arXiv AI

Is Multimodal Speculative Decoding Ready for Diffusion-Based Parallel Drafting? A Survey and Empirical Diagnosis

The paper surveys multimodal speculative decoding, examining whether diffusion-based block‑parallel generative drafting—successful in text‑only LLMs—can be applied to Vision‑Language, Video‑Language, Audio, and Vision‑Language‑Action models. It introduces a taxonomy separating drafter‑side parallelism from other design choices, and presents an empirical comparison across benchmarks such as OCR, VQA, visual reasoning, and image captioning. The study highlights current limitations, outlines open challenges, and suggests future research directions for multimodal speculative decoding.

arXiv Computer Vision
5d ago

FOVEA: Focused On-Demand Visual Evidence Adaptation for Cache-Friendly Multimodal Speculative Decoding

FOVEA introduces a cache‑friendly, on‑demand visual evidence adaptation for multimodal speculative decoding, enabling a lightweight draft model to dynamically retrieve a bounded subset of visual memory based on a cumulative‑mass rule. The retrieved visual readout is fused with the draft hidden state via a lightweight gated residual correction, avoiding the insertion of visual tokens into the autoregressive context. Experiments on various vision‑language backbones and benchmarks show that FOVEA improves draft acceptance and speeds up end‑to‑end decoding by up to 2.13× compared to traditional autoregressive decoding.

By Hengjie Zhu, Dayan Wu, Zihao Zhang, Xinze Liu, Jingxuan Yu, Peng Fu, Zheng Lin, Weiping Wang, Ding Wang
arXiv AI
Jun 9

IMUG-Bench: Benchmarking Unified Multimodal Models on Interleaved Understanding and Generation

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 AI
Aug 11

LF${}^{2}$AR: Accounting for Layerwise Dynamics to Improve Multimodal Adaptation of Language Models

arXiv:2503. 06211v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Text-pretrained language models (LMs) encode rich world knowledge, but adapting them to process and generate perceptual modalities such as audio and images while effectively leveraging that knowledge remains challenging.

By Santiago Cuervo, Adel Moumen, Yanis Labrak, Sameer Khurana, Antoine Laurent, Mickael Rouvier, Phil Woodland, Ricard Marxer
arXiv AI
Jun 16

UniT: Unified Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Test-time Scaling

arXiv:2602. 12279v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unified models can handle both multimodal understanding and generation within a single architecture, yet they typically operate in a single pass without iteratively refining their outputs.

By Leon Liangyu Chen, Haoyu Ma, Zhipeng Fan, Ziqi Huang, Animesh Sinha, Xiaoliang Dai, Jialiang Wang, Zecheng He, Jianwei Yang, Chunyuan Li, Junzhe Sun, Chu Wang, Serena Yeung-Levy, Felix Juefei-Xu
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