#generation
41 articles
01
·★ MEMBER·PAPER·10 min read
Paper Walkthrough — Beyond Retrieval: LatentStream Turns Retrieved Video Into Latent Memory
For never-ending video streams, LatentStream stops appending retrieved evidence as extra context and instead internalizes it into fixed-length latent memory tokens. A ground-up walkthrough of its hierarchical memory, latent evolution, and confidence-driven test-time optimization.
02
·★ MEMBER·PAPER·9 min read
Paper Walkthrough: The Design Fundamentals of Pixel Text Representation Learning
An encoder that reads meaning straight off the pixels, never converting glyphs to character codes. This EMNLP 2026 paper argues that what decides its quality is not data volume but four design choices — explained from zero.
03
·★ MEMBER·PAPER·15 min read
Paper Walkthrough — The Missing Temporal Link: Putting Script Timing on the Video–Audio Axis with Temporal Context Routing
Video and audio stay in sync with each other while both drift off the script's timeline. This walkthrough follows the paper's own equations and numbers to show how TCR closes that third, missing temporal link with a single additive term in the cross-attention logits.
04
·★ MEMBER·PAPER·10 min read
Paper Walkthrough: Puffin-World — A World Model That Remembers Which Way Is Up
What changes when you give an image generator a sense of gravity? A ground-up walkthrough of Puffin-World's Omni-Camera representation and physics propagation, with equations and interactive figures.
05
·★ MEMBER·PAPER·9 min read
Paper Walkthrough: LLaDA-Image — Building the Visual Prior from Images Alone, Then Distilling to 2–4 Steps
A training recipe that builds the visual prior from images alone before any caption enters the picture. We walk through LLaDA-Image — a 6B DiT trained from scratch and distilled down to 2–4 sampling steps — following the design decisions the paper actually makes.
06
·★ MEMBER·PAPER·14 min read
SolarWM: Training on 5 Seconds, Walking for an Hour — and Opening the Whole Stack
A data engine that folds 10 datasets into 1.43M clips under one contract, plus a three-stage recipe that adapts four different video backbones without erasing them. The causal models roll out for minutes to hours after training on 5-second sequences alone.
07
·★ MEMBER·PAPER·14 min read
Paper Walkthrough: Eleven Frames Are Enough — Revisiting Local Context for Long-Horizon Streaming 3D Reconstruction
How do you track a camera and rebuild a scene from a video that never ends? ABot-Recon throws away long-range memory entirely and bets on the last twelve frames. A ground-up walkthrough of the paper.
08
·★ MEMBER·PAPER·12 min read
Paper walkthrough: Qwen-Drive-1.0 — bolting 3D perception and planning onto a VLM without touching its architecture
Leave the pretrained VLM exactly as it is, attach a BEV perception head and a Planning Expert, and you get 3D detection, occupancy, maps and trajectory generation in one model — general vision-language ability nearly intact, 90.7 PDMS on NAVSIM. A ground-up walkthrough, straight from the paper.
09
·★ MEMBER·PAPER·20 min read
Lucida, explained — turning a room video back into parts you can move, by deferring precision to the end
A system that rebuilds a real indoor scene from video as individually movable 3D assets. It keeps the parse–generate–place order but redistributes what each step is allowed to demand, and hands the final placement to a VLM policy that operates a 3D editor in a closed loop.
10
·★ MEMBER·PAPER·10 min read
Paper Explained — GenFirst: Let Generation Shape the Latent Space First, Reconstruction Second
Image generation normally means training a VAE first and bolting a generative model onto its frozen latent space. This paper trains both at once without latent collapse — the key is the entropy term inside the KL objective, plus a simple rule: let generation go first and ramp reconstruction up later.
11
·★ MEMBER·PAPER·14 min read
Paper Walkthrough: DreamX-Creator — Making Sound and Picture Together in 7B, Then Finishing at 2K in One Step
A ground-up walkthrough of a 7B model that denoises audio and video inside one generative process: the gated cross-modal attention, the modality-aware reinforcement learning, the one-step 2K refiner — and the unusually heavy caveats the authors put on their own results.
