Multimodal Model

Momentum

22 papers in the last four weeks, up 267% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

Jul 13Week of Sep 28

Latest papers 133

Mar 16, 2026cs.CV

DamageArbiter: A Multimodal Arbitration Framework for Disaster Damage Assessment from Street-View Imagery

Analyzing street-view imagery with computer vision models offers a promising approach for rapid, hyperlocal disaster damage assessment, but existing approaches typically rely on black-box pre-trained vision models, which lack interpretability and reliability. This study proposes DamageArbiter, a multimodal disagreement-driven arbitration framework designed to improve the accuracy and reliability of street-view-based damage assessment. DamageArbiter leverages the complementary strengths of unimodal and multimodal models and employs a lightweight logistic regression meta-classifier to arbitrate cases in which model predictions disagree. Using 2,556 post-disaster street-view images, paired with manually generated or large language model (LLM)-generated text descriptions, we systematically compared DamageArbiter with fine-tuned unimodal (image-only and text-only) models and CLIP-based multimodal models in terms of classification performance and overconfidence errors. Results show that DamageArbiter improved accuracy to 75.85% and the Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) to 0.6188, compared with the best-performing text-only baseline (63.07% accuracy, 0.4126 MCC), image-only baseline (74.33% accuracy, 0.5947 MCC), and CLIP baseline (74.22% accuracy, 0.5915 MCC). The overconfidence analysis further reveals that DamageArbiter substantially reduced the overconfidence error from 70.58% for the best-performing baseline, the image-only ViT model, to 16.45%. Overall, this study demonstrates that accuracy alone is insufficient for evaluating disaster damage classification models and highlights the importance of measuring overconfidence errors as part of model reliability assessment. DamageArbiter thus offers a more reliable framework for rapid, hyperlocal disaster damage assessment from street-view imagery.
Mar 12, 2026cs.LG

Overcoming the Modality Gap in Context-Aided Forecasting

Context-aided forecasting (CAF) holds promise for integrating domain knowledge and forward-looking information, enabling AI systems to surpass traditional statistical methods. However, recent empirical studies reveal a puzzling gap: multimodal models often fail to outperform their unimodal counterparts. We hypothesize that this underperformance stems from poor context quality in existing datasets, as verification is challenging. To address these limitations, we introduce a semi-synthetic data augmentation method that generates contexts both descriptive of temporal dynamics and verifiably complementary to numerical histories. This approach enables massive-scale dataset creation, resulting in CAF-7M, a corpus of 7 million context-augmented time series windows, including a rigorously verified test set. We demonstrate that semi-synthetic pre-training transfers effectively to real-world evaluation, and show clear evidence of context utilization. Our results suggest that dataset quality, rather than architectural limitations, has been the primary bottleneck in context-aided forecasting.
Feb 9, 2026cs.CL

UReason: Benchmarking Reasoning-to-Generation Alignment in Unified Multimodal Models

Unified multimodal models (UMMs) aim to integrate multimodal understanding and generation within a unified architecture, yet it remains unclear to what extent textual and visual modalities are aligned. To investigate this question, we use reasoning-guided image generation as a diagnostic task, where models produce textual reasoning first and then generate images. We introduce UReason, a benchmark for evaluating reasoning-to-generation alignment in this paradigm, consisting of 2,000 human-curated and human-verified instances spanning five reasoning-intensive tasks: Code, Arithmetic, Spatial, Attribute, and Text. To enable controlled analysis, we develop an evaluation framework that compares direct generation, reasoning-guided generation, and decontextualized generation, which conditions only on the refined prompt extracted from reasoning. Across eight widely used open-source UMMs, while we find that reasoning-guided generation yields improvements over direct generation, somewhat surprisingly, decontextualized generation consistently outperforms reasoning-guided generation by a large margin. Our further analyses suggest that the intended visual semantics in textual reasoning are not reliably reflected in the generated images, despite their unified design and training. Overall, UReason serves as a practical litmus test for reasoning-to-generation alignment and provides a challenging benchmark for developing next-generation, more tightly aligned UMMs.
Feb 6, 2026cs.CV

