Multimodal

The advancement of generative AI models capable of producing text and image marks a critical step forward in the realm of multimodal intelligence, particularly for tasks involving the interleaving of both modalities. To advance this intelligence to the next stage, it is crucial for models to autonomously generate free-form interleaved text-image sequences. In this paper, we introduce ILLUME-X, an advanced unified multimodal paradigm that enables high-quality, free-form interleaved text-image generation by improving multimodal data efficiency and stabilizing the multimodal training process. ILLUME-X comprises three key components: (i) an expanded training data pipeline optimized for interleaved text-image generation, (ii) a progressive training strategy with self-adaptive objectives for free-length multimodal token sequences, and (iii) an objective and comprehensive evaluation method ILScore for interleaved text-image sequences. Notably, our ILLUME-X outperforms previous unified models across multiple interleaved text-image generation tasks like style transfer, image decomposition and storytelling.

Music-driven dance video generation aims to synthesize expressive human motion that is temporally aligned with music while maintaining high visual fidelity. Despite recent progress, existing methods still face two key limitations: the lack of large-scale, high-quality dance video datasets, and the absence of principled frameworks for integrating music as a complementary conditioning signal into Video Generation Foundation Models. To address these limitations, we introduce CIPE-Dance, a large-scale Internet-sourced dance video dataset with choreography-informed text annotations, constructed via a progressive expert pipeline. To the best of our knowledge, CIPE-Dance is the largest dataset for dance video generation to date, comprising 300k high-quality clips over 400 hours and covering diverse dancers, environments, and dance genres. We further propose OmniDance, a framework-level recipe for integrating music into a TI2V foundation model without sacrificing its original controllability or visual fidelity. Motivated by the complementary roles of text as low-frequency semantics and music as high-frequency temporal dynamics, OmniDance co-designs a depth-aware specialization architecture, an anchored easy-to-hard curriculum learning strategy, and a modality-specialized time-dependent CFG strategy, enabling unified TI2V, MI2V, and MTI2V generation. Extensive experiments on CIPE-Dance demonstrate that OmniDance achieves state-of-the-art performance across all three tasks and exhibits robust multimodal integration capability. Project is available at https://github.com/AMAP-ML/OmniDance.

Recent co-speech gesture generation methods often overlook cultural differences, limiting their effectiveness in human-agent interaction. Moreover, culture-conditioned models are rarely evaluated under speaker-disjoint splits, so apparent "cultural" behavior may be confounded with speaker-specific gesturing style. We introduce SICAGE, a modular framework for culture-aware co-speech gesture generation that conditions motion synthesis models on speaker-independent cultural representations. SICAGE learns these representations from audio and text by treating each speaker as a separate domain while imposing invariance across speakers. This encourages representations to remain culture-discriminative while reducing dependence on speaker identity. The resulting cultural embeddings condition a multimodal generator to produce culturally appropriate gestures. We instantiate this idea with two domain generalization approaches: adversarial learning and Fishr regularization. We further introduce ALaDiT, a real-time diffusion-based gesture generator designed to efficiently incorporate the learned cultural embeddings. To validate our method, we built TED4C-L, a 106-hour multimodal dataset of 764 TED speakers from four cultural groups. Experiments show that SICAGE improves motion realism, diversity, beat synchronization, semantic relevance, and cultural consistency.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is an important paradigm for improving the reasoning capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs). However, directly applying RL to rollout multimodal reasoning can lead to instability, due to the exploitation of language priors, the neglect of visual evidence, and the generation of reasoning traces that are fluent yet not visually grounded. The question arises: Can initially steer the policy toward visually faithful reasoning regime before applying reinforcement learning? To this end, we propose a Faithful Warm-Start (FWS) strategy that first curates samples with explicit vision-language causal relationships from six general VQA benchmarks to construct the FaithfulQA dataset, where each of the image-question pairs gains a certain degree of visual observations, question requirements, commonsense knowledge, domain knowledge, and the final answer. Subsequently, a VLM-based judge is employed to further purify the dataset, ensuring strong causal consistency and visual faithfulness. This warm-start stage equips the model with the capability to understand causally grounded vision-language patterns before subsequent RL optimization under sparse answer-level rewards. Experimental results show that such faithful supervision improves answer accuracy, stabilizes RL training, and reduces visually unsupported reasoning.

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.

Tactile sensors are inherently heterogeneous: a model trained on one sensor cannot be directly used on another, which limits learning contact-rich manipulation policies from diverse tactile data at scale. To bridge this gap, we propose the Heterogeneous Tactile Transformer (HTT), a framework that learns shared tactile representations across heterogeneous sensors. HTT consists of sensor-specific encoders and a shared transformer trunk, and is pretrained with per-modality masked reconstruction together with cross-modal alignment between paired sensors. Pretraining uses our novel Heterogeneous Paired Tactile (HPT) dataset, containing 1.6M synchronized paired frames across four vision- and array-based tactile sensors. Across distinct tactile perception and real-world manipulation tasks, HTT is shown to learn transferable representations that adapt to new tasks and previously unseen sensors. Dataset, code, and model checkpoints will be released upon publication at https://jxbi1010.github.io/htt-gh-page/.

Visuo-Tactile policies leveraging optical tactile sensors have shown great promise in contact-rich manipulation. These sensors achieve high spatial resolution and multi-dimensional force sensing by utilizing an internal camera to monitor the deformation of their elastic gel surface, thereby indirectly inferring tactile cues. Despite their advantages, extracting fine-grained contact states necessary for contact-rich manipulation remains an open challenge. Existing methods typically use either raw images or cumulative motion fields to represent tactile cues. However, both are prone to perception ambiguity. Raw tactile images mainly capture appearance changes, while cumulative motion fields only reflect the aggregate gel deformation. Consequently, distinct fine-grained contact states can exhibit highly similar patterns, making it difficult to explicitly distinguish subtle contact variations. To address this issue, we explore the dynamic priors of tactile motion and discover that the correlation between transient and cumulative motion can explicitly distinguish fine-grained contact states. Based on this insight, we propose a motion-aware tactile representation to facilitate contact-rich manipulation. Beyond tactile representation, effective fusion of tactile and visual modalities is also critical. Most existing fusion methods either directly concatenate features from each modality or train modality-specific networks separately and fuse their outputs. However, these strategies struggle to simultaneously model cross-modal interactions and preserve modality-specific characteristics. In this work, we take advantage of the Mixture-of-Transformers architecture and propose a unified modality-aware visuo-tactile policy that captures cross-modal complementarity while maintaining modality-specific properties.

Encrypted traffic classification has achieved strong performance, but its decision process remains difficult to interpret. Existing methods usually combine flow statistics, packet sequences, and byte-level representations into opaque latent features, making it unclear which type of evidence actually drives the prediction. In this paper, we propose Traffic-CBM, a structurally interpretable multimodal framework for encrypted traffic classification. Instead of directly fusing heterogeneous traffic signals into a black-box representation, Traffic-CBM organizes them into a unified hierarchical concept space. These concepts are not manually annotated semantic attributes; rather, they are scalar evidence summaries constrained by predefined traffic evidence groups. More specifically, grouped flow statistics are mapped to statistical concepts, dedicated temporal encoders learn temporal concepts from disjoint feature subspaces, and byte-level evidence is further organized into packet-level and cross-packet concepts. This design turns heterogeneous traffic evidence into an explicit concept representation and makes different levels of traffic evidence easier to analyze. We evaluate Traffic-CBM on multiple encrypted traffic benchmarks. Results show that it achieves competitive and balanced classification performance while providing a clearer structural interpretation interface than conventional end-to-end fusion models. Further analyses suggest that the learned concept space is actively used in the prediction process and provides a clearer structural explanation of multimodal traffic evidence.