12
·★ MEMBER·PAPER·13 min read
Paper Walkthrough: GameWAM — Generating the Next Frame and the Next Keystroke Together
A ground-up walkthrough of the first World–Action Model for native closed-loop game and GUI control: how it plans 16 actions but commits only 8, and how low-frequency noise in the sampled action source quietly spins the camera.
13
·★ MEMBER·PAPER·10 min read
Paper Explained: Beyond Data Scaling — Why the Backbone, Not the Trajectory Count, Decides Your VLA (VLAct)
Robot trajectories can't be scraped off the web, so the paper argues you should squeeze reusable representations out of the trajectories you do have. Three modest interventions — preserving the VLM prior, co-supervising with multiple action heads, and partially unifying the action space across embodiments — beat industrial VLA systems on fully open data and 16 GPUs.
14
·★ MEMBER·PAPER·9 min read
Paper Walkthrough: On-Policy Self-Distillation in Diffusion Models — Turning Reward into a Target You Can Aim At
When you train an image generator with rewards, a score on the finished picture never tells the model how to change its intermediate denoising predictions. DiffusionOPSD builds explicit targets from reward gradients and fits them using an EMA copy of the model itself. A ground-up explanation, strictly within what the abstract states.
15
·★ MEMBER·PAPER·9 min read
Paper Explained: VGI-Bench — Can Video Models Get the Middle of the Story Right?
A ground-up walkthrough of VGI-Bench, a benchmark that treats video generation models as machines that reason in pictures. Even the strongest model, Seedance 2.0, scores only 51.0 — and self-correction during denoising almost never happens.
16
·★ MEMBER·PAPER·14 min read
Paper Explained: VBVR-Pro — Making "Thinking in Pictures" Trainable, Scorable, and Comparable
Native visual reasoning treats image and video generation as the medium of thought. VBVR-Pro supplies 300 procedurally generated tasks and deterministic scorers that replace the VLM judge, then pits image, video, and interleaved generation against each other on identical ground. Written for readers starting from zero.
17
·★ MEMBER·PAPER·11 min read
Paper Walkthrough: TLive-Omni — An Omni-Modal Model That Watches, Listens, and Tells You the Timestamp
A from-scratch walkthrough of TLive-Omni, an omni-modal understanding model built for e-commerce live streaming: Per-vGrid timestamped audio-video interleaving, a three-stage SFT recipe, and Faithful-RFT, which rewards answer faithfulness instead of visible reasoning — grounded strictly in the paper's own numbers.
18
·Generative Models·★ MEMBER·PAPER·10 min read
The State of 3D Generation — From NeRF to Gaussian Splatting
3D stopped being something you sculpt and became something you fit by optimization. How the representation moved from meshes to NeRF to Gaussian Splatting, how SDS turns a 2D diffusion model into a judge that supervises 3D, and what breaks when you take any of it into a game or film pipeline.
19
·Generative Models·★ MEMBER·PAPER·11 min read
The Mathematics of Diffusion — Generation Seen Through Scores and SDEs
A layer beneath 'add noise, then subtract it': diffusion models restated in the language of the score, the gradient of log-density. Why denoising and score estimation are literally the same job, what the forward SDE, reverse SDE and probability flow ODE actually assert, and how those equations turn into the knobs you set at inference time.
20
·Generative Models·FREE·PAPER·11 min read
A Practical Map of Image Generation — SD, ControlNet, and Applying LoRA
A single map for anyone about to touch image generation for the first time: the four boxes of latent diffusion, where the prompt actually takes effect, locking down composition with ControlNet, fine-tuning with LoRA, and the licensing layers that quietly cause the most damage.
21
·★ MEMBER·PAPER·10 min read
Paper Walkthrough: GigaBrain-0.7 — 37,000 Hours of Embodied Experience and a Three-System Robot Brain
A ground-up walkthrough of GigaBrain-0.7, which splits a robot foundation model into understanding, prediction/evaluation, and action, then pretrains it on 37,256.98 hours of embodied data in a single stage. Covers subgoal-image and progress-value conditioning, Soft Knowledge Insulation, and the real-robot numbers — strictly from the paper.
