arXiv AI

SOTAlign: Semi-Supervised Alignment of Unimodal Vision and Language Models via Optimal Transport

arXiv:2602. 23353v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Platonic Representation Hypothesis posits that neural networks trained on different modalities converge toward a shared statistical model of the world.

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 AI
Jun 24

Mind the Heads: Topological Representation Alignment for Multimodal LLMs

arXiv:2606. 23885v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Representation alignment has emerged as an effective approach to improve Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) by regularizing their internal representations toward those of an external vision encoder.

By Davide Caffagni, Alberto Compagnoni, Federico Melis, Sara Sarto, Pier Luigi Dovesi, Mark Granroth-Wilding, Marcella Cornia, Lorenzo Baraldi
arXiv AI
Jul 14

PivotMerge: Bridging Heterogeneous Multimodal Pre-training via Post-Alignment Model Merging

arXiv:2604. 22823v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) rely on multimodal pre-training over diverse data sources, where different datasets often induce complementary cross-modal alignment capabilities.

By Zibo Shao, Baochen Xiong, Xiaoshan Yang, Yaguang Song, Qimeng Zhang, Haifeng Chen, Changsheng Xu
arXiv AI
Aug 28

VFA: Empowering Multilingual MLLMs via Vision-Free Adaptation

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