Personality recognition in asynchronous video interviews (AVIs) has become increasingly important due to their widespread adoption in modern recruitment. Existing approaches often rely on large language models (LLMs) to analyze textual responses of interviewees in AVI. However, unimodel methods often suffer from information loss (e.g., ignore facial cues). In contrast, multimodal methods that employ full-face images or sparsely sampled frames can discard fine-grained temporal dynamics critical for accurate personality assessment. To overcome these limitations, we propose an LLM-based framework that semantically fuse facial action units (AUs) with textual responses of AVI. AU sequences are first converted into interpretable textual descriptions, which are then fused with participants' textual responses through an LLM. A lightweight regression head transforms the resulting embeddings into continuous personality scores without disrupting the underlying semantic space. Experiments on the AVI-6 benchmark demonstrate consistent improvements over most baselines, with lower prediction errors and stronger correlations with human-rated scores across multiple traits. Further analysis reveals that AU-derived semantic representations offer complementary non-verbal cues to textual responses. Decoupling semantic understanding from regression prediction within the LLM also leads to greater training stability and clearer interpretability. Overall, these findings demonstrate that AU-text fusion provides a psychologically grounded and computationally efficient framework for personality recognition in AVIs.

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.

Inductive biases steer learning toward generalizable solutions by encoding task structure. In this work, we identify a crucial missing bias in MLLMs: cross-view consistency, \textit{i.e.}, semantically invariant views of the same instance should lead to the same answer. Standard reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) objectives do not impose this constraint, but instead assign pointwise rewards to each visual input. Even with data augmentation (DA), transformed views are typically rewarded independently, providing little signal once within-view rewards saturate. We propose \textbf{ConsistRoll}, a simple but effective method that injects cross-view consistency into RLVR training by reusing the group-sampling mechanism of GRPO. Specifically, ConsistRoll places original and semantically invariant transformed views in the same generation group, and assigns a joint reward only when paired completions are both correct and consistent. In this way, ConsistRoll turns consistency into an online credit-assignment signal, \textbf{without extra generation overhead and annotations}. Theoretically, we show that cross-view consistency is a valid inductive bias, and ConsistRoll introduces a cross-view correction term absent from DA, penalizing view dependence and alleviating advantage collapse. Comprehensive benchmarks across math, general-purpose, hallucination domains confirm that ConsistRoll achieves robust improvements in multimodal reasoning.

Chart data extraction, which reverse-engineers data tables from chart images, is essential for reproducibility, analysis, retrieval, and redesign. Existing interactive tools are reliable but tedious, and mixed-initiative systems, while more efficient, lack generalizability. Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) offer a unified interface for chart interpretation, yet their ability to extract accurate data tables, especially without visible labels, remains unclear. We build a benchmark featuring diverse real-world charts without data labels to evaluate this capability. Results show that, while current MLLMs reliably reconstruct table structures, they struggle with precise value recovery. To address this, we revisit chart data extraction from a human-centered perspective and argue that extraction should follow a progressive learning process similar to how people read charts. Our training framework substantially improves numerical accuracy, achieving state-of-the-art performance with a 7B-parameter model. A user study further shows that our model effectively supports mixed-initiative workflows for reliable chart data extraction.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are prone to hallucination as their generation preferences are insufficiently calibrated to visual evidence, causing them to fall back on linguistic priors, rather than faithful grounding. In this work, we start from an empirical observation: when query-relevant visual evidence is explicitly strengthened using the model's own attention, generation becomes more accurate, suggesting that many failures do not arise solely from missing perception, but from an insufficient tendency to trust the evidence the model has already attended to. Motivated by this finding, we propose Oriented Pickup Preference Optimization (\texttt{OPPO}), an evidence-aware alignment objective that learns preferences over the strength of visual evidence, rather than only response quality. Concretely, \texttt{OPPO} contrasts the same faithful response under stronger, anchored, weaker-evidence views, turning naive visual preference into ordered visual-evidence alignment. We further combine this objective with fine-grained span-level and token-level regularization to stabilize the training. Besides, we provide a theoretical analysis showing that ordered evidence margins induce a positive lower bound on local visual sensitivity. Extensive evaluations across hallucination and general-purpose benchmarks demonstrate that \texttt{OPPO} consistently outperforms baseline methods.

Open-ended aesthetic critique is a challenge for multimodal large language models (MLLMs): it has no single correct answer, and most aesthetic evaluation measures models against numeric scores rather than the written critiques people actually give. We ask whether MLLM critiques are close to human ones, scoring eight open-weight MLLMs from $7$B to $397$B, plus GPT-5.5, against multiple ranked human critiques for each of $1{,}227$ \texttt{r/photocritique} posts under eight prompt conditions. Reference-based similarity gives a misleading picture. In absolute terms the stricter lexical and learned metrics align only weakly with human critiques while a coarse embedding cosine reports broad topical overlap, yet requesting shorter critiques raises those scores and withholding the image barely changes them: the similarity reflects length, the post text, and a stable critiquing style more than image-specific observation. An LLM judge sharpens the question rather than settling it: in the primary condition all four judges prefer the frontier models' critiques to the human ones, but on the $7$--$8$B models they diverge wildly, from $9\%$ to $81\%$ preference on identical pairs. Asked instead how similar each pair is in substance, those judges and two human annotators agree, rating every model between $1.81$ and $2.59$ on a $1$--$5$ scale, close to ``mostly different''. Behaviorally, the models diverge in ways the scores do not surface: they cover nearly every aesthetic aspect where humans are selective and repeat themselves across critiques of one photo, even when prompted to write at human length. We argue that reference-based similarity rewards a fluent, comprehensive critique style rather than the selectivity and specificity of human critique.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly expected to generate fine-grained descriptions of visual content. However, we observe and theoretically show that generating fine-grained responses poses a reliability challenge, \textit{i.e.}, fine-grained generation is more error-prone than coarse-grained generation. This phenomenon suggests that models should generate the finest description that remains reliable rather than simply produce more specific outputs. To investigate this problem, we develop \textsc{GranFact}, a granularity-aware benchmark consisting of expert-verified multi-object images with coarse-to-fine category annotations. Then, we design a hierarchy-aware evaluation algorithm, which assesses both whether model predictions are visually correct and how specific the correct predictions are. We also propose a reliability-prioritized preference optimization method based on Direct Preference Optimization, which penalizes unreliable fine-grained claims while rewarding reliable specificity. Experiments on \textsc{GranFact} show that our method improves fine-grained generation while preserving reliability. Code and data are available \href{https://github.com/WeiWu2025/GranFact}{here}.

Vision-language dataset distillation (VLDD) compresses a large image-text paired dataset into a small set of synthetic pairs that can efficiently train contrastive vision-language models under strict data and compute budgets. Most existing methods match expert trajectories or cross-modal statistics, yet still enforce full-dimensional alignment in a Euclidean embedding space. This is often overly restrictive due to rank-deficient image--text correlation, with shared semantics concentrated in a low-dimensional range and remaining variation spread across a weakly correlated residual subspace. LoRS relaxes alignment at the similarity level by low-rank factorization, but does not explicitly control dominant alignment capacity and structure in the representation space. We thus propose a rank-aware hyperbolic alignment (RAHA) that combines hierarchical geometry with explicit alignment-capacity control. RAHA lifts multimodal representations to hyperbolic space and optimizes distilled pairs with asymmetric objectives that enforce geodesic alignment in the shared range while regularizing the residual subspace to preserve modality-private diversity and improve transfer robustness. Experiments on benchmarks show that RAHA demonstrates competitive cross-modal retrieval and improved transfer indicators under fixed budgets.

Visual grounding aims to associate free-form textual queries with specific regions in an image. While recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated promising capabilities in this domain, they primarily excel at object-level grounding and often struggle with part-level grounding-an essential requirement for fine-grained tasks such as robotic manipulation. In this work, we introduce a general approach that equips any open-source MLLMs with accurate 2D part-level point grounding, offering a more direct alternative to conventional grounding representations. Our method leverages the attention mechanisms inherently present in MLLMs. By synthesizing text-conditioned, grounding-aware queries within intermediate layers via the proposed Q-Synth Module, we capture target-relevant attention patterns and refine them with a lightweight Attention-to-Point Decoder, which converts these patterns into a point-centric heatmap for final prediction. Notably, all original MLLM parameters are frozen, ensuring full preservation of their pre-trained capabilities. Experiments show that our design consistently improves part-level grounding accuracy across datasets and can be seamlessly integrated into any open-source MLLMs.

