM-generated action-value functions optimized through self-play. These contributions aim to accelerate card game prototyping, reduce human labor, and lower barriers to entry for game developers.

Human beings are social animals. How to equip 3D autonomous characters with similar social intelligence that can perceive, understand and interact with humans remains an open yet foundamental problem. In this paper, we introduce SOLAMI, the first end-to-end Social vision-Language-Action (VLA) Modeling framework for Immersive interaction with 3D autonomous characters. Specifically, SOLAMI builds 3D autonomous characters from three aspects: (1) Social VLA Architecture: We propose a unified social VLA framework to generate multimodal response (speech and motion) based on the user's multimodal input to drive the character for social interaction. (2) Interactive Multimodal Data: We present SynMSI, a synthetic multimodal social interaction dataset generated by an automatic pipeline using only existing motion datasets to address the issue of data scarcity. (3) Immersive VR Interface: We develop a VR interface that enables users to immersively interact with these characters driven by various architectures. Extensive quantitative experiments and user studies demonstrate that our framework leads to more precise and natural character responses (in both speech and motion) that align with user expectations with lower latency.

Recent advances in video generation models have sparked interest in world models capable of simulating realistic environments. While navigation has been well-explored, physically meaningful interactions that mimic real-world forces remain largely understudied. In this work, we investigate using physical forces as a control signal for video generation and propose force prompts which enable users to interact with images through both localized point forces, such as poking a plant, and global wind force fields, such as wind blowing on fabric. We demonstrate that these force prompts can enable videos to respond realistically to physical control signals by leveraging the visual and motion prior in the original pretrained model, without using any 3D asset or physics simulator at inference. The primary challenge of force prompting is the difficulty in obtaining high quality paired force-video training data, both in the real world due to the difficulty of obtaining force signals, and in synthetic data due to limitations in the visual quality and domain diversity of physics simulators. Our key finding is that video generation models can generalize remarkably well when adapted to follow physical force conditioning from videos synthesized by Blender, even with limited demonstrations of few objects. Our method can generate videos which simulate forces across diverse geometries, settings, and materials. We also try to understand the source of this generalization and perform ablations that reveal two key elements: visual diversity and the use of specific text keywords during training. Our approach is trained on only around 15k training examples for a single day on four A100 GPUs, and outperforms existing methods on force adherence and physics realism, bringing world models closer to real-world physics interactions. We release all datasets, code, weights, and interactive video demos at our project page.

With the popularity of implicit neural representations, or neural radiance fields (NeRF), there is a pressing need for editing methods to interact with the implicit 3D models for tasks like post-processing reconstructed scenes and 3D content creation. While previous works have explored NeRF editing from various perspectives, they are restricted in editing flexibility, quality, and speed, failing to offer direct editing response and instant preview. The key challenge is to conceive a locally editable neural representation that can directly reflect the editing instructions and update instantly. To bridge the gap, we propose a new interactive editing method and system for implicit representations, called Seal-3D, which allows users to edit NeRF models in a pixel-level and free manner with a wide range of NeRF-like backbone and preview the editing effects instantly. To achieve the effects, the challenges are addressed by our proposed proxy function mapping the editing instructions to the original space of NeRF models and a teacher-student training strategy with local pretraining and global finetuning. A NeRF editing system is built to showcase various editing types. Our system can achieve compelling editing effects with an interactive speed of about 1 second.

Recent advances in Competitive Self-Play (CSP) have achieved, or even surpassed, human level performance in complex game environments such as Dota 2 and StarCraft II using Distributed Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL). One core component of these methods relies on creating a pool of learning agents -- consisting of the Main Agent, past versions of this agent, and Exploiter Agents -- where Exploiter Agents learn counter-strategies to the Main Agents. A key drawback of these approaches is the large computational cost and physical time that is required to train the system, making them impractical to deploy in highly iterative real-life settings such as video game productions. In this paper, we propose the Minimax Exploiter, a game theoretic approach to exploiting Main Agents that leverages knowledge of its opponents, leading to significant increases in data efficiency. We validate our approach in a diversity of settings, including simple turn based games, the arcade learning environment, and For Honor, a modern video game. The Minimax Exploiter consistently outperforms strong baselines, demonstrating improved stability and data efficiency, leading to a robust CSP-MARL method that is both flexible and easy to deploy.

