arXiv Computation and Language

TokenSwap: Benchmarking and Reducing the Modality Gap in Multimodal LLMs

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Visual Information-Guided Parallel Decoding for Diffusion Multimodal Large Language Models

Visual Information-Guided Parallel Decoding for Diffusion Multimodal Large Language Models introduces the VIG‑Sampler, a method that prioritizes tokens for decoding based on their attention to image tokens and penalizes redundancy in image‑attention distributions. The approach aims to improve the quality of multimodal generation by selecting more informative tokens during diffusion decoding. Experiments on seven captioning and VQA benchmarks with three open‑source dMLLMs show that VIG‑Sampler outperforms the Info‑Gain Sampler by an average of 19.3 CIDEr points and achieves better COCO Caption results using only half as many decoding steps.

By Insu Lee, Wooje Park, Wonseok Shin, Jinwoo Son, Byonghyo Shim
arXiv AI
Jun 8

Modality Gap-Driven Subspace Alignment Training Paradigm For Multimodal Large Language Models

arXiv:2602. 07026v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Despite the success of multimodal contrastive learning in aligning visual and linguistic representations, a persistent geometric anomaly, the Modality Gap, remains: embeddings of distinct modalities expressing identical semantics occupy systematically offset regions.

By Xiaomin Yu, Yi Xin, Yuhui Zhang, Wenjie Zhang, Chonghan Liu, Hanzhen Zhao, Chen Liu, Xiaoxing Hu, Ziyue Qiao, Hao Tang, Xiaobin Hu, Chengwei Qin, Hui Xiong, Yu Qiao, Shuicheng Yan
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 8

Studying Image Tokenizers as Visual Languages in Unified Multimodal Models

The paper investigates image tokenizers as the visual language of unified multimodal models by creating a controlled autoregressive testbed that tracks task‑specific validation losses during multimodal continual pretraining across text, image, text‑to‑image, and image‑to‑text predictions. It shows that losses must be analyzed by task, that the loss–performance relationship varies with the token space, and that better reconstruction does not always lead to stronger downstream performance. The study also demonstrates how tokenizer design choices—such as discriminator use, semantic supervision, and vocabulary size—affect joint modeling and downstream results.

arXiv AI
Sep 28

Improving Visual Sensitivity of LLMs on Multimodal Machine Translation with Metric-based Loss Weighting

The paper proposes Metric-based Loss Weighting to enhance visual grounding in multimodal machine translation. By increasing loss for tokens that benefit from image context—identified via the Point-wise Cross-mutual Information (PCXMI) metric and its Congruency-based variant—the method improves translation accuracy on the CoMMuTE dataset by over 7 percentage points. Experiments fine-tune three pretrained multimodal LLMs across three language directions, showing superior performance compared to standard fine-tuning while preserving overall translation quality.

By Pawe{\l} M\k{a}ka, Piotr Andruszkiewicz, Yusuf Can Semerci, Jan Scholtes, Gerasimos Spanakis
arXiv AI
Jul 29

Argus-Unified: Towards A Compact and Economical Unified Model for Image Understanding and Generation

arXiv:2607. 25527v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Unifying visual understanding and generation in one model holds immense promise, but remains challenging and expensive due to heavy compute and data demands and conflicts between the visual features needed for these two capabilities.

By Weiming Zhuang, Jiabo Huang, Jingtao Li, Zhizhong Li, Chen Chen, Sina Sajadmanesh, Lingjuan Lyu
arXiv AI
Jun 26

TOPS: First-Principles Visual Token Pruning via Constructing Token Optimal Preservation Sets for Efficient MLLM Inference

arXiv:2606. 27161v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved strong multimodal reasoning capabilities, but their efficiency is limited by the large number of visual tokens, which introduces substantial computational overhead.

By Tinghao Wang, Yichen Guo, Rui Huang, Zheng Lu, Qizhe Zhang, Chenxi Li, Yuan Zhang, Jiajun Cao, Zhirong Shen, Yaosong Du, Guangyan Gan, Wenya Wang, Lin William Cong, Shanghang Zhang