Concept-based Explainable AI (C-XAI) seeks human-understandable explanations grounded in semantic concepts, yet validation is limited by the scarcity of fine-grained concept annotations. We evaluate whether mid-scale Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) can perform localized concept naming under strict zero-shot conditions by assigning labels to bounding-box regions at both object and part levels. We propose a reproducible zero-shot evaluation protocol for Concept Naming (CoNa) with (i) closed-set, category-constrained prompting for moderate vocabularies and (ii) Open-CoNa, an embedding-similarity-based strategy for large label spaces. Experiments with four MLLMs (7B-32B) show consistent performance trends across datasets, reaching 62%-88% object-level exact-match accuracy, highlighting the potential of training-free concept annotation from localized regions. We discuss limitations and failure modes and release a reproducible framework to support future low-cost C-XAI research.

Spatio-temporal grounding in long videos requires precise temporal localization and robust object tracking conditioned on natural-language queries. While recent vision-language models (VLMs) show strong reasoning ability, directly applying frame-by-frame inference to long sequences is computationally expensive and unstable. We propose a practical pipeline that shifts from frame-level to second-level tracking and performs cross-second smoothing to preserve continuity while reducing sequence length. To improve reasoning supervision, we synthesize chain-of-thought style trajectories using advanced multimodal models for temporal localization and target selection, and replace generated spatio-temporal coordinates with ground-truth annotations to avoid noisy supervision. We further optimize the policy with reinforcement learning using a verifier based on $t\_\mathrm{IoU}+mv\_\mathrm{IoU}$. Experiments across multiple FPS settings show that our method achieves a strong trade-off between efficiency and localization quality.

Leveraging capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in text-to-image (T2I) synthesis is an important research direction. In this work we investigate whether the knowledge of a frozen LLM can be effectively utilized in T2I generation when trained exclusively on standard text-image pairs. We integrate a frozen, reasoning-capable LLM with a diffusion-based image generator via shared attention within the Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) architecture. Our experiments span two critical questions: (1) what degree of the LLM's intrinsic knowledge remains accessible during T2I training, and (2) what novel capabilities emerge in the resulting system. Across established benchmarks, our models achieve strong performance among unified understanding-generation systems: 0.85 on GenEval, 86.75 on DPG-Bench, and 0.66 on WISE with inference-time reasoning, using only text-image data. Remarkably, we uncover emergent behaviors absent from training data, including cross-lingual image generation, color-guided composition, emoji / ASCII scene construction, and generation directed by world knowledge. These results demonstrate that pretrained LLM knowledge can guide image synthesis under standard text-to-image training paradigms, without interleaved multimodal signals or explicit reasoning supervision. Our findings open new avenues for harnessing frozen model capabilities in resource-constrained multimodal learning.

Modern vision-language models (VLMs) for driving assistants typically treat vehicle dynamics as a black box, resulting in decisions that lack awareness of the vehicle's real-time electro-mechanical state. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Electro-Visual-Language Assistant (EVLA) -- a novel framework that combines multi-modal scene understanding with real-time perception of the electrified powertrain state (e.g., motor torque, battery SOC). Our approach features two key innovations: first, a Unified Co-State Encoder (UCSE) that fuses visual, textual, and vehicle-state inputs into a shared latent representation, augmented with an Energy-Efficiency Field to model spatial energy costs; and second, an Electro-aware Structured Reasoning Chain (ESRC), which replaces external chain-of-thought prompting with an internal, deterministic reasoning process grounded in physical constraints and optimization objectives. Trained end-to-end with a physics-guided joint loss, EVLA learns to generate context-aware and energy-optimal driving decisions. Extensive evaluations on a driving QA benchmark demonstrate that EVLA substantially outperforms strong fine-tuned VLM baselines, improving the final score by +0.0871 and accuracy by +5.6%. Ablation studies validate the necessity of each component, and efficiency analyses show that EVLA achieves 36% faster inference than multi-stage pipelines. This work underscores that integrating vehicle-state awareness and structured physical reasoning is crucial for developing next-generation, physically-grounded driving assistants.

Remote sensing visual grounding (RSVG) aims to locate specific objects in high-resolution RS imagery using free-form natural language descriptions. While recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) show great potential for such open-vocabulary RSVG, their training-free adaptation is hindered by the modality gap between abstract linguistic semantics and fine-grained visual cues. In cluttered RS scenes, this gap inevitably causes severe localization drift. To bridge this gap, we propose Exemplar-driven Calibrated Refinement (ExACT), a novel training-free framework driven by a one-shot visual prompting mechanism to explicitly provide discriminative structural guidance for precise pixel-level localization. Specifically, we propose a Vision Exemplar-based Calibrator (VEC) that extracts fine-grained visual correspondences from the given exemplar to rectify the rough cross-modal priors from frozen MLLMs, effectively suppressing background artifacts and accurately outlining target boundaries. Subsequently, a Structure-Aware Refiner (SAR) employs an iterative merge-and-select clustering strategy to consolidate the calibrated priors into high-quality positive and negative geometric prompts. These prompts then guide the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to achieve precise pixel-level predictions. Extensive experiments confirm the superiority of ExACT over existing training-free and weakly-supervised methods.

Personalizing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) aims to recognize users' unique concepts from visual data and provide personalized responses. Although prior work has shown the benefit of concept descriptions and reasoning for this task, MLLM descriptions often include information, such as state and context, that does not help and may in fact hinder the unique identification of the target concept among other visually similar items. Effective descriptions of personal concepts should instead be accurate, discriminative, and free of distracting details. To achieve such descriptions, we introduce Reinforced Reference Game (RRG), a learning framework that promotes discriminative descriptions through a novel reinforced multimodal reference game. The MLLM plays both the roles of speaker and listener in a contrastive game setting, whose goal is to effectively communicate discriminative information about a target concept. Our approach formulates a verifiable contrastive reward over hard positives (dissimilar views of the same concept) and hard negatives (visually similar but different concepts). Empirically, RRG achieves state-of-the-art across multiple tasks on three personalization benchmarks. RRG generalizes to unseen domains and outperforms existing methods based on concept descriptions and personalization-specific RL frameworks. We will release code and models in the project page.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are widely applied to visual document understanding. However, comprehending long documents remains an issue by the limited context window. Though recent multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (MMRAG) can address this challenge by retrieving relevant pages. It still struggles with the visual question answering (VQA) requiring holistic comprehension of a document. To cope with this, knowledge graph (KG) that summarizes global knowledge of a document can provide an effective solution. However, most existing LLM-based KG construction methods handle only the language modality, leaving the automatic creation of multimodal KGs (MMKGs) for visually rich documents largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce a multimodal graph-based RAG approach to tackle this problem. Existing LLM-based KG methods evaluate the QA performance relying on indirect evidence such as comprehensiveness, diversity, empowerment, and so on. The lack of annotated datasets for comprehensive document-level VQA poses a significant challenge to effective model evaluation. To overcome this limitation, we also introduce a new benchmark, DLVQA (document-level VQA), which provides reference summaries and corresponding supporting facts for global document-level questions. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms existing MMRAG or KG-based approaches on multi-hop QA/VQA benchmarks and DLVQA.

Sign language translation (SLT) remains challenging due to its high spatio-temporal complexity, long sequences, and the need to model multiple articulators without relying on gloss annotations. Existing approaches are typically tailored to individual datasets or languages and struggle to scale, while overlooking the relationships between sign languages that could inform more effective cross-lingual transfer. We present \textbf{SIGNET}, a framework that enables motion-level knowledge transfer for cross-language sign language translation. Our key insight is that, although sign languages differ in grammar and lexicon, pretrained models capture motion-level visual patterns that can be reused across datasets and languages. \textbf{SIGNET} integrates multiple pretrained sign language backbones through an attention-based, hand-prior aggregation mechanism that guides a gated fusion network in dynamically selecting the most relevant experts. Comprehensive experiments on four benchmarks (How2Sign, Phoenix14T, CSL-Daily, and MeineDGS) demonstrate state-of-the-art translation performance, and \textbf{SIGNET} also surpasses prior methods on WLASL for sign language recognition.