MMEarth-Bench: Global Model Adaptation via Multimodal Test-Time Training

Recent research in geospatial machine learning demonstrates that models pretrained with self-supervised learning on Earth observation data can perform well on downstream tasks with limited labeled data. However, most benchmark datasets have few data modalities and poor global representation, limiting the ability to evaluate multimodal pretrained models at global scales. In order to fill this gap, we introduce MMEarth-Bench, a collection of five new environmental tasks with 12 modalities, globally distributed data, and both random and geographic test splits. We benchmark a diverse set of pretrained models and find that while (multimodal) pretraining tends to improve model robustness in limited data settings, geographic generalization abilities remain poor. Moreover, a simple randomly initialized multimodal model is competitive given enough labeled data. Although data is abundant, models can currently only make use of the modalities on which they were pretrained. To solve this problem, we propose using all the modalities available at test time as auxiliary tasks for test-time adaptation. Our model-agnostic method for test-time training with multimodal reconstruction (TTT-MMR) can improve performance across all models and tasks on both test splits. Furthermore, geographic batching leads to a good trade-off between regularization and specialization during TTT, which is especially beneficial for long-tail distributions. Our dataset, code, and visualization tool are linked on the project page: lgordon99.github.io/mmearth-bench.
Jan 21, 2026cs.CL

Social Caption: Evaluating Social Understanding in Multimodal Models

Social understanding abilities are crucial for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to interpret human social interactions. We introduce SOCIAL CAPTION, a framework grounded in interaction theory to evaluate social understanding abilities of MLLMs along three dimensions: Social Inference (SI), the ability to make accurate inferences about interactions; Holistic Social Analysis (HSA), the ability to generate comprehensive descriptions of interactions; Directed Social Analysis (DSA), the ability to generate relevant information from interactions. We analyze factors influencing model performance in social understanding, such as scale, architectural design, and spoken context. Experiments with MLLM judges demonstrate a path towards scaling automated evaluation of multimodal social understanding.
Nov 12, 2025cs.AI

CrochetBench: Can Vision-Language Models Move from Describing to Doing in Crochet Domain?

While multimodal large language models can describe visual content, their ability to generate executable procedures remains underexplored. CrochetBench presented in this paper evaluates this shift from describing to doing through fine-grained procedural reasoning in crochet: models must recognize stitches, select structurally appropriate instructions, and generate compilable procedures. We adopt the CrochetPARADE DSL as our intermediate representation, enabling structural validation and functional evaluation via execution. The benchmark covers tasks including stitch classification, instruction grounding, and both natural language and image-to-DSL translation. Across all tasks, performance sharply decreases as the evaluation shifts from surface-level similarity to executable correctness, revealing limitations in long-range symbolic reasoning and 3D-aware procedural synthesis. Our proposed CrochetBench offers a new lens for assessing procedural competence in multimodal models and highlights the gap between surface-level understanding and executable precision in real-world creative domains. Code is available at https://github.com/Peiyu-Georgia-Li/crochetBench.
Oct 20, 2025cs.SE