In recent years, video generation has seen significant advancements. However, challenges still persist in generating complex motions and interactions. To address these challenges, we introduce ReVision, a plug-and-play framework that explicitly integrates parameterized 3D physical knowledge into a pretrained conditional video generation model, significantly enhancing its ability to generate high-quality videos with complex motion and interactions. Specifically, ReVision consists of three stages. First, a video diffusion model is used to generate a coarse video. Next, we extract a set of 2D and 3D features from the coarse video to construct a 3D object-centric representation, which is then refined by our proposed parameterized physical prior model to produce an accurate 3D motion sequence. Finally, this refined motion sequence is fed back into the same video diffusion model as additional conditioning, enabling the generation of motion-consistent videos, even in scenarios involving complex actions and interactions. We validate the effectiveness of our approach on Stable Video Diffusion, where ReVision significantly improves motion fidelity and coherence. Remarkably, with only 1.5B parameters, it even outperforms a state-of-the-art video generation model with over 13B parameters on complex video generation by a substantial margin. Our results suggest that, by incorporating 3D physical knowledge, even a relatively small video diffusion model can generate complex motions and interactions with greater realism and controllability, offering a promising solution for physically plausible video generation.

This research paper delves into the integration of OpenAI's ChatGPT into embodied agent systems, evaluating its influence on interactive decision-making benchmark. Drawing a parallel to the concept of people assuming roles according to their unique strengths, we introduce InterAct. In this approach, we feed ChatGPT with varied prompts, assigning it a numerous roles like a checker and a sorter, then integrating them with the original language model. Our research shows a remarkable success rate of 98% in AlfWorld, which consists of 6 different tasks in a simulated household environment, emphasizing the significance of proficient prompt engineering. The results highlight ChatGPT's competence in comprehending and performing intricate tasks effectively in real-world settings, thus paving the way for further advancements in task planning.

Text-driven diffusion models have unlocked unprecedented abilities in image generation, whereas their video counterpart still lags behind due to the excessive training cost of temporal modeling. Besides the training burden, the generated videos also suffer from appearance inconsistency and structural flickers, especially in long video synthesis. To address these challenges, we design a training-free framework called ControlVideo to enable natural and efficient text-to-video generation. ControlVideo, adapted from ControlNet, leverages coarsely structural consistency from input motion sequences, and introduces three modules to improve video generation. Firstly, to ensure appearance coherence between frames, ControlVideo adds fully cross-frame interaction in self-attention modules. Secondly, to mitigate the flicker effect, it introduces an interleaved-frame smoother that employs frame interpolation on alternated frames. Finally, to produce long videos efficiently, it utilizes a hierarchical sampler that separately synthesizes each short clip with holistic coherency. Empowered with these modules, ControlVideo outperforms the state-of-the-arts on extensive motion-prompt pairs quantitatively and qualitatively. Notably, thanks to the efficient designs, it generates both short and long videos within several minutes using one NVIDIA 2080Ti. Code is available at https://github.com/YBYBZhang/ControlVideo.

Real-time speech interaction, serving as a fundamental interface for human-machine collaboration, holds immense potential. However, current open-source models face limitations such as high costs in voice data collection, weakness in dynamic control, and limited intelligence. To address these challenges, this paper introduces Step-Audio, the first production-ready open-source solution. Key contributions include: 1) a 130B-parameter unified speech-text multi-modal model that achieves unified understanding and generation, with the Step-Audio-Chat version open-sourced; 2) a generative speech data engine that establishes an affordable voice cloning framework and produces the open-sourced lightweight Step-Audio-TTS-3B model through distillation; 3) an instruction-driven fine control system enabling dynamic adjustments across dialects, emotions, singing, and RAP; 4) an enhanced cognitive architecture augmented with tool calling and role-playing abilities to manage complex tasks effectively. Based on our new StepEval-Audio-360 evaluation benchmark, Step-Audio achieves state-of-the-art performance in human evaluations, especially in terms of instruction following. On open-source benchmarks like LLaMA Question, shows 9.3% average performance improvement, demonstrating our commitment to advancing the development of open-source multi-modal language technologies. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/stepfun-ai/Step-Audio.