Recent advances in large language models and vision-language models have enabled reasoning over multimodal data, offering opportunities for clinical applications such as decision support and triaging. However, existing medical AI benchmarks are fragmented: some support multi-turn dialogues but lack images, while others provide multimodal inputs but focus on single-turn QA tasks. To address this gap, we introduce IMCBench, an image-grounded, multi-turn medical conversation benchmark that pairs real, publicly available clinical images with synthetic patient profiles to simulate realistic patient-clinician interactions. Each conversation is evaluated across three clinical dimensions: safety, accuracy, and appropriate use of uncertainty in diagnosis. We benchmark eight multimodal frontier models across four model families (Claude, GPT, Nova, and Llama), scoring each on a 1-5 scale using LLM-as-Jury scoring calibrated against expert clinician annotations. Our results show that Claude Opus 4.6 achieves the highest overall score (3.61), followed by Claude Sonnet 4.6 (3.30) and GPT-5.2 (3.29), though no model dominates all dimensions and safety degrades for both malignant and rare conditions ($Δ$ = -0.27 each). Ablation studies further reveal that both visual input and EHR context contribute to safe guidance (safety drops of 0.18 and 0.23 on average when each is removed), with stronger models leveraging visual features more effectively. Together, these findings demonstrate that accurate clinical description does not guarantee safe patient guidance, motivating the need for multi-dimensional evaluation frameworks in medical AI.

Building performant Vision-Language Models (VLMs) requires carefully curating large-scale training datasets, yet the community lacks systematic benchmarks for evaluating such curation strategies. We introduce DataComp for VLMs (DCVLM), a benchmark for controlled data-centric experiments to improve VLM training. As part of DCVLM, we collect 160 datasets spanning four data types -- image-caption pairs, multimodal interleaved documents, text-only, and instruction-tuning data -- into a corpus of 6T multimodal tokens. DCVLM allows participants to test curation strategies (filtering, mixing, formatting, sampling) across 1B-8B models and 6.25B-200B token budgets. Models are then evaluated on a carefully selected suite of up to 52 downstream benchmarks across 9 domains. We conduct extensive experiments on DCVLM and find that data mixing, not filtering, is key to a high-quality training dataset: instruction-heavy mixtures scale better than caption-heavy ones, with gains widening at larger scales. The resulting dataset, DCVLM-Baseline, enables training an 8B VLM to 63.6% accuracy on our 33-task core suite with 200B training tokens. Compared to FineVision, the state-of-the-art open VLM training dataset, this represents an improvement of +5.4pp. DCVLM and all accompanying artifacts will be made publicly available at https://www.datacomp.ai/dcvlm/.

In recent years, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong potential for embodied intelligence, yet their ability to maintain geometrically consistent spatial understanding across heterogeneous views remains under-evaluated. Existing benchmarks largely focus on single-agent, single-view perception, leaving a gap in the systematic assessment of collaborative air-ground settings, where multi-scale observations are complementary but introduce scale mismatch, asymmetric occlusion, and reference-frame inconsistencies. We present AirGroundBench, a diagnostic benchmark for evaluating multi-view spatial intelligence in heterogeneous UAV-UGV collaboration. AirGroundBench is built from 11 high-fidelity simulated environments with 1,021 synchronized air-ground observation pairs, yielding approximately 62,000 dual-view, four-option single-choice visual question answering instances and 115 closed-loop vision-language navigation episodes. It covers 10 task types organized into four progressively demanding capability dimensions: spatial perception, cross-view alignment, spatial transformation and reasoning, and embodied decision-making. To support geometry-grounded evaluation and analysis, we provide structured spatial annotations, including cross-view object identities and metric 2D and 3D bounding boxes. Evaluations of 13 representative MLLMs under UAV-only, UGV-only, and dual-view input settings reveal consistent bottlenecks: models perform relatively well on spatial perception but struggle with cross-view alignment and transformation-intensive reasoning, and these deficits propagate to sequential decision-making in vision-language navigation. Although dual-view inputs provide measurable gains over single-view variants, a persistent gap from human performance remains, highlighting geometric consistency as a key limitation of current embodied MLLMs.

Despite the rapid advance of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in high-level video understanding, a fundamental bottleneck remains: these models collapse complex human motion into coarse semantic labels. Existing benchmarks mostly focus on scene-centric events or local joint articulations, failing to probe global human motion in space over time (trajectory and orientation changes). We introduce HumanMoveVQA, the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate global trajectory and orientation reasoning from an exocentric perspective. Our benchmark utilizes a first-frame anchored world coordinate system, preserving translation and rotation relative to a fixed starting point. We propose a scalable, multi-stage pipeline that lifts 2D video observations into world-consistent 3D motion tracks to generate over 10K structured question-answer pairs across seven reasoning categories, including motion aggregation, sequential ordering, and trajectory-level inference. Our extensive evaluation reveals a critical capability gap in state-of-the-art proprietary models on deep human motion understanding. However, we demonstrate that this is a learnable problem; by fine-tuning an open-source baseline with our targeted, world-consistent supervision, we achieve a significant improvement. HumanMoveVQA establishes a rigorous geometric foundation for developing next-generation, movement-aware video understanding models.

Language-guided Medical Image Segmentation (LMIS) has shown great potential to improve the delineation of anatomical structures and lesions by integrating clinical textual information. Existing methods generally rely on either implicit interaction between textual and visual features or auxiliary coarse-grained supervision for cross-modal alignment. However, these methods lack explicit and fine-grained constraints to ensure semantic consistency, causing a mismatch between language and the segmentation outputs. To address this issue, we propose Text-as-Illumination Retinex Network (TIRNet), a novel Retinex-inspired framework that treats text embeddings as semantic illumination for feature modulation, thereby improving semantic consistency in LMIS. TIRNet introduces two key blocks integrated at each decoder stage: (1) the Retinex-inspired Text Modulation Block (RTMB), which employs positive and negative illumination maps to enhance text-relevant foreground features and suppress background interference; and (2) the Consistent Detail Compensation Block (CDCB), which selectively recovers high-frequency details via a consistency-gated mechanism conditioned on illumination reliability. Furthermore, we propose a Multi-Scale Illumination Supervision Loss (MSIS-Loss), comprising a Region-Grounded Contrastive Loss (RGC-Loss) that enforces cross-modal similarity to be concentrated in text-relevant foreground regions and suppressed in background regions, and a Background Suppression Loss (BS-Loss) that provides pixel-level supervision for negative illumination maps, jointly ensuring a precise cross-modal alignment at each decoder stage. Extensive experiments on the MosMedData+ and QaTa-COV19 datasets demonstrate that TIRNet achieves state-of-the-art performance in LMIS. The code is available at: https://github.com/anaanaa/TIRNet.

Conventional RGB cameras suffer from lighting artifacts such as flare, glare, flicker, and overexposure, leading to irrecoverable information loss that necessitates computational restoration. However, existing approaches treat these problems in isolation, failing to recover structural details completely obscured by complex spatially discrete image degradations. In this paper, we propose a novel cross-modal restoration paradigm and present DeLux, a modular proof-of-concept pipeline that leverages neuromorphic event streams as a structural prior to guide the targeted detection and inpainting of lighting artifacts in RGB video. Validation on synthetic benchmarks and real-world automotive footage demonstrates that DeLux effectively suppresses local artifacts and restores affected regions. The proposed approach outperforms existing RGB-only baselines and event-guided HDR models, achieving an average MS-SSIM of over 0.99 across all artifact types and demonstrating up to an 88% reduction in artifact severity in real-world automotive footage. The synthetic artifact generation tools and curated real-world evaluation datasets are made publicly available to foster future research on cross-modal restoration.