22
·★ MEMBER·PAPER·14 min read
Paper Walkthrough: EchoWM — A World You Can Walk Into, and Hear, Driven by Camera Intent
Hand it a reference view and a stream of 'where I want to go', and it keeps generating 720p video together with environmental sound, music and speech. A walkthrough of EchoWM from the paper itself: one camera-intent interface for both first and third person, a single translation scale shared across the whole dataset, and the sink-plus-FIFO cache that makes long rollouts possible.
23
·Generative Models·★ MEMBER·PAPER·11 min read
Build Your Own Diffusion Model — Starting from MNIST
A diffusion model built up from nothing on 28×28 handwritten digits: the two conditions a noise schedule has to satisfy, how the step number gets injected into a U-Net, and why the sampler adds noise back at the very end — the places you only discover by writing the code yourself.
24
·Generative Models·★ MEMBER·PAPER·9 min read
Music and Audio Generation from Scratch — Sound as Tokens
A three-minute song is more than 15 million numbers. The history of music generation is largely the history of folding that sequence down to something a model can hold. Codec tokens, the fork between autoregressive and diffusion approaches, how text conditioning actually bites, and how to reconstruct the shape of Suno-style products from published parts — no prior knowledge assumed.
25
·★ MEMBER·PAPER·9 min read
Paper Walkthrough: Annotations as Rollouts — Dropping the Ground Truth Into the Group as a Ninth Answer
RL post-training for video MLLMs starves because sampled rollouts almost never contain the right answer. OraRL adds the annotation itself to the group as an extra rollout, then repairs the advantage inversion that naive mixing causes.
26
·★ MEMBER·PAPER·12 min read
4DAnyone, Explained — Turning One Casual Video Into a 4D Person
How 4DAnyone builds a free-viewpoint 4D human from a single phone video, explained from scratch. The core trick is not a better generator but two fixes — RCP and TCR — for a context that no longer fits in one attention pass.
27
·Generative Models·FREE·10 min read
VAEs from Scratch — Stir Probability into "Compress and Restore" and You Get a Generator
An autoencoder that only compresses and restores cannot invent anything new. This walks through why a single drop of probability turns it into a generative model — ELBO, the reparameterization trick, and walking the latent space — assuming no prior knowledge.
28
·★ MEMBER·PAPER·11 min read
Paper Walkthrough: SemComp-Bench — Asking Video Generators 'So Did It Actually Get Done?'
SemComp-Bench moves video-generation evaluation from 'does it look good' to 'did it reach the outcome I asked for'. A walkthrough of the task definition, the four-stage data pipeline, the AND-vs-average scoring, and the measured numbers — all from the paper itself.
29
·★ MEMBER·PAPER·12 min read
Paper Review: S²VOPD — Don't Strengthen the Teacher, Blur the Student's View
A walkthrough of S²VOPD, which improves vision-language models without labels, rewards, or a stronger teacher. The trick is inverting where the asymmetry comes from: degrade the student's view instead of privileging the teacher's.
30
·Generative Models·★ MEMBER·PAPER·8 min read
CFG and Samplers — What the "Strength" Knob in Generative AI Really Does
What "CFG Scale" and "Sampling steps / method" actually do inside an image generator, explained from zero. CFG extrapolates along the difference between the conditional and unconditional prediction; the sampler is a numerical ODE solver. Both knobs trade something away.
31
·Generative Models·★ MEMBER·PAPER·10 min read
The Rise and Fall of GANs — An Invention Trained by Rivalry, and Why Diffusion Won
In 2014, GANs upended image generation with one idea: don't write down what 'realistic' means — learn it. This traces the decade that followed, through mode collapse, the Wasserstein rescue, and the reasons diffusion models eventually took the crown.
32
·Generative Models·★ MEMBER·PAPER·10 min read
Flow Matching from Scratch — What Came After Diffusion, and Why It Goes Straight
Flow matching — the formulation underneath Stable Diffusion 3 and FLUX — explained with no prerequisites. Velocity fields, ODEs, and rectified flow, told through analogy and interactive figures, all the way to the scheduler settings you actually touch in production.
