Multimodal Classification

Remote sensing scene classification is a fundamental task in Earth observation and geospatial analysis. Existing approaches mainly follow three paradigms: task-specific visual classification, vision-language similarity matching, and autoregressive multimodal generation. However, visual classifiers rely on predefined label spaces, CLIP-based methods perform recognition through static image-text alignment, and multimodal large language models (MLLMs) introduce unnecessary token-level generation for classification tasks with explicit candidate categories. To address these limitations, we propose RSJEV, a one-pass multimodal decision framework for remote sensing scene classification. Unlike conventional MLLMs that formulate classification as autoregressive text generation, RSJEV reformulates scene classification as a candidate-conditioned multimodal discriminative decision process, where visual representations, task instructions, and candidate category semantics are jointly modeled. Specifically, we introduce a OnePass Decider that extracts multimodal decision states and directly estimates category probabilities within the candidate category space, eliminating autoregressive decoding while preserving vision-language interactions. Extensive experiments on three widely used remote sensing scene classification benchmarks, including UC Merced, AID, and NWPU-RESISC45, demonstrate that RSJEV achieves superior classification performance compared with representative CNN-, Transformer-, Mamba-, CLIP-, and MLLM-based methods. Moreover, RSJEV significantly reduces inference costs and achieves a better accuracy-efficiency trade-off with only a compact 0.8B-parameter model. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of state-conditioned multimodal decision making for efficient remote sensing image understanding. The code will be available at https://github.com/Dongtcs/RSJEV.

Gastric adenocarcinoma (GA) is a leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide, and accurate histopathological subtype classification from whole-slide images (WSIs) is essential for effective treatment planning. While multimodal approaches that integrate pathology report text with WSIs can improve classification, existing methods often depend on computationally expensive transformer architectures and large language models. We propose a multimodal knowledge distillation (MKD) framework that combines a pretrained WSI image encoder and a clinical text encoder using Low-Rank Multimodal Fusion (LMF) to efficiently model cross-modal interactions during training. Each WSI is represented as a bag of patches paired with a slide-level diagnostic caption. The teacher model learns fused image-text representations for subtype classification, while the student model distills this knowledge to enable accurate image-only inference. We evaluate our method on the PatchGastric benchmark dataset and achieve at least 3.35% higher mean accuracy than state-of-the-art approaches, without relying on transformer-based fusion, multi-task learning, or large language models. The source code is available at https://github.com/helomelo1/MKD-LMF.

Multimodal systems often encode every available input, even when a subset suffices for prediction. Adaptive acquisition can reduce this cost by using predictions from incrementally fused evidence to decide which modality to encode next and when to stop. However, sequential fusion makes these predictions order-dependent, so decisions based on them may need to distinguish factorially many histories of the same acquired set. We introduce SemARC, which couples a Sequential Modality Aggregator (SeMA) with an Adaptive Runtime Controller (ARC) and uses acquired evidence to select each modality before its encoder runs. SeMA executes only selected encoder and fusion branches, updates a fixed-size state, and predicts after each acquisition without recomputing earlier branches. We supervise every acquisition prefix under randomized modality subsets and orders to encourage consistent predictions across acquisition orders. ARC combines a set-dependent marginal-utility prior with residual fitted-Q learning to select the next available modality or stop, without inspecting unacquired inputs or retaining acquisition order. Across six multimodal classification datasets and eleven baselines, SemARC achieves 3.2% higher macro-F1 and 61.4% lower total inference GFLOPs on average relative to each dataset's most accurate baseline. End-to-end latency falls by 44.0% across GPU and CPU and by 47.2% on Android INT8 relative to the fastest measured baseline, on average. Under varying runtime modality missingness, SemARC still skips available modalities, matching or exceeding the best baseline macro-F1 in 21 of 24 conditions with 14.8% lower total GFLOPs on average. SemARC thus offers a practical path toward efficient multimodal inference across heterogeneous devices.

Accurate T-staging is crucial for guiding personalized treatment strategies for laryngopharyngeal cancer. However, current clinical practice relies on invasive biopsy procedures, whereas CT-based staging remains challenging due to the complex patterns of tumor invasion. Recent computer-aided approaches face two key challenges: 1) Structural relationship modeling: existing methods underrepresent anatomically structured patterns of tumor invasion, as they either process whole CT volumes without tumor-specific anatomical constraints or rely on labor-intensive tumor segmentation. 2) Fine-grained cross-modal alignment: while radiology reports contain organ-specific invasion details, current methods that apply global feature fusion struggle to accurately align individual anatomical structures with their corresponding textual descriptions. To address these issues, we propose an anatomy-aware multimodal framework that integrates organ-level CT context and radiology reports into a unified representation for laryngopharyngeal T-staging. The framework first constructs an Anatomy-Structured Organ Graph (AOG) that captures invasion patterns between primary sites and surrounding organs, then performs Organ-Anchored Cross-Modal Alignment (OCA) so that each organ node aggregates textual evidence from the radiology report, and finally refines this graph representation by injecting organ-specific invasion cues extracted from the report via Report-Enhanced Graph-Refinement (REG), yielding a multimodal organ graph that combines spatial and textual evidence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves superior performance in T-staging of laryngopharyngeal cancer.

