Multimodal Fusion

Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) has traditionally focused on a few specific categories, restricting its applicability to real-world scenarios involving diverse objects. Open-Vocabulary Multi-Object Tracking (OVMOT) addresses this by enabling tracking of arbitrary categories, including novel objects unseen during training. However, current progress is constrained by two challenges: the lack of continuously annotated video data for training, and the lack of a customized OVMOT framework to synergistically handle detection and association. We address the data bottleneck by constructing C-TAO, the first continuously annotated training set for OVMOT, which increases annotation density by 26x over the original TAO and captures smooth motion dynamics and intermediate object states. For the framework bottleneck, we propose COVTrack++, a synergistic framework that achieves a bidirectional reciprocal mechanism between detection and association through three modules: (1) Multi-Cue Adaptive Fusion (MCF) dynamically balances appearance, motion, and semantic cues for association feature learning; (2) Multi-Granularity Hierarchical Aggregation (MGA) exploits hierarchical spatial relationships in dense detections, where visible child nodes (e.g., object parts) assist occluded parent objects (e.g., whole body) for association feature enhancement; (3) Temporal Confidence Propagation (TCP) recovers flickering detections through high-confidence tracked objects boosting low-confidence candidates across frames, stabilizing trajectories. Extensive experiments on TAO demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, with novel TETA reaching 35.4% and 30.5% on validation and test sets, improving novel AssocA by 4.8% and novel LocA by 5.8% over previous methods, and show strong zero-shot generalization on BDD100K.

Recent advances in multimodal learning have motivated the integration of auxiliary modalities such as text or vision into time series (TS) forecasting. However, most existing methods provide limited gains, often improving performance only in specific datasets or relying on architecture-specific designs that limit generalization. In this paper, we show that multimodal models with naive fusion strategies (e.g., simple addition or concatenation) often underperform unimodal TS models, which we attribute to the uncontrolled integration of auxiliary modalities which may introduce irrelevant information. Motivated by this observation, we explore various constrained fusion methods designed to control such integration and find that they consistently outperform naive fusion methods. Furthermore, we propose Controlled Fusion Adapter (CFA), a simple plug-in method that enables controlled cross-modal interactions without modifying the TS backbone, integrating only relevant textual information aligned with TS dynamics. CFA employs low rank adapters to filter irrelevant textual information before fusing it into temporal representations. We conduct over 20K experiments across various datasets and TS/text models, demonstrating the effectiveness of the constrained fusion methods. Code is available at: https://github.com/seunghan96/cfa.

We propose TacFiLM, a lightweight modality-fusion approach that integrates visual-tactile signals into vision-language-action (VLA) models. While advances in VLAs have introduced robot policies that are both generalizable and semantically grounded, these models mainly rely on vision-based perception. Vision alone, however, cannot capture the complex interaction dynamics that occur during contact-rich manipulation, including contact forces, surface friction, compliance, and shear. While recent attempts to integrate tactile signals into VLA models often increase complexity through token concatenation or large-scale pretraining, the heavy computational demands of behaviour models necessitate lightweight fusion strategies. To address these challenges, TacFiLM outlines a post-training finetuning approach that conditions intermediate visual features on pretrained tactile representations using feature-wise linear modulation (FiLM). Experimental results on insertion and drawer opening tasks demonstrate consistent improvements in success rate, direct task performance, completion time, and force stability across both in-distribution and out-of-distribution tasks. Together, these results support our method as an effective approach to integrating tactile signals into VLA models, improving contact-rich manipulation behaviours. Project page: https://charliem7.github.io/projects/TacFilm/

Social media increasingly disseminates information through mixed image text posts, but rumors often exploit subtle inconsistencies and forged content, making detection based solely on post content difficult. Deep semantic mismatch rumors, which superficially align images and texts, pose particular challenges and threaten online public opinion. Existing multimodal rumor detection methods improve cross modal modeling but suffer from limited feature extraction, noisy alignment, and inflexible fusion strategies, while ignoring external factual evidence necessary for verifying complex rumors. To address these limitations, we propose a multimodal rumor detection model enhanced with external evidence and forgery features. The model uses a ResNet34 visual encoder, a BERT text encoder, and a forgery feature module extracting frequency domain traces and compression artifacts via Fourier transformation. While some existing approaches employ large scale generative vision language models for caption generation, their open ended generation tendency produces verbose and stylistically inconsistent descriptions that introduce semantic noise and risk drifting from actual image content. To overcome this, we adopt BLIP specifically pre trained for vision language alignment which generates concise, image faithful descriptions stylistically closer to news text, serving as a reliable semantic bridge across modalities. A BLIP Driven Semantic Alignment Module jointly optimizes text image and text description contrastive losses, capturing inconsistencies at both visual and semantic levels. A gated adaptive feature scaling fusion mechanism dynamically adjusts multimodal fusion and reduces redundancy. Experiments on Weibo and Twitter datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms mainstream baselines in,recall,and F1 score

Video camouflaged object detection (VCOD) is challenging due to dynamic environments. Existing methods face two main issues: (1) SAM-based methods struggle to separate camouflaged object edges due to model freezing, and (2) MLLM-based methods suffer from poor object separability as large language models merge foreground and background. To address these issues, we propose a novel VCOD method based on SAM and MLLM, called Phantom-Insight. To enhance the separability of object edge details, we represent video sequences with temporal and spatial clues and perform feature fusion via LLM to increase information density. Next, multiple cues are generated through the dynamic foreground visual token scoring module and the prompt network to adaptively guide and fine-tune the SAM model, enabling it to adapt to subtle textures. To enhance the separability of objects and background, we propose a decoupled foreground-background learning strategy. By generating foreground and background cues separately and performing decoupled training, the visual token can effectively integrate foreground and background information independently, enabling SAM to more accurately segment camouflaged objects in the video. Experiments on the MoCA-Mask dataset show that Phantom-Insight achieves state-of-the-art performance across various metrics. Additionally, its ability to detect unseen camouflaged objects on the CAD2016 dataset highlights its strong generalization ability.

We study multi-sensor fusion for 3D semantic segmentation that is important to scene understanding for many applications, such as autonomous driving and robotics. Existing fusion-based methods, however, may not achieve promising performance due to the vast difference between the two modalities. In this work, we investigate a collaborative fusion scheme called perception-aware multi-sensor fusion (PMF) to effectively exploit perceptual information from two modalities, namely, appearance information from RGB images and spatio-depth information from point clouds. To this end, we project point clouds to the camera coordinate using perspective projection, and process both inputs from LiDAR and cameras in 2D space while preventing the information loss of RGB images. Then, we propose a two-stream network to extract features from the two modalities, separately. The extracted features are fused by effective residual-based fusion modules. Moreover, we introduce additional perception-aware losses to measure the perceptual difference between the two modalities. Last, we propose an improved version of PMF, i.e., EPMF, which is more efficient and effective by optimizing data pre-processing and network architecture under perspective projection. Specifically, we propose cross-modal alignment and cropping to obtain tight inputs and reduce unnecessary computational costs. We then explore more efficient contextual modules under perspective projection and fuse the LiDAR features into the camera stream to boost the performance of the two-stream network. Extensive experiments on benchmark data sets show the superiority of our method. For example, on nuScenes test set, our EPMF outperforms the state-of-the-art method, i.e., RangeFormer, by 0.9% in mIoU. Our source code is available at https://github.com/ICEORY/PMF.