Recently, self-evolving large multimodal models (LMMs) have received attention for improving visual reasoning in a purely unsupervised setting. However, multi-role self-play and self-consistency reward schemes in existing self-evolving LMMs optimize answer agreement without ensuring the decoder attends to visual content, relying instead on statistical language priors to produce self consistent outputs. This leads to a persistent failure mode we term visual under-conditioning, where the decoder relies on language priors rather than the image during generation, manifesting as insufficient attention to visual tokens. As a result, current self-evolving LMMs struggle on vision--language understanding tasks such as image captioning and visual question answering. To address this, we propose VISE (Visual Invariance Self-Evolution), a purely unsupervised self-evolving framework that directly regularizes the model's visual conditioning policy through two complementary invariance-based rewards: a geometric invariance reward that enforces spatial consistency under known transformations, and a semantic invariance reward that penalizes evidence-agnostic generation by requiring the model to recognize the absence of evidence when predicted regions are perturbed. VISE operates within a single model without specialist roles, external reward models, or annotations, and is trained on raw unlabeled images. Experiments on 18 benchmarks demonstrate the efficacy of our approach. Using Qwen3-VL-2B as the base model, VISE achieves gains of $+16.85$ CIDEr on COCO and $+19.66$ CIDEr on TextCaps, reduces object hallucination by $5.0$ Chair-I points, and generalizes across four model families and scales. Our code and models are available at https://mbzuai-oryx.github.io/VISE

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.

Reasoning in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has shown strong promise in medical imaging. However, this reasoning is usually free-form text judged only by its final answer, making it hard to interpret and verify, especially in 3D radiology, where a diagnosis should be traceable to evidence in the scan. Existing chest CT question-answering datasets compound this by reducing expert radiology reports to answer-only pairs, dropping the reasoning that links findings to conclusions and omitting the patient history clinicians rely on. As a result, reasoning-capable 3D chest CT MLLMs remain out of reach, as neither the structured supervision needed to train them nor the protocol needed to verify their reasoning yet exists. We introduce CORTEX (Clinically Organized Reasoning and sTructured EXplanation), a structured reasoning benchmark for 3D chest CT. For each question, CORTEX restores the missing reasoning as a four-stage diagnostic trace mirroring a radiologist's workflow: task understanding, visual observation, diagnostic reasoning, and answer synthesis. We generate these traces using frontier large language models with broad medical and general-domain knowledge, then filter and verify them with a stage-level evaluation protocol combining automated rubric scoring with expert radiologist review. Crucially, both the reasoning structure and evaluation rubrics are designed in close collaboration with clinicians. Built on CT-RATE, a large, publicly available chest CT dataset without reasoning annotations, CORTEX comprises 76,177 validated reasoning traces across open-ended VQA, closed-ended VQA, and report generation, providing both the structured supervision and the stage-level evaluation protocol needed to build and evaluate trustworthy reasoning models for 3D chest CT. Our dataset and evaluation code is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/aneesurhashmi/cortex

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved strong multimodal reasoning capabilities, but their efficiency is limited by the large number of visual tokens, which introduces substantial computational overhead. Visual token pruning offers a natural solution, yet existing methods are imperfect: attention-based criteria tend to retain redundant tokens, while diversity-based criteria are often agnostic to user instructions. Even methods that combine multiple criteria still lack a principled formulation of the intrinsic objective of token pruning. In this paper, we revisit visual token pruning from a first-principles perspective and formulate it as constructing Token Optimal Preservation Sets. Through a top-down information-theoretic analysis, we identify three fundamental principles for effective token selection: Task Relevance, Information Coverage, and Semantic Diversity. Based on these principles, we propose TOPS, a training-free and model-agnostic pruning module that can be applied to various MLLMs. Extensive experiments on 7 MLLM backbones and 14 benchmarks demonstrate that TOPS outperforms prior methods under diverse pruning settings. Notably, on LLaVA-NeXT, TOPS removes 77.8% of visual tokens while preserving 100.0% and 100.6% performance on its 7B and 13B models, respectively, suggesting that pruning redundant visual tokens can sometimes mitigate hallucination and inspire future lightweight MLLM design.

Unified multimodal models capable of both understanding and generation have achieved remarkable strides. However, despite their unified designs, existing evaluations typically assess understanding and generation capabilities in isolation, overlooking the synergy between comprehension and generation. To bridge this gap, we introduce Unison, a comprehensive benchmark comprising 2,169 high-quality unified task samples, designed to evaluate joint understanding and generation in unified multimodal models. Unison offers three key strengths: 1) Comprehensive Dimensions: Unison encompasses internal consistency, understanding-guided generation, generation-guided understanding, and mutual enhancement to enable holistic evaluation. 2) Diagnostic Evaluation: it provides both unified and decoupled tracks for understanding and generation, allowing fine-grained attribution of failure modes and quantitative analysis of the gains from unified modeling. 3) Human Alignment: we also introduce Unison-Judge, an evaluation model well aligned with human judgments to ensure reliable assessment. Based on systematic evaluations of state-of-the-art models on Unison, we uncover critical limitations in current unified multimodal systems and highlight promising directions for future research. Codes, Unison and Unison-Judge are publicly available at https://github.com/FudanCVL/Unison.

Brain MRI poses a fundamental challenge for machine learning: models must learn from high-dimensional 3D data spanning multiple co-registered modalities, despite the limited sample sizes typical of neuroimaging studies relative to the diversity in anatomy, pathology, and acquisition conditions. While multimodal imaging provides complementary information critical for clinical interpretation, effectively integrating these signals remains difficult. We propose Multimodal Intra- and Cross-Context Vision Transformer (MICViT), a 3D vision transformer that explicitly models both modality-specific representations and cross-modal interactions across local and global contexts. Concretely, MICViT combines four attention mechanisms: modality-specific local and global attention for intra-modal feature learning, and cross-modal local and global attention to capture interactions between modalities. We evaluate MICViT on brain age prediction across three heterogeneous datasets (UK Biobank, n=41,404; SOOP, n=1,062; Cam-CAN, n=613) using multiple MRI modalities (e.g. T1, FLAIR, DWI, SWI). MICViT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art CNN and transformer baselines in 3D settings. Notably, it benefits more strongly from multimodal inputs, yielding larger performance gains as additional modalities are incorporated. These results demonstrate that explicitly modeling intra- and cross-modal interactions is key to unlocking the full potential of multimodal brain MRI, highlighting a promising direction for representation learning in neuroimaging.

Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) promise transparent reasoning by predicting through human-interpretable concepts, yet their effectiveness fundamentally depends on how well visual and textual representations are aligned or matched. Existing vision-language CBMs often rely on pre-aligned encoders or global cosine similarity, which obscures fine-grained concept localization and fails to reflect true semantic geometry. In this work, we rethink concept alignment as a dynamic cross-modal transport process instead of static projection and propose the Optimal Transport Flow Concept Bottleneck Model (OTF-CBM). It first learns a data-driven semantic cost via Inverse Optimal Transport to measure cross-modal distances, and then performs unbalanced optimal-transport-based flow matching to model semantic transitions between visual patches and textual concepts. With velocity-based concept activation, OTF-CBM captures interpretable geometric relations without ODE integration. Experiments further show that OTF-CBM achieves superior classification accuracy and concept faithfulness, offering a new geometric and dynamical perspective for interpretable cross-modal reasoning.

Multi-modality image fusion (MMIF) enhances scene representation by exploiting complementary cues from different modalities. Adverse weather, however, causes significant image degradation, disrupting feature representation and requiring simultaneous feature restoration and cross-modal complementarity. Existing methods often struggle with effective representation learning under such conditions, limiting their practical performance. To address these challenges, we propose a mask-guided MMIF method that integrates feature restoration and interaction. We first introduce "Pseudo Ground Truth" to simplify training, promoting faster and more effective feature learning. Then, we design a mask generation mechanism based on the mapping relationship between the fused result and the source images, quantifying the relative contribution of each modality during the fusion process. By incorporating the proposed mask-guided cross-modal cross-attention mechanism, the network is encouraged to selectively attend to informative features during modality interaction, mitigating the risk of overfitting to the static distribution of the "Pseudo Ground Truth". Additionally, we propose a mask-guided learning strategy and a task-coupled degradation-aware learning strategy to balance feature restoration and interaction. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method surpasses state-of-the-art approaches in visual quality, quantitative metrics, and downstream tasks. The source code is available at https://github.com/ixilai/AMG-Fuse.

