Cross-Modal Alignment

Building foundation models for medical imaging requires pooling data across institutions, yet privacy regulations prohibit centralized aggregation. Existing Federated Foundation Models either fine-tune natural-image models with poor medical-domain transfer, or train from scratch within a single modality, lacking the flexibility to unify tasks. We identify an under-explored challenge, Imaging Modality Heterogeneity, where clients operate under two structural regimes: Overlapped (shared modalities with heterogeneous label distributions) and Non-overlapped (fully disjoint modalities per client). We propose FM$^2$, a unified framework that trains the core backbone from scratch to preserve medical domain fidelity while optionally incorporating biomedical pretrained encoders for vision-language alignment. FM$^2$ equips each client with dual Mixture-of-Experts modules (a Class-wise MoE for personalized category knowledge and a Domain-wise MoE for shared cross-modality representations), coupled with a Heterogeneous Modality Alignment (HMA) regularizer that explicitly aligns modality-specific expert parameters, admitting provable $O(1/\sqrt{T})$ convergence and generalization guarantees. FM$^2$ further incorporates Caption-Enhanced Learning (CEL), where locally retained GPT-4o-generated captions serve as a textual semantic bridge enabling representation transfer across clients with disjoint modalities, and demonstrates extensibility to Federated Medical VQA. Experiments on our MIMH benchmark (classification and CEL) and real-world medical VQA datasets confirm consistent superiority over state-of-the-art federated baselines and strong out-of-modality generalization across all three tasks.

Human cognition does not separate understanding and generation. A teacher at a whiteboard speaks and draws $\textit{together}$, each modality reshapes the other. In this paper, we bring this coupled loop to artificial systems. Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) are ideally suited to this task, yet existing samplers either decode text and image interleavedly or independently update them in parallel branches that share only previous-step history, but not the other modality's latest decisions $\textit{within}$ the same step; combined with MDMs' inability to remask, cross-modal contradictions are neither detected nor repaired. We introduce $\textbf{Self-Correcting Coupled Markov Jump Processes (SC-CMJP)}$, a framework in which one modality's transition rates are functionals of the other modality's confidence score, as weighted by cross-modal attention. Furthermore, a remasking jump retracts commitments the moment cross-modal evidence turns against them. In conjunction with SC-CMJP, we introduce $\texttt{CO}_\texttt{2}\texttt{Jump}$ (Self-$\underline{\text{CO}}$rrecting $\underline{\text{CO}}$upled $\underline{\text{Jump}}$), a novel training-free single-pass sampler for joint multimodal geneneration. For training and evaluation purposes, we have created and will release three large-scale joint multimodal generation corpora: $\text{JEdit-1M}$, $\text{JMaze-200K}$, $\text{JNono-200K}$, with matching in- and out-of-distribution benchmarks. $\texttt{CO}_\texttt{2}\texttt{Jump}$ achieves best joint performance for image understanding and editing as well as visual reasoning (maze and nonogram solving). The performance of the sampler scales monotonically with the number of denoising steps, evidence that the benefits of cross-modal coupling $\textit{compound}$ across the trajectory. Project page: https://coupled-jump.github.io

Computer-Aided Design (CAD) floor plan drawings contain both graphical primitives and textual annotations, which provide complementary geometric and semantic cues for intelligent design understanding. Among CAD analysis tasks, panoptic symbol spotting has become increasingly important with the growing demand for industrial digitalization and deep learning-based automation. However, most existing methods remain primarily primitive-centric and underexploit textual annotations, despite their critical semantic value. Even the few text-aware approaches often treat annotations only superficially, without properly modeling complex syntax and hierarchical semantics of CAD annotations, which leads to semantic loss and suboptimal spotting performance. To address these limitations, we propose TextCAD, a multimodal framework that jointly models graphical primitives and textual annotations for panoptic symbol spotting. Specifically, we design a Type-Attribute Correlation Encoder (TACE) to explicitly encode the compositional semantics within annotations by jointly modeling their types and attributes. We further introduce a Semantic Hierarchy Alignment framework with Multi-level Semantic Filtering (MSF) and primitive downsampling, which adaptively aligns annotation semantics with graphical primitives at different semantic levels and enables accurate cross-modal semantic injection and fusion. Experiments on real-world building-design datasets show that TextCAD effectively improves symbol spotting performance and achieves state-of-the-art results.

