The paper introduces AstroVLBench, a benchmark of 4,100 expert‑verified instances covering optical imaging, radio interferometry, multi‑wavelength photometry, time‑domain light curves, and optical spectroscopy. Six leading vision‑language models were evaluated, revealing that performance varies strongly with modality and is not predicted by general benchmark rankings. Mechanistic ablations identified three bottlenecks: prompt grounding depends on model and task, presenting one‑dimensional data as tables rather than plots improves light‑curve classification, and a significant fraction of correct predictions are supported by physically inconsistent reasoning.
By Wenke Ren, Hengxiao Guo, Wenwen Zuo, Xiaoman Zhang
arXiv:2608. 05238v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training multimodal models to align time series with language runs into a self-supervision trap.
By Xinran Feng, Yi Xie, Chao Zhang, Ruikun Li, Wanyun Ling, Ziyue Li, Chenxi Liu
The paper introduces D3-Omni, a balanced and decoupled benchmark designed to diagnose fine‑grained multimodal understanding in OmniJudges that evaluate text‑to‑image, text‑to‑video, and text‑to‑speech generation. D3-Omni covers 53 orthogonal binary dimensions across 10,671 samples, using fixed positive seeds and controlled prompt rewriting to generate negatives, thereby ensuring each error can be attributed to a single capability. The benchmark’s dual‑balanced, decoupled, and dynamic design achieves near 1:1 per‑dimension parity and a uniform total‑score distribution, revealing that strong OmniJudges often miss modality‑related failures and treat distinct attributes as a single decision, masking systematic blind spots.
By Guangzheng Hu, Ziyue Jiang, Weixu Qiao, Lixin Zhang, Jianye Kang, Yuru Wu, Rong Bao, Niantong Li, Wei Wang, Ziyi Cheng, Xinfa Zhu, HangRui Hu, Ting He, Bing Zhao, Lin Qu, Hu Wei, Jin Xu
arXiv:2607. 05438v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) grounds a generator in evidence drawn from heterogeneous modalities -- text, tables, and images.
By Xue Li, Yiming Gai
arXiv:2603. 25112v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Standard evaluation of LLM confidence relies on calibration metrics (ECE, Brier score) that conflate how much a model knows (Type-1 accuracy) with how well its confidence signal tracks that knowledge (Type-2 metacognitive sensitivity).
By Jon-Paul Cacioli
The paper investigates how new concepts can be integrated into unified multimodal models (UMMs) by separating generation and understanding objectives through a novel visual entity bound to a single task direction. Experiments show that the effectiveness of cross‑task usability depends on where the concept is injected into the shared computation, with a mid‑stack alignment objective achieving high concept acquisition with minimal loss to overall performance. The study highlights that unified weights alone are insufficient; the two directions must share a semantic format at the entry point for efficient concept integration.
By Zongyang Qiu, Yihan Wu, Kaixuan Fan, Bo Li, Hui Xiong
The Modality Maturity Index (MMI) is a new benchmark that evaluates large language models on their ability to handle five different modalities—text, image, audio, video, and document—across up to three-input and three-output combinations. It contains 893 self‑contained questions, each with human‑authored rubric criteria for the expected output modalities, and measures performance via an MMI Value and a Modality Presence Score (MPS). Experiments on five frontier multimodal models show low MPS scores, indicating limited modality availability, and confirm that LLM judges can reliably assess output correctness against human‑blind rubric scoring on 70.8% of cases.
By Rohit Patel, Dieuwke Hupkes, Sloan Strader
arXiv:2608. 14227v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Preprocessing invariance is an appealing goal for spectral foundation models: a frozen model should remain useful when laboratories preprocess spectra differently.
By Dongjun Wei, Hongyi Wu, Yinuo Zou
The paper reports that in English all‑words word sense disambiguation (WSD), the scarcity of high‑quality labels—not the models—has become the limiting factor. The authors introduce lexEN, a human‑adjudicated correction layer over the Maru2022 ALL_NEW benchmark, and SenseBench, a living leaderboard for LLM WSD evaluation. They show that frontier large language models reach about 95 % accuracy on lexEN‑v1, that relabeling corpora with these models improves downstream systems, and that fine‑grained WordNet senses are often ill‑posed, with coarsening improving both annotator agreement and model performance.
"whyItMatters":"The study highlights that improving label quality and managing annotation costs are now the critical challenges for advancing WSD performance, as model accuracy is already near its theoretical ceiling."
By Vassili Philippov, Amro Salman, Dmitrii Andreev, Penny Hands, Emil Kaiumov, Pavel Katunin, Anton Nikolaev
The paper evaluates nine on‑device named‑entity recognition models ranging from classical taggers to large language models, measuring not only accuracy but also latency and output validity. Using a silver‑gold benchmark derived from an LLM judge panel and a human‑validated corpus, the study shows that encoder‑based models achieve comparable accuracy to a 4 B instruct LLM while being much smaller, faster, and producing no malformed output. Confidence calibration of GLiNER is analyzed, revealing over‑confidence but improved reliability after temperature scaling and thresholding.
By Vinay Kumar Chaganti
arXiv:2606. 11190v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cross-modal alignment (CA) and cross-modal prediction (CP) are the dominant paradigms for multimodal representation learning, yet there is no systematic understanding of when each succeeds, when each fails, and when cross-modal training helps at all -- a gap that leaves practitioners, especially in scientific domains like biomedicine or astrophysics, with heterogeneous instruments and multiple levels of organization and measurement, unable to diagnose why standard methods underperform the best single modality.
By Ilay Kamai, Hugues Van Assel, Aviv Regev, Hagai B. Perets, Randall Balestriero
arXiv:2610.31768v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Omni-modal large language models (Omni-LLMs) can jointly process a broad range of modalities, such as text, audio, and video, enabling stronger multimo...
By Shuqi Liu, Yuzhou Cao, Luke Ong