Maligned - December 17, 2025

AI news without the BS

Here’s what actually matters in AI today. No fluff, no hype - just 5 developments worth your time.

Today’s Top 5 AI Developments

1. Digital Humans Get Real: Lip-Sync & Speech with JoVA 🗣️🎬

Forget those robotic digital avatars that just wave their hands. JoVA is a new unified framework that generates video and audio jointly, finally allowing models to create realistic human speech synchronized with lip movements. This isn’t just background noise; it’s a big leap for truly interactive and believable digital humans and virtual assistants.

Source: arXiv Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.13677v1

2. LLMs as Chemists: Generating Organic Synthesis Procedures 🧪

Language models just got a serious upgrade in the lab. QFANG is a new scientific reasoning LLM that can generate precise, structured experimental procedures for organic synthesis directly from reaction equations, complete with explicit chain-of-thought reasoning. This moves us closer to fully automated, robot-assisted drug discovery and chemical research workflows.

Source: arXiv Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.13668v1

3. Text-Steerable 3D Editing: Generative AI Gets Practical for Assets ✨

Creating and editing 3D assets from AI has been a bottleneck, but Steer3D changes that. This feedforward method allows you to edit AI-generated 3D assets using simple text instructions, making it significantly faster and more consistent than prior approaches. This is a game-changer for design, AR/VR, and anyone generating 3D content.

Source: arXiv Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.13678v1

4. Foundational Fix: Visual Tokenizers Now Scale for Better Generative AI 🖼️📈

The quality of generative AI models for images and video often hits a wall due to limitations in their underlying “visual tokenizers.” VTP introduces a new pre-training framework that focuses on high-level semantics, not just pixel accuracy, making these tokenizers scale far more effectively. This means future generative vision models can achieve significantly better performance simply by having a better foundation.

Source: arXiv Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.13687v1

5. Intelligent Digital Humans: Personality, Adaptability, Self-Evolution 🤖🧠

Building on multimodal generation, Mio introduces an end-to-end framework for “Interactive Intelligence” in digital humans. This isn’t just about realistic looks; it’s about enabling personality-aligned expression, adaptive interaction, and even self-evolution for digital avatars. It’s a holistic approach to building truly intelligent and engaging digital companions.

Source: arXiv Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.13674v1

That’s it for today. Stay aligned. 🎯

Maligned - AI news without the BS