From Charts to Code: A Hierarchical Benchmark for Multimodal Models

We introduce Chart2Code, a new benchmark for evaluating the chart understanding and code generation capabilities of large multimodal models (LMMs). Chart2Code is explicitly designed from a user-driven perspective, capturing diverse real-world scenarios and progressively increasing task difficulty. It consists of three levels: Level 1 (Chart Reproduction) reproduces charts from a reference figure and user query; Level 2 (Chart Editing) involves complex modifications such as changing chart types or adding elements; and Level 3 (Long-Table to Chart Generation) requires models to transform long, information-dense tables into faithful charts following user instructions. To our knowledge, this is the first hierarchical benchmark that reflects practical chart2code usage while systematically scaling task complexity. In total, Chart2Code contains 2,023 tasks across 22 chart types, paired with multi-level evaluation metrics that assess both code correctness and the visual fidelity of rendered charts. We benchmark 25 state-of-the-art (SoTA) LMMs, including both proprietary and the latest open-source models such as GPT-5, Qwen2.5-VL, InternVL3/3.5, MiMo-VL, and Seed-1.6-VL. Experimental results demonstrate that even the SoTA model GPT-5 averages only 0.57 on code-based evaluation and 0.22 on chart-quality assessment across the editing tasks, underscoring the difficulty of Chart2Code. We anticipate this benchmark will drive advances in multimodal reasoning and foster the development of more robust and general-purpose LMMs. Our code and data are available on Chart2Code.
Sep 8, 2025cs.CV

Reconstruction Alignment Improves Unified Multimodal Models

Unified multimodal models (UMMs) unify visual understanding and generation within a single architecture. However, conventional training relies on image-text pairs (or sequences) whose captions are typically sparse and miss fine-grained visual details, even when they use hundreds of words to describe a simple image. We introduce Reconstruction Alignment (RECA), a resource-efficient post-training method that leverages visual understanding encoder embeddings as dense "text prompts", providing rich supervision without captions. Concretely, RECA conditions a UMM on its own visual understanding embeddings and optimizes it to reconstruct the input image with a self-supervised reconstruction loss, thereby realigning understanding and generation. Despite its simplicity, RECA is broadly applicable: across autoregressive, masked-autoregressive, and diffusion-based UMMs, it consistently improves generation and editing fidelity. With only 27 GPU hours, post-training with RECA substantially improves image generation performance on GenEval (0.73 →\rightarrow 0.90) and DPGBench (80.93 →\rightarrow 88.15), while also boosting editing benchmarks (ImgEdit 3.38 →\rightarrow 3.75, GEdit 6.94 →\rightarrow 7.27). Notably, RECA surpasses much larger open-source models and applies broadly across diverse UMM architectures, establishing it as an efficient and general post-training alignment strategy for UMMs.
Aug 3, 2025cs.LG

GlaBoost: A Multimodal Structured Framework for Glaucoma Risk Stratification

Early and accurate glaucoma detection is critical to prevent irreversible vision loss, yet existing AI methods often rely on unimodal inputs and lack interpretability. We present GlaBoost, a multimodal gradient boosting framework that unifies three complementary signals for glaucoma risk prediction: fundus image embeddings from a pretrained convolutional encoder,free-text neuroretinal rim assessments encoded by a transformer-based language model, and structured ophthalmic biomarkers. These modalities are fused into a single representation and classified by an enhanced XGBoost model.On two real-world annotated datasets, GlaBoost consistently outperforms unimodal and generic multimodal baselines. Feature importance analysis highlights the cup-to-disc ratio, rim thinning, and the ISNT rule as the dominant predictors, yielding clinically consistent and interpretable decisions. GlaBoost offers a transparent and scalable foundation for multimodal decision support in ophthalmology.
Jul 22, 2025cs.CV

SyncLoop: A Multimodal Dual-Loop Framework for Self-Improving Mathematical Reasoning

Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown impressive reasoning capabilities. However, further enhancing existing MLLMs necessitates high-quality vision-language datasets with carefully curated task complexities, which are both costly and challenging to scale. Although recent self-improving models that iteratively refine themselves offer a feasible solution, they still suffer from two core challenges: (i) most existing methods augment visual or textual data separately, resulting in discrepancies in data complexity (e.g., over-simplified diagrams paired with redundant textual descriptions); and (ii) the evolution of data and models is also separated, leading to scenarios where models are exposed to tasks with mismatched difficulty levels. To address these issues, we propose C2-Evo, an automatic, closed-loop self-improving framework that jointly evolves both training data and model capabilities. Specifically, given a base dataset and a base model, C2-Evo enhances them by a cross-modal data evolution loop and a data-model evolution loop. The former loop expands the base dataset by generating complex multimodal problems that combine structured textual sub-problems with iteratively specified geometric diagrams, while the latter loop adaptively selects the generated problems based on the performance of the base model, to conduct supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning alternately. Consequently, our method continuously refines its model and training data, and consistently obtains considerable performance gains across multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks. Our code, models, and datasets will be released.
Jun 10, 2025cs.CV