Interleaved multimodal reasoning improves visual grounding by revisiting visual evidence during multi-step generation, yet existing methods typically rely on token replay, repeatedly forwarding selected visual tokens. A natural shortcut is to reuse the historical visual key-value (KV) cache directly. However, we identify a critical failure mode of this strategy: cached visual keys are already bound to their original positional context. Such stale positional binding distorts attention under later decoding contexts and can trigger severe autoregressive decoding collapse. This failure suggests that effective cache reuse requires reconstructing visual evidence under positions compatible with the current decoding state, rather than directly copying position-bound historical cache entries. To this end, we propose Position Rebinding Cache Reuse (PRCR), a cache-level framework for replay-free visual revisiting. PRCR stores raw visual KV cache together with their original spatial coordinates, then reassigns position-compatible coordinates to select entries and rebinds their keys before injecting the reconstructed cache into the active decoder cache. This design reuses historical visual evidence while preserving textual positional continuity and relative visual structure. Experiments across multiple multimodal reasoning benchmarks show that PRCR achieves replay-level or better performance, improving average accuracy by 5 percent and reducing visual-revisiting computation by up to tens of thousands of times.

Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive fine-grained perception capabilities. However, existing benchmarks predominantly rely on explicit textual cues or low-resolution inputs, failing to evaluate a model's ability to autonomously perceive implicit visual cues in high-resolution. To bridge this gap, we introduce DiCoBench, a comprehensive, multi-image high-resolution benchmark designed for cross-image fine-grained perception. DiCoBench consists of 765 meticulously curated samples categorized into two progressive tracks: Differential Visual Cues and Commonality Visual Cues, covering 8 distinct perception tasks. By formulating the benchmark as a multiple-choice question task and utilizing high-resolution imagery (approaching 2K), we eliminate evaluation metric bias and pose a substantial challenge to current state-of-the-art MLLMs. Our extensive evaluation of 18 diverse MLLMs reveals a striking performance gap compared to human accuracy (98.3%), with top-performing models struggling significantly with micro-scale detail capture. We believe DiCoBench will serve as a challenging testbed to drive future research in autonomous, high-resolution multi-image perception.

Many multimodal systems estimate the reliability of each modality and weight their contributions to the final prediction. However, it remains unclear whether these scores influence model decisions or merely correlate with performance. We propose a simple diagnostic to test whether reliability information is used during inference. After training, the model and inputs are fixed while reliability scores are permuted across test examples. If predictions depend on these scores, performance should degrade. Experiments on StressID for stress recognition and CMU-MOSEI for sentiment analysis show that permuting reliability scores leaves performance unchanged despite substantial potential gains from selecting the best modality per example. In positive controls where reliability signals identify the correct modality, the same frozen fusion rules yield significant improvements, indicating that reliability signals influence fused decisions only when they reliably predict unimodal correctness.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) over knowledge graphs has emerged as a promising approach for grounding large language models, yet existing benchmarks largely overlook the challenges of retrieval in multimodal knowledge graph RAG (MKG-RAG). In practice, retrieval is a critical bottleneck: multimodal knowledge is heterogeneous, difficult to align across modalities, and often poorly served by retrievers designed for unstructured corpora. To address this gap, we introduce MKG-RAG-Bench, a cross-domain benchmark explicitly designed to evaluate retrieval in MKG-RAG. MKG-RAG-Bench is constructed from two multimodal knowledge graphs spanning general and medical domains, and includes carefully aligned question-answering datasets that support controlled evaluation of both retrieval and downstream generation. The benchmark is built using an LLM-based curation pipeline that filters low-utility knowledge, generates structurally grounded queries with exact supervision, and systematically covers diverse modality configurations. Through extensive experiments across representative retriever families and modality settings, we show that effective multimodal retrieval remains challenging yet crucial for end-to-end MKG-RAG performance, and that retrieval quality strongly determines generation outcomes. By isolating retrieval as a first-class evaluation target, MKG-RAG-Bench provides a principled foundation for diagnosing current limitations and advancing multimodal knowledge graph RAG systems.

Standard benchmarks for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) score each item on one canonical ordering and miss whether order-irrelevant shuffling changes the answer, a baseline reliability property called for by emerging AI evaluation guidelines. We introduce Facet-Probe, a five-facet audit (option, evidence-chunk, document-rank, image-set, and mixed-modality ordering) of 18 frontier and open-weight MLLMs. A Bayesian item-response model separates ordering noise from per-facet bias, and a same-ordering control estimates the decoder-stochastic floor for observed flips. We find that none of the 18 MLLMs we audit are order-invariant: screened per-facet panel-mean flip rates span 24-50%. A Gemini same-ordering control at temperature 0 estimates a substantial ordering excess over a same-input decoder-noise floor in verified cells. Capability predicts but does not eliminate flips; the best model still flips on 13.4% of trials. In our Gemini mitigation tests, training-free prompt changes are modality-conditional and do not transfer from text to visual reasoning. These results suggest that prompt-level mitigation alone is unlikely to provide general order robustness, motivating future work on training-time and architectural approaches. We propose cross-ordering flip rate as a standard reporting axis for MLLMs.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate strong performance on standard visual question answering benchmarks, yet their scalability under controlled structural complexity remains poorly understood. We introduce TriViewBench, a controlled three-view visual reasoning benchmark constructed from synthetic 3D scenes with explicitly parameterized object count and occlusion. The benchmark contains 1,923 scenes and over 14K Question-Answer (QA) pairs organized into four complexity levels and three reasoning categories: Local Decision, Object Counting, and Global Recovery. We evaluate 18 open- and closed-source MLLMs under a unified prompting protocol. All 18 models exhibit an identical capability hierarchy without exception (Local Decision > Object Counting > Global Recovery), and performance degrades monotonically with complexity: Local Decision tasks decline modestly (12.11% relative drop), while Object Counting degrades substantially (59.14%) and Global Recovery collapses severely (80.02%). Error analysis on Object Counting reveals two mechanistically independent failure modes: single-view tasks are dominated by undercounting due to occlusion blindness, whereas the multi-view task reverses to overcounting due to cross-view identity confusion. Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting yields near-zero overall benefit ($Δ= -0.16\%$) and its effect on Global Recovery is strongly capability-gated, suggesting that the bottleneck lies in cross-view spatial representation rather than reasoning strategy. These findings reveal fundamental scalability limitations in current MLLMs and position TriViewBench as a controlled diagnostic framework for analyzing structural reasoning failures.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently made remarkable progress in unifying vision-language understanding and reasoning, especially following the introduction of models such as OpenAI's O-series and DeepSeek's R-series, which have driven a paradigm shift toward perception-centric intelligence. However, there remains a lack of systematic surveys that examine perception from a truly unified vision-language perspective -- one that treats vision and language as an inseparable modality. Existing reviews are often fragmented, focusing separately on either vision or language, and thus rarely capture the cross-modal evolution of perception as an integrated capability. To bridge this gap, we present the first systematic survey of unified vision-language perception in MLLMs. Specifically, we (1) formalize MLLM perception as an intrinsic, unified vision-language capability analogous to human innate perception, (2) introduce a five-stage taxonomy tracing the paradigm evolution of MLLM perception and survey representative methods and milestones at each phase, and (3) identify open challenges and outline promising research directions toward truly general, unified multimodal intelligence. We hope our study will provide both a foundational understanding and an actionable roadmap to foster further innovation on the path toward artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Real-world photography requires capture-time guidance for both camera framing and subject pose. Yet existing aesthetic cropping benchmarks mainly evaluate post-hoc crop prediction and overlook subject-side recommendations, leaving the capture-time guidance capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce CaptureGuide-Bench, a benchmark with two complementary tasks: photographer-side composition decision and refinement, and subject-side scene-conditioned pose recommendation. Our evaluation reveals limitations: general-purpose MLLMs can make composition decisions but lack precise refinement localization, while specialized aesthetic cropping models localize crops effectively but are limited to refinement; neither provides actionable pose guidance. To support model development, we further construct CaptureGuide-Dataset, comprising 130K samples with textual rationales and structured visual annotations, and develop ShutterMuse, a unified MLLM trained with supervised and reinforcement fine-tuning. Experiments on CaptureGuide-Bench show that ShutterMuse achieves the best overall photographer-side performance among evaluated baselines and competitive subject-side pose recommendation with substantially lower inference cost, demonstrating the potential of MLLMs as interactive assistants for photography during image capture.

