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
Aug 25

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 Computation and Language
3d ago

TokenSwap: Benchmarking and Reducing the Modality Gap in Multimodal LLMs

TokenSwap introduces a method to benchmark and reduce the modality gap in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) by interleaving semantically aligned images with text tokens. By transforming text-only benchmarks like MMLU into image‑interleaved versions (TokenSwap‑Bench), the authors reveal a pervasive performance drop—averaging 19.6%—across 42 MLLMs, with reasoning models showing smaller gaps. Training with TokenSwap mitigates this gap while maintaining strong text‑only and vision‑language performance.

By Andong Hua, Colton Bishop, Igor Mordatch, Arian Hosseini, Jindong Gu, Aleksandra Faust, Rebecca Roelofs, Yao Qin
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 Computation and Language
Sep 11

OmniHallu: Unified Hallucination Detection for Cross-Modal Comprehension and Generation in Multimodal Large Language Models

OmniHallu is a unified framework for detecting hallucinations in multimodal large language models across both comprehension and generation tasks involving image, video, and audio modalities. It introduces OmniHallu-Bench, a 10,000-sample benchmark with claim-level human annotations for six cross-modal tasks (I2T, V2T, A2T, T2I, T2V, T2A). The system uses a multi‑agent architecture that decomposes outputs into atomic claims, verifies them with modality‑specific experts, and aggregates evidence through structured reasoning, while a preference‑optimized verifier reduces expert calls by 66% with minimal performance loss.

By Jianjiang Yang, Peihang Li, Shanqing Xu, Mengchen Qian, Lu Zhang, Meng Luo