HunyuanVideo-HOMA: Generic Human-Object Interaction in Multimodal Driven Human Animation

To address key limitations in human-object interaction (HOI) video generation -- specifically the reliance on curated motion data, limited generalization to novel objects/scenarios, and restricted accessibility -- we introduce HunyuanVideo-HOMA, a weakly conditioned multimodal-driven framework. HunyuanVideo-HOMA enhances controllability and reduces dependency on precise inputs through sparse, decoupled motion guidance. It encodes appearance and motion signals into the dual input space of a multimodal diffusion transformer (MMDiT), fusing them within a shared context space to synthesize temporally consistent and physically plausible interactions. To optimize training, we integrate a parameter-space HOI adapter initialized from pretrained MMDiT weights, preserving prior knowledge while enabling efficient adaptation, and a facial cross-attention adapter for anatomically accurate audio-driven lip synchronization. Extensive experiments confirm state-of-the-art performance in interaction naturalness and generalization under weak supervision. Finally, HunyuanVideo-HOMA demonstrates versatility in text-conditioned generation and interactive object manipulation, supported by a user-friendly demo interface. The project page is at https://https://bone-11.github.io/homa-page//.
May 16, 2025cs.CV

HumaniBench: A Human-Centric Framework for Large Multimodal Models Evaluation

Although recent large multimodal models (LMMs) show impressive progress on vision language tasks, their alignment with human centered (HC) principles such as fairness, ethics, inclusivity, empathy, and robustness is often overlooked. Existing LMM benchmarks are largely accuracy-agnostic. We present HumaniBench, a unified framework for characterizing HC alignment across realistic, socially grounded visual contexts. It contains 32,000 expert-verified image-question pairs from real-world news imagery, each mapped to one or more HC principles through explicit metrics. Comparing 15 state of the art LMMs reveals consistent trade -offs: proprietary systems lead on ethics, reasoning, and empathy, while open-source models show superior visual grounding and resilience. All models show persistent gaps in fairness and multilingual inclusivity. Chain-of-thought prompting and test-time scaling yield 8to 12 % gains on several HC dimensions. HumaniBench enables fine-grained analysis of alignment trade-offs not captured by conventional multimodal benchmarks. https://vectorinstitute.github.io/humanibench/
Jul 16, 2024cs.CV

VLMEvalKit: An Open-Source Toolkit for Evaluating Large Multi-Modality Models

We present VLMEvalKit: an open-source toolkit for evaluating large multi-modality models based on PyTorch. The toolkit aims to provide a user-friendly and comprehensive framework for researchers and developers to evaluate existing multi-modality models and publish \textbf{reproducible} evaluation results. In VLMEvalKit, we implement over 450+ large multi-modality model configurations, including both proprietary APIs and open-source models, and support 330+ benchmarks across diverse multi-modal benchmarks. By implementing a single interface, new models can be easily added to the toolkit, while the toolkit automatically handles the remaining workloads, including data preparation, distributed inference, prediction post-processing, and metric calculation. VLMEvalKit has also evolved to a broader evaluation suite spanning video/audio, document understanding, GUI grounding, spatial reasoning, safety, scientific reasoning, and multi-turn dialogue. Based on the evaluation results obtained with the toolkit, we host the OpenVLM Leaderboard, a comprehensive leaderboard to track the progress of multi-modality learning research. The toolkit is released on https://github.com/open-compass/VLMEvalKit and is actively maintained.