This work proposes a mutual feedback architecture, MEQ, that refines the two inputs, of possibly different modalities, into a pair of coupled embeddings such that each embedding reflects the information of the other. The core idea is to incorporate continuous interchange of information between the two inputs. This idea leads to a mutual feedback architecture consisting of two components whose outputs are fed back into the other. The final output of this model is defined as the fixed point of this interaction. We provide theoretical analysis that offers interpretation of this model as well as design choices to prevent failure cases. We show the benefits of MEQ through classification and visual grounding tasks spanning various datasets. Quantitatively, our model outperforms or shows competitive performance on concatenation-based multimodal classification problems. Qualitatively, the proposed interactive mechanism allows the model to progressively refine the visual grounding when paired with complementary modality, thus demonstrating the power of mutual feedback under such settings.

Medical models are judged not only on correctness, but on whether reported confidence matches actual accuracy. Generalist multimodal medical models have expanded what a single model can perceive, yet they still express bounded decisions such as diagnoses, findings or cell counts as generated text, so the reported probability reflects the next token rather than the decision itself. Motivated by decision-native interfaces such as Jev, we introduce OmniMed-Jev, which represents each medical decision as a Choice, Noul or Score decision over a runtime-supplied candidate set and returns a full distribution over that set: mutually exclusive classes, binary presence of a finding, or a bounded ordered value. The design is omni in three respects: it accepts diverse imaging modalities, covers different prediction tasks, and expresses them through one candidate-conditioned probability model, so heterogeneous outputs become comparable probabilities rather than task-specific strings. In an interface-controlled comparison against a generative baseline trained on the same backbone, data and schedule, OmniMed-Jev's reported probabilities track observed correctness far more closely, reducing calibration error by up to an order of magnitude and reliability error by up to two, while point-prediction performance remains comparable; counting is the one family where the generative baseline stays ahead. Making the decision distribution the model's output is not a format change but what turns reported numbers into probabilities that mean what they say. These results support explicit decision modeling as a way to make reported confidence meaningful within the evaluated tasks, and they are not evidence of clinical readiness: the comparison cannot separate the interface from associated training differences, which we state alongside the results. Code is available at github.com/lytang63/OmniMed-Jev.

Mycosis fungoides (MF) is a rare form of cutaneous T-cell lymphoma that is often misdiagnosed in early stages due to its visual similarity to benign inflammatory dermatoses. Early and accurate diagnosis is critical for improving patient outcomes. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive diagnostic framework for automated MF detection that combines dual- scale histopathological image analysis with deep learning. To distinguish MF from other lymphoproliferative skin conditions, the proposed approach leverages a late-fusion ensemble of dual- magnification (10x and 20x) convolutional neural networks (CNNs), complemented by a random forest classifier trained on 16 clinical features. Experimental results on an expanded dataset of 6,267 images (4,306 MF; 1,961 Non-MF) across 463 patients demonstrate that strong detection performance is obtained by prioritizing higher-resolution cytological details (20x) within broader architectural context (10x). The image-based late-fusion model achieves an accuracy of 83.58% and a sensitivity of 89.13%, while the clinical random forest model achieves an accuracy of 96.6% and sensitivity of 93.8%, highlighting the po- tential of this multimodal framework as a robust clinical decision support system in dermatology. This framework addresses two distinct clinical objectives: an image-based dual-scale pipeline optimized for the early diagnostic screening of MF versus non- MF dermatoses, and a complementary clinical metadata model designed for the subsequent staging of confirmed MF cases (patch/plaque versus tumor)

Existing multimodal scaling laws fit multimodality terms empirically after testing and never vary how much data is multimodally paired at fixed data budgets. We investigate how, under the same total data per modality, changing the number of paired data affects loss curves in multimodal classification tasks. We train models in three different environments and run experiment sweeps varying data sizes and pairing budget. Pairing ratios have a dramatic impact on loss and this impact is directly tied to how much information synergy the task contains. Only paired data is able to reduce synergistic loss, while unpaired data can reduce redundant or unimodal information up until unimodal floors. Unlike traditional scaling laws where loss drops immediately in power law decay, synergy acquisition is gated, requiring a critical threshold of paired data before synergistic loss falls at all. We introduce a new family of multimodal scaling laws where total data-attributable loss is the sum of four individual power laws corresponding to the four different information channels of redundancy, a unique channel per modality, and synergy, and show how this law is both more theoretically sound and empirically valid across our experiments. This law predicts multimodal loss in our experiments more accurately than existing laws, with 3.2% error on fit tests versus 10.4% error for the best pairing extension of published laws.