Designing effective game tutorials is crucial for a smooth learning curve for new players, especially in games with many rules and complex core mechanics. Evaluating the effectiveness of these tutorials usually requires multiple iterations with testers who have no prior knowledge of the game. Recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated significant capabilities in understanding and interpreting visual content. VLMs can analyze images, provide detailed insights, and answer questions about their content. They can recognize objects, actions, and contexts in visual data, making them valuable tools for various applications, including automated game testing. In this work, we propose an automated game-testing solution to evaluate the quality of game tutorials. Our approach leverages VLMs to analyze frames from video game tutorials, answer relevant questions to simulate human perception, and provide feedback. This feedback is compared with expected results to identify confusing or problematic scenes and highlight potential errors for developers. In addition, we publish complete tutorial videos and annotated frames from different game versions used in our tests. This solution reduces the need for extensive manual testing, especially by speeding up and simplifying the initial development stages of the tutorial to improve the final game experience.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have the capacity of performing complex scheduling in a multi-agent system and can coordinate these agents into completing sophisticated tasks that require extensive collaboration. However, despite the introduction of numerous gaming frameworks, the community has insufficient benchmarks towards building general multi-agents collaboration infrastructure that encompass both LLM and human-NPCs collaborations. In this work, we propose a novel infrastructure - MindAgent - to evaluate planning and coordination emergent capabilities for gaming interaction. In particular, our infrastructure leverages existing gaming framework, to i) require understanding of the coordinator for a multi-agent system, ii) collaborate with human players via un-finetuned proper instructions, and iii) establish an in-context learning on few-shot prompt with feedback. Furthermore, we introduce CUISINEWORLD, a new gaming scenario and related benchmark that dispatch a multi-agent collaboration efficiency and supervise multiple agents playing the game simultaneously. We conduct comprehensive evaluations with new auto-metric CoS for calculating the collaboration efficiency. Finally, our infrastructure can be deployed into real-world gaming scenarios in a customized VR version of CUISINEWORLD and adapted in existing broader Minecraft gaming domain. We hope our findings on LLMs and the new infrastructure for general-purpose scheduling and coordination can help shed light on how such skills can be obtained by learning from large language corpora.

We present GazeGen, a user interaction system that generates visual content (images and videos) for locations indicated by the user's eye gaze. GazeGen allows intuitive manipulation of visual content by targeting regions of interest with gaze. Using advanced techniques in object detection and generative AI, GazeGen performs gaze-controlled image adding/deleting, repositioning, and surface material changes of image objects, and converts static images into videos. Central to GazeGen is the DFT Gaze (Distilled and Fine-Tuned Gaze) agent, an ultra-lightweight model with only 281K parameters, performing accurate real-time gaze predictions tailored to individual users' eyes on small edge devices. GazeGen is the first system to combine visual content generation with real-time gaze estimation, made possible exclusively by DFT Gaze. This real-time gaze estimation enables various visual content generation tasks, all controlled by the user's gaze. The input for DFT Gaze is the user's eye images, while the inputs for visual content generation are the user's view and the predicted gaze point from DFT Gaze. To achieve efficient gaze predictions, we derive the small model from a large model (10x larger) via novel knowledge distillation and personal adaptation techniques. We integrate knowledge distillation with a masked autoencoder, developing a compact yet powerful gaze estimation model. This model is further fine-tuned with Adapters, enabling highly accurate and personalized gaze predictions with minimal user input. DFT Gaze ensures low-latency and precise gaze tracking, supporting a wide range of gaze-driven tasks. We validate the performance of DFT Gaze on AEA and OpenEDS2020 benchmarks, demonstrating low angular gaze error and low latency on the edge device (Raspberry Pi 4). Furthermore, we describe applications of GazeGen, illustrating its versatility and effectiveness in various usage scenarios.

