Sequential recommendation aims to predict users' next interaction with items by analyzing their historical behavior. However, the limited quality of item representations remains a critical bottleneck. While pre-trained large language models (LLMs) can provide rich semantic representations, existing approaches only rely on static encoding of fixed attributes, overlooking the crucial role of target audiences in defining item identity. Moreover, the semantic space struggles to reflect actual user behavior, resulting in a significant gap between semantic representations and behavioral patterns. To address these limitations, we propose GenAIR, a general framework that empowers sequential recommendation with Generative Archetype-grounded Item Representations. Specifically, we first leverage an LLM to analyze item metadata and infer textual description of the Archetype, which represents the conceptual profile of the item's ideal target audience. We then extract the corresponding embeddings in a single forward pass. Further, to ground these generative archetypes in real-world behavior, we introduce a behavioral calibration objective, which explicitly incorporates behavioral signals from actual interactions. This objective adjusts the structure of the embedding space to reflect empirical patterns. GenAIR enables seamless integration with most existing models while maintaining high efficiency. Comprehensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets demonstrate that GenAIR significantly improves the performance of various sequential recommendation models and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baseline approaches. Implementation codes are available at https://github.com/AI-Santiago/GenAIR.

Traffic Anomaly Understanding (TAU) is essential for improving public safety and transportation efficiency by enabling timely detection and response to incidents. Beyond existing methods, which rely largely on visual data, we propose to consider audio cues, a valuable source that offers strong hints to anomaly scenarios such as crashes and honking. Our contributions are twofold. First, we compile AV-TAU, the first large-scale audio-visual dataset for TAU, providing 29,865 traffic anomaly videos and 149,325 Q&A pairs, while supporting five essential TAU tasks. Second, we develop EchoTraffic, a multimodal LLM that integrates audio and visual data for TAU, through our audio-insight frame selector and dynamic connector to effectively extract crucial audio cues for anomaly understanding with a two-phase training framework. Experimental results on AV-TAU manifest that EchoTraffic sets a new SOTA performance in TAU, outperforming the existing multimodal LLMs. Our contributions, including AV-TAU and EchoTraffic, pave a new direction for multimodal TAU.

Text-to-image diffusion models can generate high-quality images but lack fine-grained control of visual concepts, limiting their creativity. Thus, we introduce component-controllable personalization, a new task that enables users to customize and reconfigure individual components within concepts. This task faces two challenges: semantic pollution, where undesired elements disrupt the target concept, and semantic imbalance, which causes disproportionate learning of the target concept and component. To address these, we design MagicTailor, a framework that uses Dynamic Masked Degradation to adaptively perturb unwanted visual semantics and Dual-Stream Balancing for more balanced learning of desired visual semantics. The experimental results show that MagicTailor achieves superior performance in this task and enables more personalized and creative image generation.

Generalized policy and execution efficiency constitute the two critical challenges in robotic manipulation. While recent foundation policies benefit from the common-sense reasoning capabilities of internet-scale pretrained vision-language models (VLMs), they often suffer from low execution frequency. To mitigate this dilemma, dual-system approaches have been proposed to leverage a VLM-based System 2 module for handling high-level decision-making, and a separate System 1 action module for ensuring real-time control. However, existing designs maintain both systems as separate models, limiting System 1 from fully leveraging the rich pretrained knowledge from the VLM-based System 2. In this work, we propose Fast-in-Slow (FiS), a unified dual-system vision-language-action (VLA) model that embeds the System 1 execution module within the VLM-based System 2 by partially sharing parameters. This innovative paradigm not only enables high-frequency execution in System 1, but also facilitates coordination between multimodal reasoning and execution components within a single foundation model of System 2. Given their fundamentally distinct roles within FiS-VLA, we design the two systems to incorporate heterogeneous modality inputs alongside asynchronous operating frequencies, enabling both fast and precise manipulation. To enable coordination between the two systems, a dual-aware co-training strategy is proposed that equips System 1 with action generation capabilities while preserving System 2’s contextual understanding to provide stable latent conditions for System 1. For evaluation, FiS-VLA outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by 8% in simulation and 11% in real-world tasks in terms of average success rate, while achieving a 117.7 Hz control frequency with action chunk set to eight. Project web page: https://fast-in-slow.github.io.

Trajectory prediction has been a crucial task in building a reliable autonomous driving system by anticipating possible dangers. One key issue is to generate consistent trajectory predictions without colliding. To overcome the challenge, we propose an efficient masked autoencoder for trajectory prediction (Traj-MAE) that better represents the complicated behaviors of agents in the driving environment. Specifically, our Traj-MAE employs diverse masking strategies to pre-train the trajectory encoder and map encoder, allowing for the capture of social and temporal information among agents while leveraging the effect of environment from multiple granularities. To address the catastrophic forgetting problem that arises when pre-training the network with multiple masking strategies, we introduce a continual pre-training framework, which can help Traj-MAE learn valuable and diverse information from various strategies efficiently. Our experimental results in both multi-agent and single-agent settings demonstrate that Traj-MAE achieves competitive results with state-of-the-art methods and significantly outperforms our baseline model. Project page: https://jiazewang.com/projects/trajmae.html.