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have shown promise for analyzing language models, but applying them to vision-language models (VLMs) often yields representations that are difficult to use as controllable cross-modal steering directions. We introduce the Joint Sparse Autoencoder (JSAE), which uses an explicit alignment constraint to jointly factorize sequence-pooled vision and language activations into shared, interpretable image/caption-level features. Applied to LLaVA, JSAE recovers cross-modal features for recognizable concepts (e.g., food and animals). Through bidirectional interventions (additive steering and suppression), we observe a layer-dependent asymmetry under our protocol: additive steering peaks at mid-to-late (pre-output) layers and weakens at both ends, whereas suppression scores remain within a comparable range across all probed layers within statistical noise. Experiments on three VLMs, namely LLaVA-v1.6-Mistral-7B, Llama3-LLaVA-8B, and the MoE-based Qwen3-VL-30B, show related layer-localized effects across architectures. Together, these results suggest that explicitly aligned sparse representations support more controllable intervention-based analysis of multimodal features, within an identifiable layer range, than the unconstrained alternatives tested here.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable progress in single-image perception, yet their ability to reason about complex cross-view human-centric scenes remains largely unverified. Current multi-view benchmarks evaluate models using a fixed "bag of frames" and thus conflate a model's robustness to visual distraction with its genuine ability to fuse fragmented cross-view evidence. To address this issue, we introduce SSMNBench, a diagnostic benchmark comprising 3,300 curated QA pairs for cross-view human and human-object understanding. SSMNBench uniquely categorizes tasks into Single-View Sufficiency (SVS) and Multi-View Necessity (MVN). By systematically perturbing view availability across 17 state-of-the-art MLLMs, critical limitations are revealed: models suffer from severe "distraction degradation" when presented with redundant views (SVS), and fail to integrate fragmented geometric evidence across cameras (MVN). Our evaluations demonstrate that modern MLLMs rely on multiple single-image semantic averaging and view preference rather than genuine cross-view synthesis. By exposing these fundamental vulnerabilities, SSMNBench provides a rigorous diagnostic framework to drive the advancement of future cross-view-aware multimodal architectures. The code is available at: $\href{https://github.com/gtc-gh/SSMNBench}{\text{SSMNBench}}$

Background: Response to neoadjuvant imatinib in gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GISTs) is highly variable and cannot be reliably predicted using current clinical or molecular markers. This study developed and evaluated an explainable multimodal deep learning framework integrating computed tomography (CT) imaging and clinical variables to predict treatment response. Methods: Patients from four tertiary centers were retrospectively included between 2000-2023 in independent pretraining (n=935) and prediction (n=213) cohorts. A cross-attention framework integrating clinical variables and tumor-centered CT imaging was developed to predict response to neoadjuvant imatinib. Two training strategies were evaluated: (1) self-supervised pretraining with low-rank adaptation and (2) training from scratch. Hyperparameters were optimized using SMAC3. Performance was assessed through internal cross-validation and external testing. Ablation analyses and attention-based explanations were used to quantify modality contributions. Results: Among 213 patients (54.5% responders), responders had larger tumors (112 vs. 89 mm, P=0.026), higher mitotic index (3 vs. 0, P<0.001), and more frequent KIT mutations (69.0% vs. 56.7%, P=0.019). Cross-attention models achieved the highest internal performance (AUC up to 0.99) but lower external performance (AUC 0.60-0.63). Clinical-only performance was moderate (AUC 0.66), whereas imaging-only models showed limited generalizability (AUC 0.56-0.66). Explainability analyses identified significant differences in feature importance between responders and non-responders, including CD117, BRAF, PDGFRA, age, sex, disease status, and comorbidities (FDR-adjusted P<=0.036). Conclusion: The cross-attention framework shows potential for improving imatinib response prediction in GIST while providing interpretable insights into multimodal determinants of treatment response.

While Change Captioning systems have garnered substantial attention to respond to our evolving world, their true performance on diverse real-world change contexts remains largely unexplored due to the lack of comprehensive evaluation frameworks. To fill this gap, we propose C3-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating Context-aware Change Captioning. C3-Bench features: (1) 4,996 human-labeled image pairs of 51 real-world change contexts across four domains (e.g., natural scenes, remote sensing imagery, image editing, and anomalies), each with diverse, carefully curated scenarios derived from multiple change-centric communities; and (2) the first LLM-as-Judge evaluation framework in the change captioning task that measure fine-grained dimensions (e.g., correctness, specificity, fluency, and relevance), along with a novel reversibility metric exploring whether models understand changes with symmetric consistency. Based on C3-Bench, we benchmark 32 models -- including conventional change captioning models, proprietary Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), and 2B-90B open-source LMMs. We reveal a fundamental blind spot in the prevailing change captioning paradigm: Once the change context departs from training-style regimes, conventional models collapse, and even state-of-the-art LMMs such as GPT-5.2 exhibit systematic domain- and position-dependent errors that distort reliable change understanding. By making these hidden failure modes explicit and measurable, we delineate the next frontier for building generalizable and trustworthy change captioning systems. All codes and datasets are publicly available on the project page.

Connecting a pre-trained speech encoder to a Large Language Model (LLM) is the standard architecture for building Speech LLMs. However, a structural misalignment exists between the encoder and the LLM. Unlike encoders based on automatic speech recognition, which often produce representations in separate language-specific spaces, LLMs operate within a unified language-agnostic space. A mechanism is required to align the encoder's language-specific representations with the LLM's shared space. We argue that speech translation provides a principled way to achieve this. Unlike monolingual transcription, translation requires the model to bridge different languages and learn language-agnostic representations. We experimentally evaluate the impact of incorporating translation objectives into speech encoder pre-training. Our results demonstrate that translation-enhanced pre-training improves cross-modal integration and leads to superior performance across downstream Speech LLM tasks.

With the rapid adoption of generative AI, synthetic medical images pose growing risks, including diagnostic deception and insurance fraud. Although prior work has explored vision-language model (VLM)-based synthetic image detection, these evaluations typically consider images in isolation. In clinical practice, however, images are interpreted alongside structured records and metadata, and VLMs are increasingly deployed under joint image-record inputs. We uncover a previously underexamined multimodal vulnerability: when given both modalities, VLMs may overweight record context in authenticity judgments, such that the same image receives different predictions solely due to changes in its accompanying text. This raises concerns about robustness in real-world deployment. To systematically characterize this effect, we reformulate synthetic medical image detection as an audit of multimodal robustness at the image-record interface and introduce a paired benchmark that holds the image fixed while swapping controlled metadata variants. Across multiple imaging modalities, we evaluate diverse open-weight and frontier API VLMs and find that changing the metadata context alone can flip authenticity judgments, with accuracy on authentic images dropping by 61.1% on average under an explicit AI-origin tag. We further propose an inference-time mitigation pipeline that detects and neutralizes provenance shortcuts without model retraining, substantially outperforming direct prompt-based suppression on the affected subset. Our benchmark provides a standardized tool for assessing and improving multimodal robustness beyond image-only settings. Code and data will be released upon acceptance.