Conditional human animation transforms a static reference image into a dynamic sequence by applying motion cues such as poses. These motion cues are typically derived from video data but are susceptible to limitations including low temporal resolution, motion blur, overexposure, and inaccuracies under low-light conditions. In contrast, event cameras provide data streams with exceptionally high temporal resolution, a wide dynamic range, and inherent resistance to motion blur and exposure issues. In this work, we propose EvAnimate, a framework that leverages event streams as motion cues to animate static human images. Our approach employs a specialized event representation that transforms asynchronous event streams into 3-channel slices with controllable slicing rates and appropriate slice density, ensuring compatibility with diffusion models. Subsequently, a dual-branch architecture generates high-quality videos by harnessing the inherent motion dynamics of the event streams, thereby enhancing both video quality and temporal consistency. Specialized data augmentation strategies further enhance cross-person generalization. Finally, we establish a new benchmarking, including simulated event data for training and validation, and a real-world event dataset capturing human actions under normal and extreme scenarios. The experiment results demonstrate that EvAnimate achieves high temporal fidelity and robust performance in scenarios where traditional video-derived cues fall short.

The development of artificial intelligence systems is transitioning from creating static, task-specific models to dynamic, agent-based systems capable of performing well in a wide range of applications. We propose an Interactive Agent Foundation Model that uses a novel multi-task agent training paradigm for training AI agents across a wide range of domains, datasets, and tasks. Our training paradigm unifies diverse pre-training strategies, including visual masked auto-encoders, language modeling, and next-action prediction, enabling a versatile and adaptable AI framework. We demonstrate the performance of our framework across three separate domains -- Robotics, Gaming AI, and Healthcare. Our model demonstrates its ability to generate meaningful and contextually relevant outputs in each area. The strength of our approach lies in its generality, leveraging a variety of data sources such as robotics sequences, gameplay data, large-scale video datasets, and textual information for effective multimodal and multi-task learning. Our approach provides a promising avenue for developing generalist, action-taking, multimodal systems.

Photorealism is an important aspect of modern video games since it can shape the player experience and simultaneously impact the immersion, narrative engagement, and visual fidelity. Although recent hardware technological breakthroughs, along with state-of-the-art rendering technologies, have significantly improved the visual realism of video games, achieving true photorealism in dynamic environments at real-time frame rates still remains a major challenge due to the tradeoff between visual quality and performance. In this short paper, we present a novel approach for enhancing the photorealism of rendered game frames using generative adversarial networks. To this end, we propose Real-time photorealism Enhancement in Games via a dual-stage gEnerative Network framework (REGEN), which employs a robust unpaired image-to-image translation model to produce semantically consistent photorealistic frames that transform the problem into a simpler paired image-to-image translation task. This enables training with a lightweight method that can achieve real-time inference time without compromising visual quality. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework on Grand Theft Auto V, showing that the approach achieves visual results comparable to the ones produced by the robust unpaired Im2Im method while improving inference speed by 32.14 times. Our findings also indicate that the results outperform the photorealism-enhanced frames produced by directly training a lightweight unpaired Im2Im translation method to translate the video game frames towards the visual characteristics of real-world images. Code, pre-trained models, and demos for this work are available at: https://github.com/stefanos50/REGEN.

We present an explicit-grid based method for efficiently reconstructing streaming radiance fields for novel view synthesis of real world dynamic scenes. Instead of training a single model that combines all the frames, we formulate the dynamic modeling problem with an incremental learning paradigm in which per-frame model difference is trained to complement the adaption of a base model on the current frame. By exploiting the simple yet effective tuning strategy with narrow bands, the proposed method realizes a feasible framework for handling video sequences on-the-fly with high training efficiency. The storage overhead induced by using explicit grid representations can be significantly reduced through the use of model difference based compression. We also introduce an efficient strategy to further accelerate model optimization for each frame. Experiments on challenging video sequences demonstrate that our approach is capable of achieving a training speed of 15 seconds per-frame with competitive rendering quality, which attains 1000 times speedup over the state-of-the-art implicit methods. Code is available at https://github.com/AlgoHunt/StreamRF.

