The paper introduces Redemption Score (RS), a multi‑modal evaluation framework for image captioning that combines three complementary signals: Mutual Information Divergence for global image‑text alignment, DINO‑based perceptual similarity of cycle‑generated images for visual grounding, and LLM text embeddings for contextual similarity to human references. RS fuses these signals to provide a more holistic assessment, achieving a Kendall‑τ of 58.42 on Flickr8k and outperforming most prior methods. The framework demonstrates consistent performance across Conceptual Captions and MS COCO, offering a robust evaluation that captures both visual accuracy and text quality.
By Ashim Dahal, Ankit Ghimire, Saydul Akbar Murad, Nick Rahimi
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
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:2506. 03096v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Contrastive language-image pre-training aligns features of text-image pairs in a common latent space via distinct encoders for each modality.
By Christian Schlarmann, Francesco Croce, Nicolas Flammarion, Matthias Hein
The paper introduces TIC‑Bench, a new benchmark for evaluating multimodal large language models on deeply interleaved text‑image contexts. It covers logical, temporal, and spatial association tasks, totaling 2,280 questions across eight specific types. The authors benchmarked ten state‑of‑the‑art MLLMs, finding a significant performance gap versus human experts and highlighting persistent challenges in integrating evidence across interleaved visual and textual inputs.
By Zihao Wang, Xi Xiang, Yuwen Sun, Yingyu Li, Yabo Zhang, Yihan Zeng, Fan Li, Wangmeng Zuo
arXiv:2609.37287v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Image translation is a fundamental capability of multimodal models for multilingual applications, requiring visual understanding and meaning preserva...
By Bo Lv, Mao Zheng, Zheng Li, Fangxu Liu, Mingrui Sun, Tao Chen
arXiv:2605.02035v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Ambiguity resolution is a key challenge in multimodal machine translation (MMT), where models must genuinely leverage visual input to map an...
By Jingheng Pan, Xintong Wang, Longyue Wang, Liang Ding, Weihua Luo, Chris Biemann
The paper introduces Vision-Free Adaptation (VFA), a method that separates multilingual language enhancement from visual alignment in multimodal large language models. VFA fine‑tunes a base LLM on multilingual text to create a multilingual task vector, which is then merged with the vision‑aligned task vector of an existing MLLM. Experiments on five MLLMs and six multilingual benchmarks show consistent gains while preserving multimodal and text‑only performance, and using less than 2% of text data narrows the performance gap to fully multimodal‑trained models.
By Yixia Li, Yaqing Shi, Zhiwen Ruan, Dongdong Zhang, Lingjie Jiang, Shaohan Huang, Yun Chen, Guanhua Chen, Furu Wei
OmniFusion is an end‑to‑end multilingual multimodal translation system that fuses a pretrained multimodal foundation model (Omni 2.5‑7B) with a translation large language model (SeedX PPO‑7B). By connecting hidden states from multiple layers of the multimodal model to the translation LLM, OmniFusion can translate speech, speech‑and‑image, and text‑and‑image inputs while reducing simultaneous speech‑translation latency by about one second compared to cascaded pipelines. The approach improves overall translation quality by leveraging both audio and visual context.
By Sai Koneru, Matthias Huck, Jan Niehues
VIVAS is a new Vision‑Language Model pre‑training framework that addresses the lack of fine‑grained visual perception in existing VLMs. It introduces a unified token space and a dense‑structural‑semantic vision tokenizer that expands the textual vocabulary with visual tokens, enabling vision‑language unified autoregressive supervision over both visual details and linguistic content. Trained on 12.4 T tokens, VIVAS achieves state‑of‑the‑art results on 7 tasks and 39 multimodal benchmarks.
By Zhehan Kan, Yubo Zhu, Xinghua Jiang, Zhixiang Wei, Shifeng Liu, Wei Tong, Sheng Zhong, Qingmin Liao, Wenming Yang, Xin Li, Yinsong Liu, Deqiang Jiang, Xing Sun
arXiv:2511. 01390v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fine-grained cross-modal alignment aims to establish precise local correspondences between vision and language, forming a cornerstone for visual question answering and related multimodal applications.
By Xinyu Mao, Junsi Li, Haoji Zhang, Yu Liang, Ming Sun
arXiv:2507. 19634v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in large language models have laid the foundation for multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), which unify text, speech, and vision within a single framework.
By Sara Papi, Maike Z\"ufle, Marco Gaido, Beatrice Savoldi, Danni Liu, Ioannis Douros, Luisa Bentivogli, Jan Niehues