Major depressive disorder (MDD) severely impacts daily activities and quality of life. Detecting MDD involves multimodal data, such as interview recordings and sensor measurements. This is particularly challenging, as these heterogeneous modalities often demand distinct, customized prediction pipelines. Existing efforts to address this challenge have explored both manually engineered multimodal architectures and agent-assisted pipeline development. Despite their progress, it remains challenging to autonomously revise pipelines based on experimental feedback and carry verified improvements forward into subsequent designs. To this end, we propose Multimodal Exploration via Recursive Self-Improvement Agents for Major Depression Analysis (MERID). The framework develops depression pipelines through experience-based recursive self-improvement (RSI). Grounded State Construction (GSC) grounds experience by aligning multimodal records with subject-level depression targets. Coupled Pipeline Exploration (CPE) jointly modifies representations, fusion, and predictors to build successor pipelines for classification and severity estimation. Evidence-Guided Evolution (EGE) guides revisions through feedback and verifies gains under uncertainty in small depression cohorts before inheritance. Extensive experiments on depression benchmarks show that MERID achieves the best results on multiple tasks compared with multimodal and agent-based baselines. Further analysis highlights the value of acoustic and linguistic cues for depression detection. Our code is available at https://github.com/DiscoAILab/MERID

Patient responses to dental pulp testing, ranging from no sensation to intense pain, provide important information for assessing pulp status in endodontic diagnosis. However, pain is a subjective sensory and emotional experience that varies considerably across individuals and can be difficult to communicate. We investigated whether complementary autonomic signals could support objective assessment of responses during dental examination. Forty-nine patients underwent cold pulp testing, yielding no-response, mild-response, and intense-response conditions. The framework integrated ECG-derived skin nerve activity (SKNA) and R-R intervals (RRI), together with electrodermal activity (EDA), using temporal convolutional network encoders with attention-based mid-level fusion. Individual baseline signals and subject-level covariates, including anxiety scores and biological sex, were also incorporated. The framework achieved 80.2% balanced accuracy, 75.2% sensitivity, and 85.2% specificity for binary classification of no response versus mild or intense response. For three-class classification, it achieved 60.0% balanced accuracy and a 58.8% macro-averaged F1 score. Ablation and attention-weight analyses indicated that EDA contributed most strongly to model performance, followed by RRI, while SKNA improved balanced accuracy by approximately five percentage points. Age was significantly associated with model performance. These findings support the feasibility of multimodal autonomic sensing for objective, non-invasive assessment of responses to dental pulp stimulation.

When should multimodal foundation models generate tokens, and when should they directly output a decision? We present MAD-Guard, a controlled study of output-decision interfaces for closed multimodal forensic tasks. Once a multimodal representation is computed, is autoregressive generation necessary for closed forensic decisions with high input complexity but low output entropy? Under a matched Qwen3-VL-8B backbone, 2,400 FakeClue training samples, and LoRA budget ($r=16, α=32$) on Huawei Ascend 910C NPUs, we evaluate a progression of decision interfaces (AR-SFT [generate] $\to$ Logit Slice $\to$ Binary Direct Head $\to$ +choice $\to$ +act $\to$ CLM-Head) and decompose latency into backbone representation (53.12 ms), 151,643-way vocabulary projection (+85.04 ms $\to$ 138.16 ms), and decoding (+248.26 ms $\to$ 386.42 ms). Under 1-to-1 binary supervision ($\mathcal{L}_{\mathrm{BCE}}$), a Binary Direct Head cuts latency by $2.60\times$-$7.27\times$ (53.12 ms) and lowers calibration error by $1.88\times$ (ECE = 0.0450 vs. 0.0845), with a -1.80% accuracy trade-off (93.10% vs. 94.90%; 0.9795 vs. 0.9871 ROC-AUC) from forfeiting token priors. Gains above AR-SFT arise either from multi-task attribution and uncertainty gating (+choice+act: 96.44% accuracy, 0.9940 ROC-AUC, 0.0187 ECE at 53.71 ms) or from a disaggregated contrastive head (CLM-Head: 96.55% binary and 96.44% multi-task accuracy, 0.0166 ECE, 98.79% 7-class attribution at 54.42 ms) retaining semantic priors without token decoding. Across 5,000 out-of-sample images from five benchmarks, our framework excels on synthetic, camouflage, and document forgeries (96.44% GenImage, 97.73% Chameleon, 91.84% Doc) while showing a clear boundary on compressed face manipulation (FF++ ROC-AUC = 0.5913).