This paper introduces VIVRA (Voice Interactive Virtual Reality Annotation), a VR application combining multimodal interaction with large language models (LLMs) to transform users' ideas into interactive 3D visualizations. VIVRA converts verbalized thoughts into "idea balloons" that summarize and expand on detected topics by an LLM. VIVRA allows users to verbalize their thoughts in real time or record their ideas to display the topics later. We evaluated the effectiveness of VIVRA in an exploratory study with 29 participants and a user study with 10 participants. Our results show that VIVRA enhanced users' ability to reflect on and develop ideas, achieving high levels of satisfaction, usability, and engagement. Participants valued VIVRA as a reflective tool for exploring personal thoughts and ideas. We discuss the potential advantages and uses of this application, highlighting the potential of combining immersive technologies with LLMs to create powerful ideation and reflection tools.

Assessing and comparing player skill in online multiplayer gaming environments is essential for fair matchmaking and player engagement. Traditional ranking models like Elo and Glicko-2, designed for two-player games, are insufficient for the complexity of multi-player, asymmetric team-based matches. To address this gap, the OpenSkill library offers a suite of sophisticated, fast, and adaptable models tailored for such dynamics. Drawing from Bayesian inference methods, OpenSkill provides a more accurate representation of individual player contributions and speeds up the computation of ranks. This paper introduces the OpenSkill library, featuring a Python implementation of the Plackett-Luce model among others, highlighting its performance advantages and predictive accuracy against proprietary systems like TrueSkill. OpenSkill is a valuable tool for game developers and researchers, ensuring a responsive and fair gaming experience by efficiently adjusting player rankings based on game outcomes. The library's support for time decay and diligent documentation further aid in its practical application, making it a robust solution for the nuanced world of multiplayer ranking systems. This paper also acknowledges areas for future enhancement, such as partial play and contribution weighting, emphasizing the library's ongoing development to meet the evolving needs of online gaming communities.

Recent advances in internet-scale video data pretraining have led to the development of text-to-video generative models that can create high-quality videos across a broad range of visual concepts, synthesize realistic motions and render complex objects. Hence, these generative models have the potential to become general-purpose simulators of the physical world. However, it is unclear how far we are from this goal with the existing text-to-video generative models. To this end, we present VideoPhy, a benchmark designed to assess whether the generated videos follow physical commonsense for real-world activities (e.g. marbles will roll down when placed on a slanted surface). Specifically, we curate diverse prompts that involve interactions between various material types in the physical world (e.g., solid-solid, solid-fluid, fluid-fluid). We then generate videos conditioned on these captions from diverse state-of-the-art text-to-video generative models, including open models (e.g., CogVideoX) and closed models (e.g., Lumiere, Dream Machine). Our human evaluation reveals that the existing models severely lack the ability to generate videos adhering to the given text prompts, while also lack physical commonsense. Specifically, the best performing model, CogVideoX-5B, generates videos that adhere to the caption and physical laws for 39.6% of the instances. VideoPhy thus highlights that the video generative models are far from accurately simulating the physical world. Finally, we propose an auto-evaluator, VideoCon-Physics, to assess the performance reliably for the newly released models.

Creating interactive scenes often involves complex programming tasks. Although large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT can generate code from natural language, their output is often error-prone, particularly when scripting interactions among multiple elements. The linear conversational structure limits the editing of individual elements, and lacking graphical and precise control complicates visual integration. To address these issues, we integrate an element-level modularization technique that processes textual descriptions for individual elements through separate LLM modules, with a central module managing interactions among elements. This modular approach allows for refining each element independently. We design a graphical user interface, MoGraphGPT , which combines modular LLMs with enhanced graphical control to generate codes for 2D interactive scenes. It enables direct integration of graphical information and offers quick, precise control through automatically generated sliders. Our comparative evaluation against an AI coding tool, Cursor Composer, as the baseline system and a usability study show MoGraphGPT significantly improves easiness, controllability, and refinement in creating complex 2D interactive scenes with multiple visual elements in a coding-free manner.