We find that current emotion-oriented Omni-MLLMs still lack reliable omni-modal perception: they (i) underutilize multimodal cues in their reasoning trajectories and (ii) exhibit unfaithful behavior, often hallucinating modality-specific statements from other modalities. Building on these insights, we propose OPPO (Omni-Perception Policy Optimization), a reinforcement learning framework that explicitly optimizes multimodal perception. First, an Omni-Perception Reward decomposes ground-truth reasoning into fine-grained visual, acoustic, and emotion cues and rewards trajectories that semantically recover these cues. Second, an Omni-Perception Loss compares the policy under full and unimodally masked inputs, applying a KL penalty only to modality-specific evidence tokens to suppress cross-modal hallucination. We further introduce MEP-Bench, a diagnostic benchmark that quantifies utilization and faithfulness. Experiments show that OPPO achieves state-of-the-art performance on MER-UniBench and MME-Emotion, while substantially improving utilization and faithfulness scores on MEP-Bench, highlighting the importance of sufficient and faithful omni perception for multimodal emotion reasoning.

General-purpose embodied agents must understand multimodal instructions, anticipate how their environment will evolve, and produce precise control actions over extended horizons. Existing approaches typically specialize in visual-language reasoning, video-based world modeling, or action generation, while cascaded pipelines that first synthesize future observations and then infer actions can introduce interface bottlenecks and compound prediction errors. We present iFLYTEK-Embodied-Omni, a unified multimodal foundation model that jointly models vision(videos and images), language, and action within a single Omni framework. Its modality-specific visual-language, video-generation, and action-generation components communicate through shared multimodal self-attention. This design establishes brain-cerebellum collaboration: the vision-language modeland video generation model form a high-level brain for instruction understanding, task planning, progress tracking, and future visual-state prediction, whereas the action generation modelserves as a low-level cerebellum that directly converts planned subgoals and shared multimodal context into executable action chunks. To develop these capabilities, we combine action-annotated and action-free embodied videos from human demonstrations and robot interactions with embodied reasoning, embodied perception, and general-purpose image-text data to construct a comprehensive dataset. We further adopt a four-stage strategy that progressively trains the VLM, VGM, and AGM before jointly fine-tuning the complete model.

Self-supervised learning from large-scale video data has emerged as a dominant paradigm for visual representation learning. Since audio and visual streams naturally co-occur in video data, extending this success to jointly learn from both modalities is a natural next step, yet it remains challenging. Existing audio-visual self-supervised methods rely on modality-specific encoders and complex combinations of contrastive or reconstruction objectives, limiting cross-modal synergy and scalability. Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) offer a simple, modality-agnostic alternative, but have to date been applied primarily to individual modalities. We introduce MJEPA, a joint-embedding predictive architecture for audio-visual learning that uses a single, unified encoder for both modalities. Our approach uses only a single predictive objective, applied both within and across modalities. We show that cross-modal prediction is critical: without it, a shared encoder degrades below unimodal baselines; with it, each modality's representation benefits from the other. Our frozen ViT-g model outperforms the best prior frozen baseline by over 6.8 mAP on AudioSet-20K, surpasses fully finetuned models on ESC-50 and FSD50K, and is competitive on video benchmarks despite using 10x less video data.

Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models route each token to a few of many experts, inviting the hypothesis that experts form functional modules tied to capabilities or languages. We test this causally on Command A+, a frontier open-weights MoE (218B total / 25B active; 128 experts, 8 active, +1 shared). We build a routing-mass atlas, pre-register six family-to-axis hypotheses before any intervention, and ablate each family at inference time against a size-matched random-expert null, measuring whether it selectively breaks its own axis (worst off-target effect at most one third of on-target). Crucially, we test the same families under four metrics and a held-out, independent-corpus run with bootstrap confidence intervals. Our finding is cautionary: robust functional modularity is rare and measurement-dependent. Of six pre-registered families, only one, the Arabic-language family, is a clean selective module that survives an independent corpus and a conservative statistical bar (1/6; a more permissive pre-registered point rule admits 3/6, but that count is threshold-sensitive). Every other family has a real causal effect yet fails selectivity, and its apparent modularity flips with the measurement: with the corpus, the metric, and the statistical bar. A positive control on Qwen3-30B-A3B recovers its published disjoint structure, confirming the method detects modularity when present. The verdict reproduces on the un-quantized BF16 model, ruling out a 4-bit quantization artifact. We conclude that ablation-based modularity verdicts are not safe unless the corpus, metric, and statistical bar are controlled. We release the atlas and ablation data.

Recent advancements have explored agentic zero-shot 3D understanding by reformulating it as video keyframe understanding with Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, existing methods face an intrinsic bottleneck due to the finite observation perspectives inherent in videos and the implicit perception of 3D scenes. In this paper, we propose a collaborative multi-agent framework that assigns a Planning Agent to handle high-level viewpoint planning and supplement novel perspectives, and a Perception Agent to explicitly summarize the 3D scene into a structured holistic cognitive map. Specifically, Planning Agent first analyzes this cognitive map to determine query-relevant viewpoints and supplements missing critical perspectives to ensure comprehensive observation. Subsequently, Perception Agent documents object-level attributes from these views by assigning consistent instance identifiers across viewpoints, thereby integrating fragmented observations into the holistic cognitive map. In parallel, it provides feedback to filter out mismatched candidate objects and guide subsequent viewpoint planning. Through this closed-loop iterative process, two agents collaboratively figure out candidates until Perception Agent determines that sufficient information has been captured to complete the task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on 6 benchmarks, with improvements of 11.1% Acc@0.5 on ScanRefer, 14.6 BLEU-1 on 3D-assisted dialog, and 2.1 EM on SQA3D.

Pointing-based visual grounding requires models to precisely locate target objects by deciphering complex spatial relationships between the visual scene and pointing gestures. Traditional methods typically encode input images into static feature representations and perform reasoning primarily within the linguistic domain, often overlooking the rich perceptual cues and explicit spatial geometry inherent in images. In this study, we aim to mitigate the cognitive vulnerability of models in interpreting gestural spatial relations by proposing PointVG-R, a reasoning-guided Multi-modal Large Language Model (MLLM). PointVG-R introduces geometric-aware reasoning for pointing-based grounding, enabling the model to think with images through the strategic integration of Reinforcement Learning (RL) and cold-start data. Specifically, we design a novel geometric reasoning pipeline that simulates the iterative cognitive process humans employ when interpreting pointing gestures. Furthermore, we construct EgoPoint-CoT, a high-quality visual Chain-of-Thought (CoT) dataset featuring detailed reasoning trajectories to guide the model via Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and RL. To address the varying quality of learning signals encountered during training, we further propose an Adaptive Importance Weighting strategy based on Group Variance, which dynamically adjusts reward signals to optimize the learning process. Experimental results demonstrate that PointVG-R achieves SOTA performance, outperforming the baseline by $\textbf{15.86}$ points in mIoU. Extensive ablation studies further validate the efficacy of our proposed modules. Code: https://github.com/lingli1724/PointVG-R.

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offer powerful reasoning for forensic tasks, yet existing approaches utilizing exogenous segmentation decoders often suffer from suboptimal localization. The reliance on stitched pipelines introduces information bottlenecks during backpropagation, which dilutes spatial signals and is limited by semantic priors of the segmentor. To address these limitations, we propose ForensicsTok, which reformulates image manipulation localization as an autoregressive sequence generation task. ForensicsTok directly generates spatially grounded token sequences, enabling precise mask prediction without intermediary supervision. Specifically, we introduce a Token Splatting Decoder (TSD) to map tokens to binary masks via codebook-aware code smoothing, which mitigates sharp gradients from deterministic detokenizers. Furthermore, to capture diverse tampering clues, we propose a Hierarchical Expert Fusion (HEF) module that injects multi-scale features from a forensic expert model. This unified architecture effectively compensates for the lack of forensic priors in standard MLLMs. Extensive experiments on six benchmarks show that ForensicsTok substantially improves over existing MLLM-based baselines and slightly improves over strong forensic expert baselines, while exhibiting stronger robustness to perturbations.