Zhening Liu
Publications
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.
Mage-Flow: An Efficient Native-Resolution Foundation Model for Image Generation and Editing
Large-scale visual generators are increasingly capable but costly to train, fine-tune, and deploy. We introduce Mage-Flow, a compact 4B-scale generative stack for efficient text-to-image generation and instruction-based image editing. The stack is built from two co-designed components: Mage-VAE, a lightweight high-fidelity latent tokenizer, and a Native-Resolution Multimodal Diffusion Transformer trained with rectified flow matching. Mage-VAE uses one-step diffusion-style encoding and decoding with anchor-latent regularization, preserving the reconstruction quality of strong public VAEs while reducing tokenization cost by more than an order of magnitude. Together with native-resolution packing and stack-level CUDA kernel fusion, the stack supports flexible-resolution training and improves end-to-end training throughput by about $2.5\times$. Built on this foundation, we develop a complete model family with Base, RL-aligned, and Turbo variants for both generation and editing. Diffusion-NFT improves prompt following, text rendering, aesthetic quality, and editing fidelity, while few-step distillation with adversarial perceptual guidance produces 4-step Turbo models for low-latency inference. Despite its compact scale, Mage-Flow and Mage-Flow-Edit achieves competitive performance across standard generation and editing benchmarks. More importantly, the Turbo variants make high-resolution generation and editing practical for interactive use: at $1024^2$ resolution on a single NVIDIA A100 GPU, Mage-Flow-Turbo generates an image in 0.59s, and Mage-Flow-Edit-Turbo edits an image in 1.02s, while maintaining a small memory footprint. These results show that careful tokenizer--backbone--system co-design can deliver strong high-resolution generation and editing within an efficient 4B model family.
Token-level Data Selection for Safe LLM Fine-tuning
Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on custom datasets has become a standard approach for adapting these models to specific domains and applications. However, recent studies have shown that such fine-tuning can lead to significant degradation in the model's safety. Existing defense methods operate at the sample level and often suffer from an unsatisfactory trade-off between safety and utility. To address this limitation, we perform a systematic token-level diagnosis of safety degradation during fine-tuning. Based on this, we propose token-level data selection for safe LLM fine-tuning (TOSS), a novel framework that quantifies the safety risk of each token by measuring the loss difference between a safety-degraded model and a utility-oriented model. This token-level granularity enables accurate identification and removal of unsafe tokens, thereby preserving valuable task-specific information. In addition, we introduce a progressive refinement strategy, TOSS-Pro, which iteratively enhances the safety-degraded model's ability to identify unsafe tokens. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach robustly safeguards LLMs during fine-tuning while achieving superior downstream task performance, significantly outperforming existing sample-level defense methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/Polly-LYP/TOSS.
Mon3tr: Monocular 3D Telepresence with Pre-built Gaussian Avatars as Amortization
Immersive telepresence aims to transform human interaction in AR/VR applications by enabling lifelike full-body holographic representations for enhanced remote collaboration. However, existing systems rely on hardware-intensive multi-camera setups and demand high bandwidth for volumetric streaming, limiting their real-time performance on mobile devices. To overcome these challenges, we propose Mon3tr, a novel Monocular 3D telepresence framework that integrates 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) based parametric human modeling into telepresence for the first time. Mon3tr adopts an amortized computation strategy, dividing the process into a one-time offline multi-view reconstruction phase to build a user-specific avatar and a monocular online inference phase during live telepresence sessions. A single monocular RGB camera is used to capture body motions and facial expressions in real time to drive the 3DGS-based parametric human model, significantly reducing system complexity and cost. The extracted motion and appearance features are transmitted at < 0.2 Mbps over WebRTC's data channel, allowing robust adaptation to network fluctuations. On the receiver side, e.g., Meta Quest 3, we develop a lightweight 3DGS attribute deformation network to dynamically generate corrective 3DGS attribute adjustments on the pre-built avatar, synthesizing photorealistic motion and appearance at ~ 60 FPS. Extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our method, achieving a PSNR of > 28 dB for novel poses, an end-to-end latency of ~ 80 ms, and > 1000x bandwidth reduction compared to point-cloud streaming, while supporting real-time operation from monocular inputs across diverse scenarios. Our demos can be found at https://mon3tr3d.github.io.