Learning, at its core, extends beyond memorization to the ability to reason and solve novel problems by navigating a space of possibilities. We introduce Lumo-2, a latent world-action model that generates actions by reasoning over world dynamics in latent space. The learned latent world dynamics capture physically grounded visual transitions, naturally encoding future possibilities and providing a unified substrate for cross-modal alignment. This formulation enables predictive reasoning akin to world modelling while remaining lightweight and focused on physical dynamics relevant to control. Central to our approach is the hypothesis that action generation quality is governed by the geometry of the latent space. We observe that standard reconstruction-based action tokenization objectives induce representations biased toward low-level signal fidelity, leading to misalignment between reconstruction quality and downstream control performance. To address this limitation, we propose a multi-stage modality pre-alignment strategy in which action representations are progressively aligned with latent world dynamics, vision, and language. This process enforces cross-modal consistency, promotes abstraction, and induces a structured latent space for predictive reasoning. We provide a systematic empirical study of latent world modelling and modality alignment, analyzing their roles in scaling laws and out-of-distribution generalization. Results show that Lumo-2 consistently outperforms strong vision-language-action (VLA) and world-action model (WAM) baselines, with gains on challenging real-world tasks requiring temporal reasoning, physical understanding, or high control complexity, including long-horizon and dexterous manipulation. These findings suggest that structured multimodal alignment and predictive reasoning are fundamental principles for advancing embodied intelligence.

We study the modality gap in CLIP-style dual-encoder contrastive learning, where image and text embeddings remain misaligned despite being trained in a shared space. We argue that the gap is induced by a failure of the InfoNCE formulation with independent encoders. We conduct a uni-modal experiment with two independent encoders and identical initialization conditions and find that InfoNCE actively generates a gap at low temperatures. We provide a theoretical analysis of this phenomenon and show that the modality gap is indeed a mode-failure of InfoNCE, but only at low temperatures. We propose a simple modification called xNCE, which uses intermodal as well as intra-modality negative contrastive pairs. xNCE matches retrieval performance on MS-COCO while consistently reducing the gap even at low temperatures. Notably, xNCE improves zero-shot classification over the InfoNCE baseline across all benchmarks, whereas high-temperature InfoNCE and regularized InfoNCE both fail to do so, demonstrating that xNCE reduces the modality gap without sacrificing the discriminative geometry needed for transfer.

Dance-to-music generation is a promising task for applications such as choreography support and automatic accompaniment, where temporal coordination between body movement and sound is essential. In particular, using human joint positions as the motion representation is attractive because they explicitly capture body dynamics while being lightweight, privacy-preserving, and easy to integrate with motion capture and pose-estimation pipelines. A central challenge in this setting, however, is the scarcity of high-quality paired dance-music data, since collecting accurately synchronized pairs is costly and often constrained by copyright and performance rights. This makes it difficult to train end-to-end models solely from paired data. To address this issue, we propose a dance-conditioned music generation framework that efficiently exploits both unpaired and paired data. Our method combines pretrained unimodal encoders for motion and music, beat-guided contrastive pretraining to align their feature spaces, and a ControlNet-style conditioning module on top of a pretrained text-to-audio diffusion model. Experiments on AIST++ demonstrate that the proposed techniques improve both dance-music alignment and audio quality, as confirmed by quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Compared to a state-of-the-art method, our approach achieves superior dance alignment performance and competitive audio quality. Code is available at https://github.com/kmraven/AudioLDM-ControlNet .

Understanding music requires understanding localized relationships across data modalities, e.g., how time in performance audio maps onto position in a score image. Yet supervision for such local correspondences is difficult to obtain-in practice, we often only have access to coarser global supervision like paired segments of audio and images. To address this gap, we propose FuSiLi (Fused Sinkhorn-Localized Similarity), a similarity score for multimodal contrastive learning operating directly on local image patch and audio frame features via Sinkhorn-based soft alignment. We show that FuSiLi (i) effectively learns local relationships, (ii) requires only global supervision, and (iii) retains the global alignment capabilities of conventional contrastive approaches. We fine-tune pretrained CLIP and CLAP encoders on pairs of raw sheet music images and audio using a hybrid contrastive objective combining FuSiLi with conventional global similarity. We evaluate on cross-modal retrieval and frame-level alignment tasks against a range of global and local baselines, showing that our approach outperforms them on local alignment while remaining competitive on retrieval.

