Bridging the Gap Between Semantics and Reconstruction:Unifying Sign Language Translation and Production

Recent advances in sign language (SL) research have shown a trend toward unifying multiple sign language understanding (SLU) subtasks, such as isolated sign language recognition (ISLR), continuous sign language recognition (CSLR), and sign language translation (SLT), within a single framework, leading to substantial progress. Meanwhile, sign language production (SLP), which generates sign sequences from text, has also attracted growing attention. This naturally raises an important question: can sign language understanding and production be unified within a single framework? Compared with unifying SLU subtasks, this problem is substantially more challenging. Existing SLU tasks largely share the same direction of mapping, namely from sign inputs to linguistic outputs, whereas SLT and SLP lie in opposite directions of sign-text mapping. A unified framework must therefore address two key challenges: (1) bridging the modality gap between continuous sign motions and discrete text tokens through a shared sign tokenizer that supports both linguistic abstraction and motion reconstruction; and (2) learning a single conditional autoregressive model that can take either sign or text as input and generate the corresponding target sequence in the opposite modality. To this end, we propose Uni-SLTP, a unified framework for SLT and SLP with two key components: (1) a shared sign tokenizer that converts sign sequences into discrete tokens and latent representations, capturing both semantic and reconstructive information; and (2) a unified autoregressive generation model that formulates both tasks as conditional sequence generation. Experiments on widely used public datasets show that Uni-SLTP achieves superior motion accuracy for SLP while maintaining competitive SLT performance.

KVAE: Family of Tokenizers for Multimodal Generative Models

Latent diffusion modeling (LDM), a prominent paradigm, utilizes tokenizers to map input signal to compressed representation. This dependency positions tokenizer as an integral part of generation process itself, since it affects learning speed, quality of synthesized samples and lay foundation for later applications. This report presents series of KVAE tokenizers for audio, image and video, all designed for subsequent text-conditioned generation: KVAE-Audio, a continuous full-band 48 kHz tokenizer with a 50 Hz latent of 64 channels; KVAE-3D -- two causal video tokenizers for 4x16x16 and 4x8x8 compression; KVAE-2D, an image model, compressing input by factor of 8 with 32 channels. We demonstrate that reconstruction (PSNR, LPIPS, PESQ, etc.) and generation results on objective (Frechet Distance, CLIP score, CLAP score, etc.) and subjective (side-by-side evaluation) metrics matches or surpasses frontier opensource tokenizers, such as VAEs from Wan-2.2, HunyuanVideo-1.5, FLUX.2, MovieGen, StableAudio and MMAudio. Considering difficulty of development, we share with community training details, model selection method and ablation on design choices. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/kandinskylab/kvae and https://github.com/kandinskylab/kvae-audio.

Mage-VL: An Efficient Codec-Native Streaming Multimodal Foundation Model

Standard vision-language models (VLMs) suffer from Moravec's paradox: they excel at complex offline visual reasoning but struggle with simple streaming perception tasks and process them inefficiently. We present Mage-VL, an efficient codec-native streaming foundation model for real-time multimodal understanding and interaction. At its core, our custom tokenizer, Mage-ViT, replaces uniform frame sampling by selectively encoding dynamic, entropy-rich regions using motion vectors and residual energy across sparse anchor (I) and predicted (P) frames. Operating at a 16 x 16 patch level, this reduces visual token consumption by over 75% while preserving spatiotemporal context. Trained from scratch on approximately 560M unlabeled images and 100M unlabeled video frames, Mage-ViT matches or outperforms flagship encoders trained on billions of image-text pairs. We establish AI4AI data pipelines encompassing prompt-code joint optimization for multimodal captioning and AI-driven performance diagnosis to guide training recipes. Furthermore, through a bio-inspired dual-system architecture - a lightweight System 1 event gate and a causal System 2 decoder - Mage-VL enables proactive streaming perception. Extensive evaluations show that Mage-VL-4B matches Qwen3-VL-4B on static tasks while achieving strong gains in video understanding and 2D/3D spatial reasoning, with up to a 3.5x wall-clock inference speedup, and comprehensively surpasses the 15B Phi-4-reasoning-vision baseline. Beyond model artifacts, we deliver seven key empirical findings covering pre-training data efficiency, variable-resolution scaling, codec system acceleration, VideoQA SFT redundancy, motion-spatial synergy, AI4AI data pipelines, and Zero-Vision SFT for multimodal RL.

SPAR: Semantic-Pixel Self-Alignment and Adaptive Routing for Unified Multimodal Models

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable success in visual understanding but remain constrained in visual generation due to the fundamental feature discrepancy between semantic perception and pixel-level reconstruction. Bridging this gap requires overcoming two core challenges: endowing semantic encoders with high-fidelity reconstruction capabilities, and effectively aligning generative models with semantic spaces without relying on external teachers. To this end, we propose a novel unified multimodal framework featuring \textbf{S}emantic-\textbf{P}ixel self-alignment and \textbf{A}daptive \textbf{R}outing (\textbf{SPAR}). First, to reconcile semantic perception with pixel-level reconstruction, we introduce an asymmetric dual-stream unified tokenizer. A lightweight semantic stream anchors discriminative features, while a Transformer-augmented pixel stream recovers fine-grained visual details into a unified compact latent space. Second, to eliminate external dependencies, we propose a self-aligned generation paradigm that natively leverages this optimized tokenizer as an internal alignment teacher for the diffusion model. Furthermore, to facilitate flexible multimodal interaction within this unified space, we introduce Dynamic Token Routing, which enables each token to adaptively aggregate multi-layer MLLM features based on its distinct semantic demands. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SPAR establishes the state-of-the-art for unified architectures, achieving exceptional generation and reconstruction quality while preserving foundational visual understanding capabilities.