Multimodal graph predictors combine text, images, and relations to classify connected entities. How much of this input is needed to preserve their predictions? We study budgeted representation selection, which chooses a subset of candidate text and image vectors under a separate capacity for each modality. Predictions from the complete candidate input define the classes to preserve. The challenge is that a representation's contribution depends on the other selected inputs, while graph propagation extends its effects across nodes. Our empirical study shows that candidate rankings change with the selected input, while predicted probabilities remain informative after the class stops changing. Updating scores improves selection, and exchanging inputs can improve a subset whose capacity is already filled. These findings lead to GraphSelect, which starts from individual candidate gains and refines the subset through jointly evaluated exchanges. It screens promising removals and additions, accepts an exchange when it reduces the prediction loss, and updates the scores. Experiments on six graphs show higher mean objective recovery than six attribution and explanation methods adapted to the selection task. Across nine trained architectures on two graphs, retaining 20% of the candidate representations per modality gives a mean accuracy drop of 0.10 percentage points relative to full candidate input, preserving classification performance with substantially fewer text and image representations.

Multimodal learning (MML) falls into the optimization dilemma due to the modality imbalance phenomenon, leading to suboptimal overall performance in practice. While many attempts primarily focus on balancing the optimization dynamics across modalities to address this issue, we identify a subtle yet critical flaw: optimization yields asymmetric gains in predictive certainty, with the strong modality more confident than the weak one, driving imbalanced modality contributions. In this paper, our analysis reveals that this flaw stems from unimodal characteristics rather than multimodal learning, and this confidence discrepancy can be corrected by positive cross-modal intervention. Based on this insight, we propose multimodal Max Confidence Regularization (MaxCR) to dynamically intervene in modality semantic confidence. Specifically, the semantic confidence of each modality is tracked using a nonlinear sparsity measure. We then design max suppression and max excitation based on this measure to regularize strong and weak modalities, respectively. They penalize and encourage the top-1 confidence, thereby constraining multimodal prediction. To this end, strong and weak modalities are expected to make calibrated confidence, thereby improving the overall performance. Empirical experiments on widely used datasets reveal the superiority of our method through comparison with various state-of-the-art (SOTA) multimodal learning baselines.

Memes often derive their harmful, hateful, or sarcastic meaning from small but decisive visual, textual, or cross-modal cues. Existing multimodal classifiers can miss such evidence when relying mainly on global image-text representations. We introduce MemeCF, a cue-focused benchmark of 9,895 memes across harm, hate, and sarcasm, with annotations identifying the modality and rationale of the pivotal evidence. We also propose MemePIVOT, a local-global architecture for meme classification. MemePIVOT uses frozen CLIP features, unbalanced optimal transport to align words with image patches while allowing irrelevant evidence to remain unmatched, and an evidential fusion head to combine local grounding with global meme context under uncertainty. Experiments on HarMeme, PrideMM, and MemeCF show consistent gains over strong text-only, image-only, multimodal, and vision-language baselines. Cross-dataset and ablation results further show that explicit pivotal-evidence modeling improves robustness and contributes meaningfully beyond global multimodal representations. Our code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/AkshitSharma1/MemePIVOT

Multimodal classifiers can converge to modality-dominant solutions in which one modality dominates the joint prediction, suppressing the learning of others. Existing balancing methods mainly adjust losses, gradients, or modality contributions, largely treating modality imbalance as an optimization problem while implicitly treating the weak modality as under-optimized but representationally intact. In this work, we find that this assumption does not always hold, as persistent modality dominance can induce a representation-level collapse of the weak modality, which we term \emph{manifold modality collapse} (MMC). MMC manifests as a coupled geometric degradation in which weak-modality representations collapse onto fewer directions within each class and become less separable across classes. Motivated by this observation, we propose \emph{GeoBalance}, a geometry-aware framework that monitors these two geometric properties and reconstructs the weak modality representation only when it exhibits signs of MMC. Once triggered, GeoBalance uses a fixed Simplex-ETF class scaffold and spectral regularization to restore class separation while preventing collapse onto a few feature directions. To preserve reconstruction during joint training, asymmetric gradient projection removes the joint-gradient component conflicting with reconstruction, leaving non-conflicting optimization unchanged. Extensive experiments across six multimodal benchmarks demonstrate great improvements over competitive balancing methods, validating its effectiveness.