Sign language translation (SLT) converts continuous sign videos into spoken language text. Gloss-free approaches leverage pre-trained visual encoders and language models but rely on implicit cross-modal alignment from translation supervision alone. We present VTaMo, a framework that introduces explicit multi-granularity alignment at three levels: (1) local alignment via entropy-regularized optimal transport with a learnable null token for fine-grained frame-to-token correspondences; (2) global alignment via a learnable orthogonal transformation that calibrates embedding space geometry through Earth Mover's Distance; and (3) position-aligned contrastive learning for discriminative token-level representations. Experiments on Phoenix-2014T, CSL-Daily, How2Sign, and OpenASL demonstrate consistent state-of-the-art performance, with ablations confirming the complementary contributions of each component. Code is available at https://github.com/junyi2005/vtamo.

Fully characterizing a crystalline material requires integrating heterogeneous data sources -- atomic structures, diffraction patterns, electronic density of states, and natural language -- each of which captures a different facet of the same physical object. In practice, however, these modalities are stored and analyzed in isolation, making it difficult to relate or query materials across representational boundaries. We present MatBind, a contrastive learning framework that aligns four materials modalities -- crystal structure, powder X-ray diffraction (pXRD) simulated from structures, density of states (DOS), and text -- into a unified embedding space using crystal structure as the central physical anchor. The framework induces alignment between modalities never explicitly paired during training, enabling emergent zero-shot cross-modal retrieval as a direct consequence of the shared representation. The learned embedding space organizes materials according to physically meaningful properties without explicit supervision, and retrieval performance improves systematically when modalities are combined at query time. These results demonstrate that treating heterogeneous materials data as complementary projections of a single physical reality, rather than as isolated data sources, is not a practical choice but is consistent with the underlying physics.

RGB-Thermal (RGBT) Video Object Detection (VOD) has gained significant attention because of the limitations of conventional RGB-based VOD methods under challenging conditions, such as low light, heavy fog, and adverse weather, etc. However, spatial misalignment commonly exists between RGBT image pairs. To address this, we propose a Dual-Correlation Hypergraph Network (DCHNet) that captures high-dimensional complementary information by explicitly modeling two types of correlations: temporal correlation across consecutive frames and spatial correlation from cross-modal features. Specifically, we first design a Patch-based Spatial Alignment Module (PSAM) to sequentially align the multimodal features at the local region level. Subsequently, we propose a Dual Hypergraph Fusion Module (DHFM), which constructs temporal and multimodal hypergraphs, respectively, to enhance object characteristic through dual-correlation learning. Furthermore, the field currently lacks a large-scale, scene-diverse benchmark dataset for comprehensive evaluation. Therefore, we construct DVT-VOD1000, a large-scale RGBT VOD dataset containing 1,000 video sequences with 103,464 RGBT image pairs. The dataset covers diverse scenarios, including campuses, parks, traffics, rural areas, night scenes, rainy weather, and snowy weather. Comprehensive experiments on VT-VOD50 and our DVT-VOD1000 demonstrate that DCHNet achieves state-of-the-art detection accuracy. The dataset and source code will be made publicly available on https://github.com/tzz-ahu/ to support academic research.

Action Quality Assessment (AQA) aims to evaluate how well a person performs a movement, which is essential in applications such as sports scoring, skill assessment, and healthcare. However, unimodal approaches often struggle to capture subtle cues of movement quality in real-world settings. Although multi-modal inputs provide complementary information, existing methods still face two major challenges: heterogeneous modalities often lead to cross-modal misalignment and unstable fusion, and reliable multi-modal annotation is costly, resulting in limited dataset diversity. To address these challenges, we propose DualAlign, a two-stage multi-modal fusion framework with adaptive alignment. The framework first constructs a coherent visual representation by maximizing shared structural information across RGB video, optical flow, and skeleton modalities. Textual semantics are then incorporated after visual stabilization, allowing high-level descriptions to complement rather than distort the underlying visual manifold. To evaluate the framework under realistic multi-modal conditions, we introduce MM--JDM, a movement-quality assessment dataset integrating RGB videos, optical flow, skeleton sequences, and structured text. MM--JDM naturally exhibits modality noise, class imbalance, and label scarcity, making it a challenging benchmark for studying multi-modal fusion and alignment. Extensive experiments show that DualAlign improves average correlation on MM--JDM by 21.16% over the state-of-the-art methods and achieves gains of 3.53% and 5.95% on the RG and Fis-V benchmarks, respectively. DualAlign also remains robust under missing-modality and label-scarce conditions.

