PRISM is a training‑free framework that efficiently selects visual instruction data for multimodal large language models by addressing the anisotropy in visual feature distributions, which causes a Global Semantic Drift. By implicitly re‑centering visual semantics, PRISM removes the influence of global background features, cutting data‑selection and model‑tuning time to 30% of conventional pipelines while improving performance across eight multimodal and three language benchmarks, achieving a 101.7% relative gain over baseline models.
By Jinhe Bi, Aniri, Zengjie Jin, Yifan Wang, Danqi Yan, Wenke Huang, Xiaowen Ma, Sikuan Yan, Artur Hecker, Mang Ye, Xun Xiao, Hinrich Schuetze, Volker Tresp, Yunpu Ma
arXiv:2606. 28551v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Building performant Vision-Language Models (VLMs) requires carefully curating large-scale training datasets, yet the community lacks systematic benchmarks for evaluating such curation strategies.
By Matteo Farina, Vishaal Udandarao, Thao Nguyen, Selim Kuzucu, Maximilian B\"other, Andreas Hochlehnert, Adhiraj Ghosh, Marianna Nezhurina, Karsten Roth, Joschka Struber, Yuhui Zhang, Sebastian Dziadzio, Elaine Sui, Soumya Jahagirdar, Dhruba Ghosh, Hasan Hammoud, Thomas De Min, Simone Caldarella, Jehanzeb Mirza, Sedrick Keh, Mehdi Cherti, Hilde Kuehne, Bernt Schiele, Serena Yeung-Levy, Muhammad Ferjad Naeem, Federico Tombari, Ana Klimovic, Elisa Ricci, Matthias Bethge, Sewoong Oh, Ameya Prabhu, Alessio Tonioni, Jenia Jitsev, Massimiliano Mancini, Ludwig Schmidt, Nikhil Parthasarathy
arXiv:2603. 01195v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The effectiveness of multimodal instruction tuning depends not only on dataset scale, but critically on whether training samples genuinely require visual reasoning.
By Mingkang Dong, Hongyi Cai, Jie Li, Sifan Zhou, Bin Ren, Kunyu Peng, Yuqian Fu
arXiv:2605. 18160v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In recent years, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, primarily attributed to effective paradigms for integrating visual and textual information.
By Xinpeng Dong, Min Zhang, Kairong Han, Xu Tan, Fei Wu, Kun Kuang
arXiv:2606. 03871v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual instruction tuning effectively adapts a pre-trained Large Language Model (LLM) to process image information alongside text.
By Luis Palacios, Lorenzo Basile, Diego Doimo, Alberto Cazzaniga
arXiv:2607. 26596v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities by integrating visual and textual understanding within a unified transformer architecture.
By Mingkuan Feng, Zhengqi Wen, Jianhua Tao
arXiv:2606. 04434v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal In-Context Learning (ICL) has emerged as a practical inference paradigm for Multimodal Large Language Models, where a small set of interleaved image-text In-Context Demonstrations (ICDs) conditions the model to solve new tasks.
By Niloufar Alipour Talemi, Hossein Kashiani, Fatemeh Afghah
arXiv:2605. 18740v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) still struggle with fine-grained visual understanding, where answers often depend on small but decisive evidence in the full image.
By Qianhao Yuan, Jie Lou, Xing Yu, Hongyu Lin, Le Sun, Xianpei Han, Yaojie Lu
The paper investigates why multimodal large language models (MLLMs) struggle with vision‑centric tasks when visual evidence conflicts with pretrained language knowledge. Using image reconstruction and a new WhatIfVis benchmark, the authors show that MLLMs preserve coarse‑grained visual attributes but fail to consistently use them, and that supervised fine‑tuning and activation patching can improve controllability of visual context sensitivity. The study demonstrates that the main bottleneck lies in the models’ inability to reliably regulate their reliance on visual evidence rather than in visual perception itself.
By Jiaang Li, Chengzu Li, Zhaochong An, Yifei Yuan, Xi Liu, Serge Belongie, V\'esteinn Sn{\ae}bjarnarson
The paper introduces Visual Retrieval Heads (VRHs), a small fraction of attention heads in vision‑language models that are causally responsible for grounding text descriptions to image regions. By recasting head‑scoring methods and evaluating across eleven VLMs and five benchmarks, the authors show that masking the top 20 VRHs can drop grounding accuracy by up to 80 percentage points, while random masking has little effect. VRHs generalize across various visual reference tasks, preserve output format while corrupting localization, and transfer causally across models sharing an LLM backbone.
By Chanho Park, Daehyeon Choi, Jihyun Lee, Minhyuk Sung
arXiv:2506. 01850v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable success in instruction-following tasks by integrating pretrained visual encoders with large language models (LLMs).
By Wayner Barrios, Andr\'es Villa, Juan Le\'on Alc\'azar, SouYoung Jin, Bernard Ghanem
Abundant visual information strengthens vision-language model (VLM) perception, yet massive visual tokens raise inference costs. Existing visual token pruning methods rely on similarity-based guidance, which exploits pairwise text-vision and vision-vision token correlations for compression.