The Mobile Unified Multimodal Understanding (MUMU) Challenge requires a single efficient model to jointly perform multi-concept image tagging, open-vocabulary object detection, and image captioning. We present Efficient Unified Multimodal Understanding (EUMU), the winning solution for the MUMU Track of the 8th LSVOS Challenge. EUMU builds on a shared pretrained multimodal model, using its prompt-based capabilities for detection and captioning and training lightweight heads on shared visual features to predict quality, scene, and event tags. Rather than treating the three tasks independently, EUMU applies task-aware inference refinement by reusing task outputs as cross-task cues. For detection, caption cues help recover objects missed by the initial detection. For captioning, detection cues help refine the caption to better reflect the detected objects. For tagging, image statistics refine quality predictions, while caption and detection cues refine scene and event predictions. This design unifies all three tasks within a single model while satisfying the challenge's resource constraints. EUMU contains 239.169M parameters, requires 23.947 GFLOPs, uses 4.5 GB of peak inference memory, and achieves a final challenge score of 17.3409. Code and models are available at https://github.com/Dayoung-Kil/EUMU.

AI models for multimodal medical imaging must balance modality-specific specialization with cross-modal shared representations, a trade-off that pure Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures currently fail to satisfy. Expert-based routing improves in-domain learning but may sacrifice cross-modal signals, which appear particularly important for rare (low-prevalence) pathologies in our experiments. To resolve this, we introduce Generalist-Specialist-MoE (GS-MoE), a two-branch (MoE) architecture that couples a cross-modal generalist model with distinct modality-specific specialists (experts) via domain-constrained feature fusion. On RadImageNet (1.35M images, 165 pathologies, three modalities), GS-MoE recovers detection of six low-prevalence pathologies on which every baseline scores F1 $=$ 0, with per-class gains up to +0.60 F1. It attains this while even slightly exceeding dense and specialist-only MoE aggregate baselines (MCC 0.770), while using ${\sim}53\%$ fewer active parameters at inference than the strongest investigated dense model.

The analysis and classification of cultural heritage architectural styles remain challenging due to the complexity of visual images of buildings, which are highly relied on in traditional CNN-based classification approaches in comparison to textual descriptions, and the relative lack of non-western region-specific datasets. This paper addresses this gap by proposing a multimodal machine learning framework to analyze and classify Emirati residential architecture using OpenAI's CLIP model. We integrate visual features from images and textual features from expert descriptions into a unified 512-dimensional embedding, followed by dimensionality reduction with UMAP for visualization and unsupervised clustering using K-Means. Cluster labels, which are derived from manual analysis of the K-Means clusters, are used to train an SVM classifier for automated architectural style classification. Our approach achieves a classification accuracy of 98% across eight identified style clusters, higher than every other study in the literature, demonstrating the effectiveness of combining visual and textual modalities. Overall, this paper highlights the potential of using multimodal AI to support architectural heritage analysis, offering scalable and interpretable tools for exploring regional architectural identities.

Multimodal representation learning seeks shared representations for cross-modal retrieval and knowledge transfer. Hub-based binding reduces pairwise supervision costs, but separate hub connections cannot guarantee reliable alignment between modalities without direct joint training. We introduce Hub-Spectral Activation (HSA), a closed-form method for recovering and activating the hub-readable component of latent multimodal knowledge in frozen representations. We formalize this knowledge as source-induced cross-modal dependence and characterize the component determined by the second-order statistics of two trained hub edges. Under a second-order source model, we establish conditions for exact recovery of the complete source-induced relation and bound the dimension of its hub-readable component by the hub covariance rank. HSA composes and standardizes hub-edge statistics, extracts paired spectral directions, and combines reliability-weighted matching evidence with source-gated candidate resolution for bidirectional retrieval and prototype classification. HSA requires no target-pair supervision, gradient optimization, or backbone updates. Across 19 retrieval and 11 prototype-classification relations on ImageBind and LanguageBind, HSA raises mean bidirectional Recall@10 from 18.27% to 31.15% and mean macro Top-1 accuracy from 29.01% to 52.43%, respectively. Controlled analyses further identify valid hub-edge correspondence and leading spectral directions as key sources of retrieval gains, demonstrating the utility of latent multimodal knowledge beyond native similarity scores. Code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/Luo1Yan/HSA.