We present VTMR, a two-stage framework for Video-To-Music Recommendation. In Stage1, VTMR aligns comprehensive video and music signals in a joint audio-visual-text representation space and efficiently retrieves semantically compatible candidates using coarse global embeddings. In Stage2, it reranks the retrieved candidates by attending to the temporal sequences of both video and music, thereby capturing fine-grained temporal correspondence. Evaluated on the video-to-music recommendation task, the multimodal retrieval stage improves R@10 from 14.2 to 15.9 and Median Rank from 75 to 58 over the strongest baseline; the temporal reranker further boosts R@10 to 18.3 and Median Rank to 46, demonstrating complementary gains from richer query encoding and temporal alignment. A human preference study confirms that VTMR is on par with a commercial baseline in overall preference, while outperforming a generative baseline in music quality.

Zero-shot composed image retrieval (ZS-CIR) aims to retrieve a target image from a multimodal query consisting of a reference image and an edit text describing the desired modification. Recent ZS-CIR studies have relied on projection-based methods that map a reference image into pseudo-word tokens in the text embedding space. However, such methods require additional projection and re-encoding steps, increasing training complexity, reducing efficiency, and introducing a discrepancy between training and inference. In this paper, we propose DiCE-CIR, a direct composition learning method that predicts composed query representations by directly composing a reference image and an edit text. To enable scalable training without manually annotated triplets, we automatically construct compositional training samples from large-scale image-caption pairs using a large language model. Based on these samples, we train a lightweight composition module with objectives that promote alignment with the target, edit-consistent semantic transformation, and retrieval discriminability. We conduct extensive experiments on ZS-CIR benchmarks and show that DiCE-CIR achieves state-of-the-art performance on CIRCO and competitive performance on CIRR while maintaining high computational efficiency.

Continuous video anomaly detection is dominated by reactive Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) that collapses spatiotemporal features into scalar scores. We introduce PULS (Predictive Unified Latent Space), a continuous semantic world-model pipeline comprising two modules: a 490M-parameter KSD Bridge (Kinematic-to-Semantic Distillation) and a 16.8M-parameter Anticipatory State Predictor (ASP). The KSD Bridge maps V-JEPA 2 physical tensors into the 2048-d Qwen3-VL-Embedding-2B text-aligned hypersphere, trained on a subset of UCF-Crime. This translation alone yields a chunk-level AUROC of 0.8994 for UCF-Crime and 0.8162 for out-of-distribution XD-Violence without MIL or hierarchical fusion. We introduce and validate the Latent Clarity Hypothesis: because JEPA's temporal predictor discards aleatoric pixel noise while preserving kinematics, anticipated future representations are more semantically separable than observed presents. The ASP sharpens these anticipated future latents, achieving 44.5% mean 14-way zero-shot VQA accuracy (exceeding observation baseline by +9.6 pp). Applying the ASP to Observation Tensors collapses accuracy to 7.3% (random chance), proving Anticipation and Observation occupy distinct sub-manifolds. A Triple-Track Lead-Time protocol with an L1-surprise gate yields a peak +8.9 pp anticipatory advantage at T-0.5s (p < 0.001, N = 1,000 permutation), separating physical anticipation from static scene priors. Zero-shot transfer to XD-Violence confirms that Newtonian-invariant kinematic representations generalize out-of-distribution.

Generative diffusion models excel at synthesizing high-quality images, videos, and 3D content under multimodal control. However, arbitrary user-defined modality-to-4D (X-to-4D) generation remains challenging due to the high cost of constructing diverse datasets and the limited scalability of existing methods. This paper presents Align4D, a flexible framework that translates any-modal input into coherent video-3D pairs, using video to guide 4D motion and 3D data to shape 4D geometry. Align4D introduces three key techniques: (1) Object Distance Alignment, which searches Video-Aligned and Multiview-Aligned Object Distances (VAOD/MAOD), respectively, to reconcile 4D renderings with video and the priors of multiview diffusion models; (2) Motion-Geometry Joint Alignment, which constrains known and unknown views through synchronized video and 3D inputs, ensuring consistent 4D generation; and (3) Asynchronous Optimization, which decouples Gaussian attribute and deformation network training to enhance motion and geometry fidelity. We further propose the X4D dataset, which integrates prompt, image, video, and 3D data for benchmarking. Experiments on X4D and Consistent4D demonstrate that Align4D achieves state-of-the-art quality and consistency in X-to-4D generation. Project page: https://miaoqiaowei.github.io/Align4D/.