33
·CNNs & Image Recognition·★ MEMBER·PAPER·8 min read
Paper Walkthrough: TurboVLA — Kick the LLM Out of the Loop and Run a Robot Policy at 32 Hz on an RTX 4090 with Under 1 GB of VRAM
Mainstream VLA models route every control step through a large language model. TurboVLA removes the LLM and fuses vision and instructions with lightweight bidirectional cross-attention instead — hitting 97.7% on LIBERO with 0.2B parameters, 31.2 ms latency, and 0.9 GB of VRAM. A from-scratch walkthrough of the paper.
34
·★ MEMBER·PAPER·10 min read
Paper Deep-Dive: The 'Physics' of Multimodal Pretraining — Which Way Does Knowledge Actually Flow?
What happens when a single model learns text and images together from day one? A large-scale controlled study from Meta FAIR and collaborators maps the asymmetric flow of knowledge between modalities, the conditions for synergy, the 'vision laziness' caused by late integration, and a recipe that gets strong image generation from just 5% of the data budget.
35
·CNNs & Image Recognition·★ MEMBER·PAPER·10 min read
Paper Walkthrough: PhiZero — A World Model That Reasons in a Language of Physics Before It Renders
A close read of PhiZero, which reasons about how the world will change in a discrete 'physical language' learned self-supervised from video, and only then renders the footage — instead of predicting pixels directly. The two-stage tokenizer and reasoner, the top spot on Physics-IQ Verified, zero-shot motion transfer, and the limitations the paper itself admits.
36
·★ MEMBER·PAPER·8 min read
Paper Explained: JoyAI-Video-Edit — Autoregressive Diffusion That Keeps Editing 720p Video at ~30 FPS, Without Ever Seeing the Future
Say 'swap the background for snowy mountains' and the live feed comes back edited as it streams — a walkthrough of JD's JoyAI-Video-Edit from the paper itself. We trace the three-stage recipe (chunk-wise autoregression, Source-Anchored DMD, long-horizon distillation) that lets a 16B model edit 720p video at roughly 30 FPS.
37
·★ MEMBER·PAPER·8 min read
Paper Walkthrough: Hunyuan3D-Buffalo 1.0 — One Brain for 3D Understanding, Generation, and Editing
Describe a 3D shape in words, generate it from text, edit it by instruction, carve out a named part — Tencent Hunyuan's Hunyuan3D-Buffalo 1.0 does all four in a single model. We walk through the 87M-sample data factory behind it, the Nano3D-v2 editing-pair pipeline, and the paper's most practical finding: training generation makes editing better.
38
·★ MEMBER·PAPER·8 min read
Paper Walkthrough: GST-Bench — Can VLMs Build a Global Map of a Scene from Video?
Show a VLM a walkthrough video of a house, then ask 'from where you're standing now, which way is the sofa?' — even the strongest model scores barely half of what humans do. A walkthrough of GST-Bench from ByteDance Seed: the shortcut-proof benchmark design, results across 22 models, and the training data that closed 27 points of the gap.
39
·★ MEMBER·PAPER·9 min read
Paper explained: DEFT-RLVR — show a driving VLM the future trajectory too early and it fabricates its reasoning
Let a teacher model peek at the ground-truth trajectory while writing chain-of-thought annotations for driving, and severe hallucinations double from 29% to 50% — the paper calls this trajectory anchoring bias. This article walks through AD-MCQ, which turns planning into a verifiable multiple-choice task, and DEFT-RLVR (arXiv:2608.01755), which reveals trajectories only after the model commits to a decision, using nothing but the paper itself as the source.
40
·★ MEMBER·PAPER·9 min read
Paper Walkthrough: AURORA-LM — A Diffusion Language Model That Keeps Its Text Latent Full-Width Instead of Compressing It
A walkthrough of AURORA-LM, a continuous-latent diffusion language model that rejects the usual compromise of compressing text latents to make diffusion easier. It keeps a decodable, width-1024 latent and learns its distribution with a low-rank input pathway, width-calibrated noise, and self-trajectory consistency.
41
·Generative Models·★ MEMBER·PAPER·9 min read
Diffusion Models from the Ground Up — Add Noise, Then Subtract It
A reading of the DDPM paper (Ho et al., 2020) grounded strictly in its own text: the forward process that adds noise and the reverse process that removes it, why the objective settles into 'predict the noise', how a simplified loss hurt likelihood while improving samples, and what the paper does and does not say about step count.