Emergency vehicle detection in autonomous driving is a safety-critical perception task that demands robustness under diverse and adverse real-world conditions. Existing approaches rely on a single modality, either audio or video, which leads to systematic failure when that modality is degraded: microphone-based systems fail in noisy urban environments, and camera-based systems fail at night or under occlusion. This report presents AVNet, a multimodal audio-visual transformer that classifies emergency vehicles (ambulance, fire engine, police car) and road background using both audio and video, while gracefully handling the absence of either modality at inference time. AVNet introduces three key contributions: (1) a temporally aligned cross-modal fusion module that performs second-level cross-attention between audio spectrogram tokens and video frame tokens, exploiting their exact temporal correspondence without any learned alignment mechanism; (2) learned null embeddings that substitute for missing modality tokens, enabling a single unified model to operate in audio-only, video-only, or joint audio-visual mode without retraining; and (3) a knowledge distillation training strategy in which specialist unimodal teacher models transfer inter-class dark knowledge into the multimodal student fusion branch via soft probability targets. Evaluated on 281 clips from the Google AudioSet dataset, AVNet achieves 66.6% overall accuracy in audio-visual mode, outperforming the audio-only branch by +10.4% and the video-only branch by +15.0%. The largest per-class gain is observed for the hardest class, Ambulance, where fusion achieves +29.5% over either unimodal branch alone, demonstrating that the two modalities provide complementary information that the aligned cross attention mechanism successfully exploits.

The clinical management of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) faces a bottleneck in early screening, mainly because trained specialists are scarce and conventional assessment tools are subjective. Here, we introduce ASDchat, a multimodal large language model designed for evidence-based ASD screening, which takes video, audio, and dialogue as input. ASDchat adopts a dual-branch architecture, where the decision branch generates screening probabilities and the evidence branch generates traceable, timestamped behavioral evidence aligned with standardized clinical criteria (ADOS-2). The model was trained and evaluated on a dataset of 1,035 participants from 27 sites in China, which covered typically developing (TD) children, children with ASD, and children with other disorders. For ASD versus TD, ASDchat reached an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.953 $\pm$ 0.021. On 9 held-out sites that were not used for training, the mean AUC was 0.932. Furthermore, unsupervised clustering of the behavioral dimensions split the ASD cases into six subtypes with different phenotypic profiles, and ASDchat suggests an intervention for each subtype. ASDchat provides a feasible path for large-scale, evidence-based early ASD screening in clinical practice.

Detecting sexism on the internet is a fundamentally subjective task; our team, VANGUARD, addresses this challenge in the EXIST 2026 Task 2 by proposing a human-centered multimodal framework that analyses and incorporates the psychological and demographic characteristics of human annotators into the detection pipeline. We fuse five input modalities through a cross-attention architecture with Feature-wise Linear Modulation conditioning. Meme text is extracted and visually described with Gemma 4, then augmented by automatic translation between English and Spanish with NLLB-200. Text and image representations are produced by LoRAadapted XLM-RoBERTa and CLIP encoders and fused with sensor features encoded by a pretrained autoencoder. To model annotator subjectivity, we frame Subtask 2.1 as a label distribution learning problem, optimizing a Kullback-Leibler divergence loss over the full annotator label distribution. At inference time, predictions are produced by soft-voting between the deep multimodal network and a complementary SVM trained on stylometric and physiological features. Our best submission ranks 29th out of 114 on Subtask 2.2 (source intention) under soft evaluation, and the normalized ICM scores remain above the baseline on Subtasks 2.1 and 2.2, indicating that annotator-centered conditioning contributes a usable signal. We release our full pipeline and analysis to support reproducible human-centered modeling.

Dementia is a major and growing global health burden, with Alzheimer's disease (AD) accounting for most cases. Timely and accurate diagnosis is central to managing this burden and increasingly depends on integrating complementary clinical and imaging information. Multimodal deep learning can combine these modalities for AD diagnosis, but how its explanations behave across modalities, fusion strategies, and cohorts remains unclear. We developed an explainable multimodal framework pairing a 3D CNN encoder for T1-weighted MRI with a feedforward network for harmonized clinical and demographic data, comparing varied model setups on three-way and pairwise diagnostic tasks using 6,479 internal records from the ADNI and 1,703 independent records from the OASIS-3. On ADNI, the tabular-only model achieved the highest three-class AUC-ROC of 0.879 and best discriminated cognitively normal (CN) versus mild cognitive impairment (MCI; 0.903), while cross-attention performed best for MCI versus AD (0.861); CN versus AD was highly discriminative overall. On OASIS-3, the vision-only model performed best (three-class AUC-ROC 0.910); CN versus MCI remained difficult, and no fusion strategy consistently outperformed single modalities across tasks and cohorts. SHAP and Integrated Gradients identified the MMSE as the dominant tabular feature in both cohorts, with global feature rankings agreeing strongly in ADNI ($\rho=0.94$) and OASIS-3 ($\rho=0.96$); CAM-based explanations, however, changed with model configuration and cohort. These findings show that multimodal performance and explanations are task, modality, fusion, and cohort-dependent: a dominant cognitive signal persisted across cohorts, but feature contributions and CAM explanations did not, underscoring the need to evaluate explainability under cohort shift rather than as a stable, intrinsic property.