The interaction between brain structure and genetic influences is key to understanding neuropsychiatric disorders. However, most large-scale datasets are unimodal, providing either neuroimaging or genetics data. We propose CALM, a framework that learns interpretable associations between brain ROIs and genetic pathways from completely disjoint populations. CALM aligns the two modalities in a shared latent space via linear projections that simultaneously match the class-conditional latent distributions and ensure group separability. These projections provide interpretable pathway--ROI associations. When trained on unimodal imaging and genetics datasets, CALM generalizes to an unseen paired dataset, outperforming several state-of-the-art methods and ablation baselines. We also demonstrate stability of the learned associations against a paired baseline. Our experiments on autism spectrum disorder reveal immune and metabolic pathways linked to specific cortical regions and are consistent with established literature. Thus, CALM opens the door to leveraging large unimodal repositories for studying cross-modal interactions in brain disorders across disparate datasets.

Recent brain decoding studies have made substantial progress in reconstructing externally perceived visual content from neural signals. However, using electroencephalography (EEG) recordings to guide facial expression editing remains largely unexplored and poses a distinct challenge: rather than recovering what a subject sees, it requires identifying facial-action related patterns from noisy EEG signals and grounding them in localized, identity-preserving expression edits. In this paper, we investigate EEG-conditioned facial image editing for fine-grained facial action unit (AU) control and propose MindAU, a unified framework for controlling facial AU edits from EEG signals. MindAU first learns noise-robust and AU-discriminative EEG representations through temporal masked reconstruction and AU classification supervision. It then bridges the modality gap via Dual-Stream Manifold Alignment, aligning EEG features with AU-level text semantics and identity-reduced visual displacement trajectories in the multimodal space of Qwen2.5-VL. Finally, MindAU incorporates EEG-aware Multimodal Rotary Positional Embeddings, landmark-guided reference masking, and AU-aware region supervision into a multimodal diffusion-based editor for high-fidelity identity-preserving editing. We also introduce E-CAFE, a curated benchmark for EEG-Conditioned Action-Unit Facial Editing with paired EEG-face editing samples and standardized evaluation protocols. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of MindAU and suggest its potential as a step towards future assistive expression technologies for individuals with facial neuromuscular disorders.

Unsupervised cross-modal hashing enables efficient retrieval of semantically related instances across different modalities without requiring manual semantic annotation. However, existing unsupervised methods rely heavily on large-scale image-text pairs. Collecting such data can be costly, particularly in scenarios where well-aligned pairs are scarce due to privacy and specialized constraints. More critically, existing methods tend to overfit to seen training data, restricting their generalization performance on unseen categories that the constrained training data cannot cover. To address these limitations, we propose Attribute-Prompted Kernel Hashing (APKH), a novel data-efficient approach that constructs a compact, modality-aligned Hamming space driven by the generalized attribute priors of vision-language foundation models. Specifically, APKH introduces two core modules: Context-optimized Attribute Kernel Mapping (CAKM) and Kernel-Smoothed Contrastive Alignment (KSCA). CAKM formulates cross-modal alignment through hyperspherical Radial Basis Function kernel mapping, optimizing dynamic attribute kernels via prompt learning to capture modality-invariant semantics. Furthermore, KSCA extends conventional point-to-point contrastive learning by modeling limited paired data as continuous kernel distributions. This explicit smoothing of the modality gap alleviates overfitting to sparse pairwise correlations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that APKH outperforms state-of-the-art hashing methods in the challenging cross-modal retrieval tasks from seen to unseen categories under data-constrained scenarios.

Compared to supervised cross-modal hashing (CMH), unsupervised CMH reduces the reliance on manual labeling by learning binary codes from unlabeled image-text pairs. However, existing unsupervised CMH methods often rely on large-scale image-text pairs, which are costly to collect. To address this limitation, we propose Global-Neighborhood Alignment Hashing (GNAH), a novel approach that preserves the semantic structure of vision-language foundation models within a compact binary Hamming space using only a limited number of image-text pairs. Specifically, GNAH captures global structural information from the continuous latent space and transfers it into the binary Hamming space through a Prototype-Anchored Global Alignment module. In addition, GNAH extends conventional pairwise contrastive learning by modeling stochastic neighborhood relationships via a Contrastive Stochastic Neighborhood Alignment module, thereby alleviating overfitting to sparse pairwise correlations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GNAH consistently outperforms existing unsupervised cross-modal retrieval methods under data-constrained settings, offering a practical solution for real-world CMH applications.