Creating a physical digital twin of a real-world object has immense potential in robotics, content creation, and XR. In this paper, we present PhysTwin, a novel framework that uses sparse videos of dynamic objects under interaction to produce a photo- and physically realistic, real-time interactive virtual replica. Our approach centers on two key components: (1) a physics-informed representation that combines spring-mass models for realistic physical simulation, generative shape models for geometry, and Gaussian splats for rendering; and (2) a novel multi-stage, optimization-based inverse modeling framework that reconstructs complete geometry, infers dense physical properties, and replicates realistic appearance from videos. Our method integrates an inverse physics framework with visual perception cues, enabling high-fidelity reconstruction even from partial, occluded, and limited viewpoints. PhysTwin supports modeling various deformable objects, including ropes, stuffed animals, cloth, and delivery packages. Experiments show that PhysTwin outperforms competing methods in reconstruction, rendering, future prediction, and simulation under novel interactions. We further demonstrate its applications in interactive real-time simulation and model-based robotic motion planning.

Generating music that aligns with the visual content of a video has been a challenging task, as it requires a deep understanding of visual semantics and involves generating music whose melody, rhythm, and dynamics harmonize with the visual narratives. This paper presents MuVi, a novel framework that effectively addresses these challenges to enhance the cohesion and immersive experience of audio-visual content. MuVi analyzes video content through a specially designed visual adaptor to extract contextually and temporally relevant features. These features are used to generate music that not only matches the video's mood and theme but also its rhythm and pacing. We also introduce a contrastive music-visual pre-training scheme to ensure synchronization, based on the periodicity nature of music phrases. In addition, we demonstrate that our flow-matching-based music generator has in-context learning ability, allowing us to control the style and genre of the generated music. Experimental results show that MuVi demonstrates superior performance in both audio quality and temporal synchronization. The generated music video samples are available at https://muvi-v2m.github.io.

Mobile agents are essential for automating tasks in complex and dynamic mobile environments. As foundation models evolve, the demands for agents that can adapt in real-time and process multimodal data have grown. This survey provides a comprehensive review of mobile agent technologies, focusing on recent advancements that enhance real-time adaptability and multimodal interaction. Recent evaluation benchmarks have been developed better to capture the static and interactive environments of mobile tasks, offering more accurate assessments of agents' performance. We then categorize these advancements into two main approaches: prompt-based methods, which utilize large language models (LLMs) for instruction-based task execution, and training-based methods, which fine-tune multimodal models for mobile-specific applications. Additionally, we explore complementary technologies that augment agent performance. By discussing key challenges and outlining future research directions, this survey offers valuable insights for advancing mobile agent technologies. A comprehensive resource list is available at https://github.com/aialt/awesome-mobile-agents

Perceiving and reconstructing 4D spatial-temporal geometry from videos is a fundamental yet challenging computer vision task. To facilitate interactive and real-time applications, we propose a streaming 4D visual geometry transformer that shares a similar philosophy with autoregressive large language models. We explore a simple and efficient design and employ a causal transformer architecture to process the input sequence in an online manner. We use temporal causal attention and cache the historical keys and values as implicit memory to enable efficient streaming long-term 4D reconstruction. This design can handle real-time 4D reconstruction by incrementally integrating historical information while maintaining high-quality spatial consistency. For efficient training, we propose to distill knowledge from the dense bidirectional visual geometry grounded transformer (VGGT) to our causal model. For inference, our model supports the migration of optimized efficient attention operator (e.g., FlashAttention) from the field of large language models. Extensive experiments on various 4D geometry perception benchmarks demonstrate that our model increases the inference speed in online scenarios while maintaining competitive performance, paving the way for scalable and interactive 4D vision systems. Code is available at: https://github.com/wzzheng/StreamVGGT.

Our aim is to build autonomous agents that can solve tasks in environments like Minecraft. To do so, we used an imitation learning-based approach. We formulate our control problem as a search problem over a dataset of experts' demonstrations, where the agent copies actions from a similar demonstration trajectory of image-action pairs. We perform a proximity search over the BASALT MineRL-dataset in the latent representation of a Video PreTraining model. The agent copies the actions from the expert trajectory as long as the distance between the state representations of the agent and the selected expert trajectory from the dataset do not diverge. Then the proximity search is repeated. Our approach can effectively recover meaningful demonstration trajectories and show human-like behavior of an agent in the Minecraft environment.

