arXiv AI

Correct When Paired, Wrong When Split: Decoupling and Editing Modality-Specific Neurons in MLLMs

arXiv:2606. 17057v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Although Knowledge Editing provides an efficient mechanism for updating the knowledge of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), we find that current paradigms still suffer from an important yet remain underexplored issue : editing decoupling failure, where entity-related knowledge can be updated when the model is triggered by multimodal inputs (text--image query pairs), however, it often reverts to outdated pre-edit facts when the paired inputs are split into unimodal ones.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 2

Same Semantics, Different Outcome: On the Modality Robustness of Multimodal LLMs under Knowledge Conflict

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
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
arXiv Computation and Language
6d ago

Does Understanding Inform Generation in Unified Multimodal Models? From Analysis to Path Forward

The paper introduces UniSandbox, a decoupled evaluation framework with controlled synthetic datasets, to study whether understanding informs generation in Unified Multimodal Models. Results show a notable understanding‑generation gap, especially in reasoning generation and knowledge transfer. Explicit Chain‑of‑Thought (CoT) in the understanding module bridges this gap, and self‑training can internalize CoT for implicit reasoning during generation; query‑based architectures also exhibit latent CoT‑like properties that aid knowledge transfer.

By Yuwei Niu, Weiyang Jin, Jiaqi Liao, Chaoran Feng, Peng Jin, Bin Lin, Zongjian Li, Bin Zhu, Weihao Yu, Li Yuan
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

Mitigating Strong-Modality Collapse in Multimodal Learning via Inverted Asymmetric Fusion

The paper introduces Inverted Asymmetric Fusion (IAF) to address strong-modality collapse in multimodal learning, where dominant modalities are degraded during fusion. IAF preserves the dominant modality by passing it unchanged and letting weaker modalities attend to it, while also strengthening weaker modalities via Modality-Aware Knowledge Distillation. Experiments on MultiHuSE, UR-FUNNY, and MUStARD show that IAF maintains unimodal performance and improves over the best unimodal baseline by up to 8.25%.

By Mary Ogbuka Kenneth, Foaad Khosmood, Abbas Edalat
arXiv AI
Aug 5

Does Forgetting Transfer Across Modalities? A Real-World Benchmark for Cross-Modal Knowledge Unlearning Evaluation

arXiv:2608. 03791v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs), like Large Language Models (LLMs), may memorize sensitive, copyrighted, or harmful knowledge from their pretraining corpora.

By Chunlin Liu, Junnian Chen, Haitong Jiang, Jianyu Zhao, Yingsen Pang, Jingchen Li, Jiabiao He, Youming Lu, Jinhe Bi, Yuntao Du