Artificial intelligence is transforming our capability to solve biological challenges. In dimensionality bottleneck regimes exacerbated by high-dimensional biological data, neural networks force distinct concepts into the lower dimensions known as superposition. Although this superposition is widely known to hinder interpretability, its impact on corrupting the geometry of latent spaces remains critically overlooked. Here, we utilized sparse autoencoders (SAEs) trained on over 100,000 multiplexed images of patient-derived Parkinson's disease and healthy neurons to resolve superposition. This approach bypasses the mathematical non-uniqueness of feature attribution by shifting to interpretable latent representation analysis. We theoretically and empirically demonstrate that superposition contaminates representational metric spaces, and thereby SAEs successfully recover geometric fidelity. By treating these geometrically purified representations as single-cell state vectors, we adapted single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data analysis methodologies directly to the image domain. Finally, we introduce GW-map, utilizing Gromov-Wasserstein optimal transport to align these image representations with authentic scRNA-seq data de novo. This coupling reconstructs hierarchical neuronal pathology pathways such as Calcium-AIS scaffold, without reference spatial transcriptomics, establishing a scalable foundation for spatial biology. Code is available at https://github.com/jijihihi/Bio\_superposition

View-based point cloud completion aims to recover a complete 3D shape from a partial point cloud, guided by a single-view image. However, existing approaches often suffer from limited performance due to weak modality alignment and limited self-geometry enhancement. To overcome these challenges, we propose a unified geometry-aware framework that integrates efficient modality alignment and adaptive geometry enhancement, mainly to address cross-modal geometric inconsistency of view-guided point cloud completion. Specifically, we propose a geometry-aware modality alignment by integrating a shared self-attention Transformer and cross-modality reconstruction supervision, which aims to bring features of the image and point cloud close to each other in a shared latent space describing the 3D object. To enhance the perception of global shape and local geometric details, we propose an adaptive geometry-aware self-attention module, which simultaneously considers local geometry-aware attention computation and the spatially-variant feature fusion. In addition, we apply a geometry-perceptive anchor refinement module to reorganize the anchor points (representing a local region of the shape) under appropriate supervision, further boosting the completion performance of our method. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance over existing approaches. Our code will be available at https://github.com/weizequan/MAGE.

Referring Remote Sensing Image Segmentation (RRSIS) seeks to localize and segment the target object or region specified by a natural language expression in a remote sensing image. While existing RRSIS models have benefited from large-scale foundation models, they predominantly rely on full fine-tuning. These approaches are computationally intensive and may weaken the generalization ability of pre-trained models, as extensive fine-tuning on significantly smaller downstream datasets can distort the well-structured feature representations learned during large-scale pre-training. Although Parameter-Efficient Tuning (PET) offers a potential alternative, existing PET frameworks primarily focus on single-modal optimization, failing to capture the complex cross-modal dependencies required for multimodal reasoning, while simultaneously struggling to bridge the substantial domain gap between natural scenes and aerial imagery. To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework, Semantic-driven Scale and Spatial Selection for Efficient Cross-modal Alignment (S4ECA), which enables effective and efficient cross-modal interaction through parameter-efficient adaptation. Specifically, we design a dual-encoder adapter architecture. The textual adapter employs learnable queries to distill highly semantic language proxies from word-level embeddings, facilitating early grounding. Simultaneously, the visual adapter refines hierarchical feature representations through a multi-scale dense extractor, followed by a language-guided scale and spatial selection mechanism that dynamically emphasizes relevant visual contexts, ensuring precise cross-modal alignment. By updating only 2.4% of the backbone parameters, our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the RRSIS-D and RefSegRS datasets, demonstrating superior efficiency and precision in complex aerial scenarios.

H&E-stained whole-slide images offer cohort-scale availability and rich spatial context but lack molecular specificity, whereas bulk RNA-seq provides transcriptome-wide resolution at high cost with limited archival availability. We show that training a lightweight alignment module atop frozen histopathology and RNA-Seq foundation models enables open-vocabulary molecular prompting -- querying H&E slides with gene-set signatures to predict pathway activity without sequencing or end-to-end retraining. Using contrastive learning on a multi-cancer cohort (N=1,720), we achieve a 25-fold improvement in retrieval over baseline methods. Systematic analysis reveals a graduated predictability spectrum: morphologically grounded programs (cell-cycle programs, immune-related) are most reliably predicted (R^2>0.5), while predicting pathways with no morphological footprint remains challenging as expected. We validate clinical utility on the POSEIDON clinical trial: H&E-predicted squamous cell carcinoma scores recapitulate NSCLC subtype identity and predicted IFN-gamma mirror PD-L1 tumor-cell expression groups. Furthermore, genesets describing immune activation and fibrosis predict known tumor microenvironment archetypes from histology alone. We further validate generalization of our approach across unseen cohorts and demonstrate data-efficient domain adaptation, establishing a slide-native framework for molecular analysis on H&E images.