Performing simple household tasks based on language directives is very natural to humans, yet it remains an open challenge for AI agents. The 'interactive instruction following' task attempts to make progress towards building agents that jointly navigate, interact, and reason in the environment at every step. To address the multifaceted problem, we propose a model that factorizes the task into interactive perception and action policy streams with enhanced components and name it as MOCA, a Modular Object-Centric Approach. We empirically validate that MOCA outperforms prior arts by significant margins on the ALFRED benchmark with improved generalization.

In this paper, we propose the Dynamic Latent Frame Rate VAE (DLFR-VAE), a training-free paradigm that can make use of adaptive temporal compression in latent space. While existing video generative models apply fixed compression rates via pretrained VAE, we observe that real-world video content exhibits substantial temporal non-uniformity, with high-motion segments containing more information than static scenes. Based on this insight, DLFR-VAE dynamically adjusts the latent frame rate according to the content complexity. Specifically, DLFR-VAE comprises two core innovations: (1) A Dynamic Latent Frame Rate Scheduler that partitions videos into temporal chunks and adaptively determines optimal frame rates based on information-theoretic content complexity, and (2) A training-free adaptation mechanism that transforms pretrained VAE architectures into a dynamic VAE that can process features with variable frame rates. Our simple but effective DLFR-VAE can function as a plug-and-play module, seamlessly integrating with existing video generation models and accelerating the video generation process.

Realistic video simulation has shown significant potential across diverse applications, from virtual reality to film production. This is particularly true for scenarios where capturing videos in real-world settings is either impractical or expensive. Existing approaches in video simulation often fail to accurately model the lighting environment, represent the object geometry, or achieve high levels of photorealism. In this paper, we propose Anything in Any Scene, a novel and generic framework for realistic video simulation that seamlessly inserts any object into an existing dynamic video with a strong emphasis on physical realism. Our proposed general framework encompasses three key processes: 1) integrating a realistic object into a given scene video with proper placement to ensure geometric realism; 2) estimating the sky and environmental lighting distribution and simulating realistic shadows to enhance the light realism; 3) employing a style transfer network that refines the final video output to maximize photorealism. We experimentally demonstrate that Anything in Any Scene framework produces simulated videos of great geometric realism, lighting realism, and photorealism. By significantly mitigating the challenges associated with video data generation, our framework offers an efficient and cost-effective solution for acquiring high-quality videos. Furthermore, its applications extend well beyond video data augmentation, showing promising potential in virtual reality, video editing, and various other video-centric applications. Please check our project website https://anythinginanyscene.github.io for access to our project code and more high-resolution video results.

Generative AI significantly enhances player agency in interactive narratives (IN) by enabling just-in-time content generation that adapts to player actions. While delegating generation to AI makes IN more interactive, it becomes challenging for authors to control the space of possible narratives - within which the final story experienced by the player emerges from their interaction with AI. In this paper, we present WhatELSE, an AI-bridged IN authoring system that creates narrative possibility spaces from example stories. WhatELSE provides three views (narrative pivot, outline, and variants) to help authors understand the narrative space and corresponding tools leveraging linguistic abstraction to control the boundaries of the narrative space. Taking innovative LLM-based narrative planning approaches, WhatELSE further unfolds the narrative space into executable game events. Through a user study (N=12) and technical evaluations, we found that WhatELSE enables authors to perceive and edit the narrative space and generates engaging interactive narratives at play-time.

Recent advances in diffusion models have revolutionized audio-driven talking head synthesis. Beyond precise lip synchronization, diffusion-based methods excel in generating subtle expressions and natural head movements that are well-aligned with the audio signal. However, these methods are confronted by slow inference speed, insufficient fine-grained control over facial motions, and occasional visual artifacts largely due to an implicit latent space derived from Variational Auto-Encoders (VAE), which prevent their adoption in realtime interaction applications. To address these issues, we introduce Ditto, a diffusion-based framework that enables controllable realtime talking head synthesis. Our key innovation lies in bridging motion generation and photorealistic neural rendering through an explicit identity-agnostic motion space, replacing conventional VAE representations. This design substantially reduces the complexity of diffusion learning while enabling precise control over the synthesized talking heads. We further propose an inference strategy that jointly optimizes three key components: audio feature extraction, motion generation, and video synthesis. This optimization enables streaming processing, realtime inference, and low first-frame delay, which are the functionalities crucial for interactive applications such as AI assistants. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that Ditto generates compelling talking head videos and substantially outperforms existing methods in both motion control and realtime performance.