Adapting natural-image foundation models like DINOv3 to multi-modal medical imaging is challenging due to the significant domain gap between natural color images and multi-channel medical scans. We present a unified, patch-based framework that processes raw multimodal imaging through training-free registration, automated localization, and mask-filtered patch extraction. This architecture culminates in a hierarchical strategy that aggregates patch-level insights into subject-level diagnostics. Using liver fibrosis staging as a case study, we evaluate four patch-level feature representations: handcrafted Radiomics features, learned ResNet features, pre-trained foundation model SAM-Med2D features, and frozen DINOv3 features. To ensure a controlled comparison, all models utilize the same lightweight MLP head and are evaluated across both rigid and deformable registration settings. Our training protocol focuses on mild fibrosis (S1) and cirrhosis (S4) classes only, enabling a single classifier to address both substantial fibrosis detection and cirrhosis staging. Evaluated via 10 random train (90%)/ test (10%) splits on 360 subjects from the CARE 2025 Liver Track 4 cohort, our DINOv3-based framework significantly outperforms all baselines, achieving the best classification accuracy of 78.4% for S1 and 75.8% for S4.

Simultaneous assessment of medical imaging and patient records is often required in clinical diagnosis. However, standard machine learning algorithms cannot analyze these data types together. Meanwhile, compliance with HIPAA and GDPR can constrain centralized aggregation of sensitive patient data. This leaves a crucial void of secure fusion of visual and textual context across distant networks. Thus, we present OmniMed-FL, a controlled systems study of multimodal federated learning for five-class clinical condition classification (Normal, Pneumonia, COVID-19, Pleural Effusion, Cardiomegaly). Our proxy corpus pairs 3,000 public chest radiographs with 3,000 class-conditioned synthetic notes, matched by class, not by patient. The framework benchmarks eight fusion strategies, three initializations, four missing-text imputation rules, and matched federated baselines under non-IID Dirichlet partitioning across 3 to 20 hospital clients. As all notes are synthetic and pairing is not patient-level, these are descriptive proxy comparisons, not estimates of diagnostic performance or deployment readiness. Within those limits with clients ($K=5$) and severe skew ($α=0.1$), local-only training achieves a macro-F1 score of 0.297, FedAvg achieves $0.662\pm0.074$, FedProx $0.737\pm0.085$, a matched FedMME-style one-shot ensemble $0.647\pm0.080$, and our SCAFFOLD-AdamW adaptation $0.070\pm0.015$, the 0.075 FedProx-FedAvg gap falling inside the wider of the two two-seed standard deviations. Over a $4\times3$ grid, label skew costs up to 0.27 F1 whereas a near-sevenfold client increase costs at most 0.10, while bidirectional volume grows linearly to 183.5 GiB at $K=20$. Multimodal fusion leads on both corpora, scoring 0.956 against 0.934 for text and 0.664 for images on the synthetic corpus and 0.906 against 0.880 and 0.737 on the radiograph corpus, for $2.3\times$ the model state of text alone.

Malocclusion skeletal grading is a fundamental task in orthodontics, critical for diagnosis and treatment planning. Traditionally, cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) is used for visual measurement, and the reconstructed lateral cephalograms are handed over to expert dentists for diagnosis. However, manual review is time-consuming, labor-intensive, and subject to inter-operator variability. Therefore, an automatic CBCT-based system is needed for reliable malocclusion skeletal grading. In this case, we develop TeethGNN, a novel graph-based framework designed to combine CBCT image features with morphological information for accurate and efficient malocclusion grading. TeethGNN utilizes a decoupled learnable decoder to directly predict key morphological indicators from CBCT images, eliminating the need for manual measurements. These morphological features are then fused with image features using a graph neural network (GNN), which effectively models the relationships between the modalities. To further enhance robustness and calibration, we introduce a collaborative calibration strategy. This strategy combines multi-scale graph adversarial perturbation for explicit calibration and nonlinear topological graph calibration for implicit confidence adjustment. Extensive experiments and ablation studies on our collected clinical dataset demonstrate that our malocclusion measurement system achieves 77.08% in accuracy and 89.61% in AUC, outperforming the compared state-of-the-art methods. These results validate the effectiveness of graph-based multimodal fusion and collaborative calibration in improving malocclusion grading performance. Our system shows strong potential for advancing computer-aided orthodontic diagnosis, providing an accurate and reliable solution for vision-based clinical measurement and diagnosis.