Vision-language models map images and text into a joint embedding space. However, these embeddings often entangle multiple semantic features, which limits their interpretability and controllability. While sparse autoencoders have emerged as a useful tool for decomposing these embeddings into monosemantic features, their application to joint embedding spaces has largely relied on an implicit, untested assumption that semantically corresponding features share the same directions across modalities. In this paper, we challenge this assumption by identifying discrepancies in feature directions for the same concept across image and text modalities, a phenomenon we term cross-modal feature heterogeneity. We demonstrate that this heterogeneity is a key driver of the modality split, where a shared concept activates different latents depending on the modality. This finding further reveals why aligning latent activations alone is insufficient to resolve the underlying feature mismatch. Motivated by this observation, we propose an approach that trains modality-specific sparse autoencoders to preserve each modality's feature geometry, and then aligns corresponding features post hoc. Our method improves reconstruction fidelity and enhances performance in cross-modal retrieval and concept steering.

Visual grounding often fails even when the target object is present in the proposal pool, because the language-side referent is bound to the wrong region. We study this binding failure under frozen perception and ask whether an explicit query--region alignment hook, together with a perception-grounded abstention mechanism, can improve faithful grounding without retraining the detector or the vision-language backbone. HKVLM freezes a language-aligned open-vocabulary detector for localization and learns a lightweight hook that maps referential query embeddings to detector proposals in a shared space; a verifier abstains when no region sufficiently supports the query. We prove an exact proposal-level diagnostic decomposition, $(1-\mathrm{SeeErr})(1-\mathrm{SayErr})$, separating proposal-coverage failures from conditional binding failures, and a monotonicity result that characterizes the faithfulness--recall trade-off induced by abstention. Across RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, RefCOCOg, and POPE, HKVLM improves over untrained and trained matched-perception binding controls and substantially reduces hallucination through abstention. Strong coordinate-decoding and end-to-end fine-tuned baselines remain much higher in raw grounding accuracy, and a reasoning-stress set exposes binding as the main current bottleneck. We therefore present HKVLM as a diagnostic and mechanism-level study of query--region binding under frozen perception, not as an absolute localization leader.

Multimodal feature fusion can effectively capture complex patterns in real-world data by integrating complementary information from different modalities. However, in many applications, such as boiler combustion monitoring, equipment failure, inconsistent sensor sampling frequencies, and network delays often cause missing modalities and temporal asynchrony. These issues lead to incomplete and disorderly multimodal data. To address them, previous studies have proposed several data fusion methods that align cluster centers before fusion. However, these methods have two key limitations. First, they cannot guarantee accurate sample-level alignment of data pairs. Second, they do not address significant discrepancies in data sizes across different classes, which may affect subsequent fusion performance. To address these problems, we propose a dual-learning based penalized multi-align clustering model, named DLPMAC. The dual-learning mechanism enables the model to learn prior knowledge from each modality, including semantic and structural information. This helps preserve semantic consistency and structural similarity across modalities at both local and global levels. In addition, the penalized multi-align module performs multi-to-multi data alignment through a penalty mechanism. It allows one sample to form data pairs with different samples from other modalities, thereby improving data-pair alignment accuracy. The penalty mechanism also prevents data aggregation, avoiding the case where excessive samples are linked to a single sample. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of DLPMAC in addressing data alignment and fusion challenges from both sampling and clustering perspectives.

While modern multimodal models integrate vision with language, audio, or touch, olfaction remains largely unexplored due to the lack of paired visuo-olfactory data. We introduce SmellNet-V, a scalable visuo-olfactory dataset built on the insight that odor identity is largely invariant to visual transformations within a semantic category. This allows us to synthetically pair smell-only samples with semantically aligned in-the-wild web images, converting a unimodal olfactory dataset into a cross-modal benchmark without costly co-collection. Building on this dataset, we propose See & Sniff, a self-supervised framework that learns joint visuo-olfactory representations via dense local alignment and naturally produces smell saliency maps for spatial grounding of odor sources. We further introduce pixel-level smell localization task and a benchmark for evaluation. Our method surpasses smell-only baselines by 7% in smell classification from smell alone and generalizes to cross-modal retrieval and smell localization, establishing visuo-olfactory learning as a new direction in multimodal perception.