Point-Based Neural Rendering (PBNR), i.e., the 3D Gaussian Splatting-family algorithms, emerges as a promising class of rendering techniques, which are permeating all aspects of society, driven by a growing demand for real-time, photorealistic rendering in AR/VR and digital twins. Achieving real-time PBNR on mobile devices is challenging. This paper proposes RTGS, a PBNR system that for the first time delivers real-time neural rendering on mobile devices while maintaining human visual quality. RTGS combines two techniques. First, we present an efficiency-aware pruning technique to optimize rendering speed. Second, we introduce a Foveated Rendering (FR) method for PBNR, leveraging humans' low visual acuity in peripheral regions to relax rendering quality and improve rendering speed. Our system executes in real-time (above 100 FPS) on Nvidia Jetson Xavier board without sacrificing subjective visual quality, as confirmed by a user study. The code is open-sourced at [https://github.com/horizon-research/Fov-3DGS].

Recent advancements in generative modeling now enable the creation of 4D content (moving 3D objects) controlled with text prompts. 4D generation has large potential in applications like virtual worlds, media, and gaming, but existing methods provide limited control over the appearance and geometry of generated content. In this work, we introduce a method for animating user-provided 3D objects by conditioning on textual prompts to guide 4D generation, enabling custom animations while maintaining the identity of the original object. We first convert a 3D mesh into a ``static" 4D Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) that preserves the visual attributes of the input object. Then, we animate the object using an Image-to-Video diffusion model driven by text. To improve motion realism, we introduce an incremental viewpoint selection protocol for sampling perspectives to promote lifelike movement and a masked Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) loss, which leverages attention maps to focus optimization on relevant regions. We evaluate our model in terms of temporal coherence, prompt adherence, and visual fidelity and find that our method outperforms baselines that are based on other approaches, achieving up to threefold improvements in identity preservation measured using LPIPS scores, and effectively balancing visual quality with dynamic content.

We propose 4Real-Video, a novel framework for generating 4D videos, organized as a grid of video frames with both time and viewpoint axes. In this grid, each row contains frames sharing the same timestep, while each column contains frames from the same viewpoint. We propose a novel two-stream architecture. One stream performs viewpoint updates on columns, and the other stream performs temporal updates on rows. After each diffusion transformer layer, a synchronization layer exchanges information between the two token streams. We propose two implementations of the synchronization layer, using either hard or soft synchronization. This feedforward architecture improves upon previous work in three ways: higher inference speed, enhanced visual quality (measured by FVD, CLIP, and VideoScore), and improved temporal and viewpoint consistency (measured by VideoScore and Dust3R-Confidence).

Recent advances in generative modeling have led to promising progress on synthesizing 3D human motion from text, with methods that can generate character animations from short prompts and specified durations. However, using a single text prompt as input lacks the fine-grained control needed by animators, such as composing multiple actions and defining precise durations for parts of the motion. To address this, we introduce the new problem of timeline control for text-driven motion synthesis, which provides an intuitive, yet fine-grained, input interface for users. Instead of a single prompt, users can specify a multi-track timeline of multiple prompts organized in temporal intervals that may overlap. This enables specifying the exact timings of each action and composing multiple actions in sequence or at overlapping intervals. To generate composite animations from a multi-track timeline, we propose a new test-time denoising method. This method can be integrated with any pre-trained motion diffusion model to synthesize realistic motions that accurately reflect the timeline. At every step of denoising, our method processes each timeline interval (text prompt) individually, subsequently aggregating the predictions with consideration for the specific body parts engaged in each action. Experimental comparisons and ablations validate that our method produces realistic motions that respect the semantics and timing of given text prompts. Our code and models are publicly available at https://mathis.petrovich.fr/stmc.