Contrastive learning approaches achieve strong performance by training models to bring similar samples closer while pushing dissimilar samples apart. A crucial component of contrastive learning is the temperature hyperparameter $τ$, which controls the penalty strength applied to negative samples. However, most existing methods either fix this hyperparameter or learn a global value during training. In this paper, we introduce TeMo, Temperature Modulation framework, a similarity-based modulation approach that adaptively adjusts the temperature for each positive-negative pair according to their similarity, enabling more fine-grained multimodal contrastive learning. Our approach seamlessly integrates temperature-modulated multimodal and unimodal losses with the standard multimodal contrastive loss by gradually transitioning between them. This design allows the model to capture both coarse- and fine-grained semantics at different training stages. Extensive experiments demonstrate that each component of TeMo consistently enhances performance across diverse zero-shot retrieval and classification tasks, establishing new state-of-the-art results.

Reliable disaster damage assessment requires models that provide both accurate predictions and transparent explanations. However, existing multimodal approaches are limited by scarce annotated data and insufficient evaluation of reasoning quality. This study proposes a two-stage training framework that integrates Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) within a unified data construction pipeline. From a single Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) annotation workflow, two complementary datasets are derived, namely ReasoningSet, which contains validated rationales for SFT, and PreferenceSet, which comprises paired rationales for DPO-based alignment. The framework evaluates both classification performance and explanation quality using automatic metrics, model-based scoring, and human ranking. Experimental results show that SFT improves accuracy from 73.64% to 78.29% and increases Macro-F1 by 29% compared to the baseline, while explanation quality improves by approximately 25%. Subsequent DPO alignment further enhances interpretability on the PreferenceSet. Cross-model validation on InternVL-3-8B and LLaVA-1.5-7B demonstrates the robustness and generalizability of the approach. The proposed framework improves detection of underrepresented mild damage cases, reduces high-risk misclassifications, and strengthens alignment between model reasoning and human judgment. Overall, it provides a reproducible pathway to develop reliable multimodal systems that deliver auditable, actionable disaster insights for emergency management.

Dynamic stance classification models how a reply responds to its direct parent message, rather than how a post relates to a fixed topic. Existing work has mainly studied this problem in text-only settings, while social media interactions increasingly rely on images, screenshots, memes, reaction images, and cross-modal references. We introduce MMDS-Bench, a diagnostic benchmark for multimodal dynamic stance classification in social media parent-reply interactions. MMDS-Bench contains 3,482 multimodal instances annotated with a seven-label dynamic stance taxonomy, together with an 800-instance diagnostic subset that requires structured reasoning over parent understanding, reply understanding, and stance-relation inference. We further annotate each instance with five challenge factors covering multimodal fusion, parent framing, non-literal expression, interaction reasoning, and label-boundary ambiguity. We evaluate 12 closed-source and open-source multimodal large language models and propose a reference-grounded LLM-judge protocol for assessing reasoning quality. Results show that current MLLMs still struggle with multimodal dynamic stance understanding, especially in cases that require relational inference beyond separate parent and reply comprehension.

Combining whole-body magnetic resonance imaging (WB-MRI) with clinical variables has the potential to improve systemic disease diagnosis by leveraging complementary sources of patient information. However, structured clinical variables are often incomplete or missing, limiting the applicability of conventional multimodal fusion methods that assume fixed inputs. In this work, we propose TACTIC (Tabular-Attribute Conditioned Transformer for Image Classification), a prompt-based multimodal framework that integrates WB-MRI and structured clinical data through conditional visual feature learning. By encoding clinical attributes as prompts, TACTIC supports an arbitrary number of tabular inputs and naturally handles missing data without requiring imputation or fixed input structures. We evaluate TACTIC on five WB-MRI classification tasks spanning systemic and oncologic applications, including diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), breast cancer, prostate cancer, and metastasis diagnosis. Across all tasks, TACTIC consistently improves performance over image-only baselines when clinical information is available while maintaining strong predictive capability under incomplete tabular inputs. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of prompt-based models as a flexible approach for improving WB-MRI analysis using clinical context. The model weights and code are available at https://github.com/lauradaza/TACTIC