Zero-shot visual decoding from electroencephalography (EEG) aims to infer visual semantics from non-invasive neural recordings, but remains challenging due to the low signal-to-noise ratio, non-stationarity, and limited spatial resolution of EEG. Existing EEG-vision alignment methods often rely on holistic EEG embeddings, which can obscure the complementary temporal, spectral, and spatial structure underlying visual perception. We introduce a unified multiview EEG representation learning framework for aligning brain responses with visual semantic embeddings. Our method builds an EEG encoder that jointly models three complementary views: input-conditioned state-space temporal dynamics, learnable wavelet-based spectral decomposition for sample-adaptive frequency modeling, and attention-modulated graph learning for structured electrode interactions. The resulting multiview EEG embeddings are fused and aligned with pretrained visual representations in a shared semantic space using contrastive learning with EEG-specific regularization, enabling 200-way zero-shot visual classification. Experiments on THINGS-EEG benchmark show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, with 54.8% Top-1 and 85.6% Top-5 accuracy in the within-subject setting and 15.3% Top-1 and 45.4% Top-5 accuracy in the cross-subject setting. We further present the first systematic cross-session EEG-image decoding evaluation, achieving 40.8% Top-1 and 78.0% Top-5 accuracy. These results suggest that explicitly modeling multiview neural structure improves both semantic alignment and generalization in EEG-based visual decoding.

Micro-expression recognition (MER) is challenging due to subtle facial movements, limited data, and the ambiguous relationship between Action Units (AUs) and emotion categories. Optical flow and motion magnification are two widely used representations for making subtle facial dynamics observable. However, many existing methods treat them as separate cues or fuse them without explicitly modeling their dual complementarity. Optical flow encodes displacement-level muscle motion, whereas motion magnification reveals appearance-level changes in facial texture and context. When both modalities are informative, their combination provides a more complete characterization of subtle facial dynamics; when one modality degrades, the other may still preserve discriminative evidence for compensation. This dual complementarity provides richer facial representations, but also introduces two key challenges for multimodal fusion: cross-modal heterogeneity and spatially varying modality reliability. To address these challenges, we propose SAC$^2$-Net, a Semantic Anchoring and Complementary-Consensus Network that first aligns heterogeneous visual representations with semantic anchors and then performs reliability-aware complementary fusion. Specifically, Semantic Anchoring Soft Alignment (SASA) converts activated AUs into textual prompts and uses hierarchical AU-aware soft labels to align motion-magnified and optical-flow representations while preserving semantic proximity among anatomically related samples. Based on the aligned representations, Complementary-Consensus Fusion (CCF) exchanges complementary motion and appearance cues, adaptively enhances unreliable local responses with trustworthy cross-modal evidence, and further encourages a shared spatial focus through consensus refinement.

Effective cross-modal feature alignment and interaction are central challenges in multispectral object detection. Although global cross-attention provides strong long-range modeling ability, its quadratic complexity with respect to feature size limits deployment on resource-constrained platforms. We therefore propose Progressive Pixel-Neighborhood Deformable Cross-Attention for multispectral feature fusion, termed PNAFusion. The proposed framework is motivated by two observations: weak misalignment between visible and thermal images is usually concentrated around local neighborhoods, and semantic correspondence across modalities often follows non-linear spatial mappings that fixed receptive fields cannot model well. To address these issues, PNAFusion incorporates local spatial priors into its architectural design to concentrate feature interaction and alignment on the most relevant neighborhoods. Specifically, a Pixel-Neighborhood Cross-Attention (PNCA) module is introduced to avoid redundant global feature matching and suppress background noise. Meanwhile, an Adaptive Deformable Alignment (ADA) module captures non-linear spatial correspondences through learned pixel-wise offsets. These components are further integrated through an iterative feedback mechanism to progressively refine cross-modal feature alignment. Experiments on FLIR, M3FD, and DroneVehicle show that PNAFusion achieves 84.2, 90.5, and 85.5 [email protected], respectively, under the YOLOv5 detector, and further reaches 86.8 [email protected] on FLIR and 90.8 [email protected] on M3FD when transferred to Co-DETR. Efficiency analysis indicates that PNAFusion reduces allocated GPU memory by 33.0% compared with ICAFusion and reduces theoretical FLOPs from 194.8 G to 156.4 G, although the deformable sampling and iterative refinement introduce additional latency. Our code will be available at https://github.com/DanielQiuTian/PNAFusion.