The paper investigates how multimodal large language models (MLLMs) handle conflicting evidence presented in text, image, or both forms. Across 13 MLLMs and two datasets, the authors find that models are not robust to knowledge conflict: they tend to accept contradictory image evidence more readily than contradictory text, and when both modalities conflict the preference is arbitrary, depending on input order, model, and dataset. The instability degrades multimodal retrieval-augmented generation and can be exploited by adversarial attacks, while simple mitigation techniques such as prompting, steering, and direct preference optimization largely fail, with supervised fine‑tuning offering only moderate improvement.
By Jungyeon Lee, Yejin Yoon, Taeuk Kim
This survey reviews 490 papers on text‑to‑image synthesis (T2I) over the past decade, covering key model families such as GANs, autoregressive models, and diffusion models. It organizes recent research by problem areas—controllability, personalization, editing, preference alignment, efficiency, safety, and spatial consistency—rather than strictly chronologically. The paper also examines unified multimodal models, datasets, evaluation metrics, and discusses applications, challenges, and future research directions in T2I.
By Nonghai Zhang, Hao Tang
UniEvo‑VL is a self‑evolving framework that lets multimodal models improve themselves by using their own critiques as privileged information. The method trains a single model to act as both teacher and student, minimizing divergence between their diffusion distributions over sampling trajectories. Experiments on Qwen‑image‑2512 show significant gains in image generation metrics, and stronger external critics further raise the improvement ceiling, though results vary across tasks.
By Fang Wu, Da Xing, Yanjie Huang, Junxi Wang, Ji Wang, Hejia Geng, Guancheng Wan, Bowen Zuo, Xiaomin Li, Shixiang Tang, Xinyu Xiang, Zehong Wang, Shiyi Du, Peng Xia, Shuangjia Zheng, Yining Hong, Li Erran Li, Jure Leskovec, Yejin Choi
Modern multimodal models bring generation and understanding into a single unified system, which enables them to provide and learn from their own feedback. Motivated by this unified capacity, we introd...
arXiv:2606. 09169v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In recent years, unified multimodal models (UMMs) have emerged to support both understanding and generation within a single framework.
By Lingyi Meng, Zecong Tang, Haoran Li, Tengju Ru, Zhejun Cui, Weitong Lian, Qi Kang, Hangshuo Cao, Yichen Zhu, Yechi Liu, Kaixuan Wang, Yu-Jie Yuan, Chunwei Wang, Yu Zhang, Bo Dai
arXiv:2505.17613v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Automatically evaluating multimodal generation presents a significant challenge, as automated metrics often struggle to align with human evaluation...
By Jihan Yao, Yushi Hu, Wenyuan Wang, Bin Han, Shangbin Feng, Guang Yang, Yujie Yi, Bingbing Wen, Ranjay Krishna, Lucy Lu Wang, Yulia Tsvetkov, Noah A. Smith, Banghua Zhu
Multimodal Language Models as Text-to-Image Model Evaluators presents MT2IE, a framework where a multimodal large language model generates evaluation prompts and scores images, achieving higher correlation with human judgment than prior metrics. MT2IE recovers official T2I model rankings using only 20 prompts—far fewer than traditional benchmarks—and adapts prompts to each model’s performance, maintaining informative scoring ranges. The approach demonstrates that dynamic, interactive evaluation can replace static benchmarks as T2I models improve.
By Jiahui Chen, Candace Ross, Reyhane Askari-Hemmat, Koustuv Sinha, Melissa Hall, Amy Zhang, Michal Drozdzal, Adriana Romero-Soriano
SAVOR is a training framework for multimodal large language models that adds token and answer confidence to the output schema, optimises a Group Relative Policy Optimisation objective to penalise calibration error and poor abstention, and uses the learned confidence at inference to revisit visual evidence only when uncertain. Experiments on POPE, HallusionBench, AMBER, and MMHal-Bench with InternVL3-8B and Qwen3-VL-8B backbones show that SAVOR reduces hallucination while maintaining general capability on MME and MMBench, achieving lower Expected Calibration Error than DPO and decoding baselines.
By Zixiu Ding, Zilin Zhao, Yingjie He, Xinlang Kang, Guansu Wang, Wei Zhang
arXiv:2605. 16411v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Hallucination remains a fundamental challenge in vision-language models (VLMs), where autoregressive generation may produce linguistically plausible yet physically inconsistent or visually ungrounded responses due to likelihood maximization under joint probabilistic modeling.
By Qinwu Xu
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made strong progress on visual question answering and image captioning, yet they still produce fluent claims about objects, attributes, or relations that...
arXiv:2606. 26348v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can process diverse inputs, e.
By Po-han Li, Shenghui Chen, Sandeep Chinchali, Ufuk Topcu
arXiv:2605. 18714v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unified multimodal models (UMMs) strive to consolidate visual understanding and visual generation within a single architecture.
By Songsong Yu, Yuxin Chen, Ying Shan, Yanwei Li