arXiv AI

AdaKerNet: Neural Kernel Decoding for Task-Adaptive Prediction with Multimodal Large Models

AdaKerNet is a task‑adaptive neural kernel decoder that operates on frozen multimodal representations from large foundation models, without requiring access to the models’ parameters. It learns Lipschitz‑controlled multimodal features, a reference kernel providing a soft structural prior, and a lightweight nonlinear predictor that deforms this structure. Experiments on four multimodal large language models and diverse input modalities show consistent improvements over baseline decoders, achieving up to 41% error reduction in scarce‑label settings.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

Generalized Multimodal Foundation Model

The paper introduces a generalized multimodal foundation model that can handle arbitrary combinations of modalities and prediction tasks. It trains on large-scale synthetic multimodal datasets with diverse causal structures to learn transferable multimodal correlations. Experiments on 18 real-world datasets across 12 modalities and 11 tasks show competitive performance compared to specialized models without task-specific adaptation.

By Huizi Cui, Zongbo Han, Chenggong Ding, Naichuan Xiao, Jialong Yang, Jingdong Chen, Guangyu Wang, Qinghua Hu, Changqing Zhang
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
Sep 18

Lens: Bringing the Right Semantic Perspective into Focus for Training-Free Multimodal Representation Learning

The paper introduces Lens, a training‑free framework that aligns multimodal representations with the semantic perspective required by downstream tasks. Lens uses a task‑specific readout phrase to anchor the perspective and then aggregates token states after the full input, ensuring the extracted representation reflects task‑conditioned evidence integration rather than generic salient content. The method achieves a Precision@1 of 63.9 across 36 MMEB datasets, outperforming the nearest training‑free baseline by 10.2 points.

By Xinran Liu, Shouqian Shi, Yixian Chen, Ruizhi Chen, Xin-Wei Yao, Sheng Zhong
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 Computer Vision
Sep 24

UVU: Improving Multimodal Understanding via Vision-Language Unified Autoregressive Paradigm

UVU is a vision-language unified autoregressive framework that integrates visual supervision directly into the pre-training stage of multimodal large language models. By using continuous visual encoding and a large-scale iterative hierarchical clustering algorithm to build a pixel-level visual codebook, UVU enables lossless representation of visual inputs and autoregressive generation of pixel-level image tokens alongside textual tokens. This approach synergizes pixel-level visual perception with semantic-level visual understanding, allowing models to internalize visual reconstruction capabilities and improve multimodal understanding performance.

By Zhehan Kan, Xinghua Jiang, Yubo Zhu, Yanlin Liu, Xiaochen Yang, Zhixiang Wei, Shifeng Liu, Qingmin Liao, Wenming Yang, Xin Li, Yinsong Liu, Deqiang Jiang, Xing Sun