arXiv AI

ES-Merging: Biological MLLM Merging via Embedding Space Signals

arXiv:2603. 14405v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Biological multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have emerged as powerful foundation models for scientific discovery.

arXiv AI
Jul 24

Monkey King Bang: A Unified Scientific Multimodal Foundation Model

arXiv:2607. 20557v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scientific discovery is increasingly shifting from isolated disciplines to multi-domain reasoning, and AI for science faces a similar transition.

By Hesen Chen, Xinyu Su, Xiaomeng Yang, Yuetan Lin, Zixiong Yang, Junyi An, Fenglei Cao, Yifeng Jiao, Yunqi Zhang, Yuan Cheng, Zhiyu Tan, Hao Li, Libo Wu, Yuan Qi
arXiv AI
Aug 26

MolEmb: Multimodal Large Language Models Can Be Strong Molecular Embedding Models

MolEmb is a lightweight framework that adapts multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to serve as general molecular embedding models. By aligning molecular profiles with textual descriptions in a shared embedding space using a bidirectional contrastive objective, MolEmb produces embeddings conditioned on both a molecular profile and a natural‑language semantic context. The model performs competitively on molecular property prediction and enables cross‑modal molecule‑text retrieval, while the newly introduced MolCAR benchmark demonstrates that context‑aware molecular embedding is largely a data property of the supervision.

By Xinjian Zhao, Xiangru Jian, Yaoyao Xu, Xiaozhuang Song, Wei Pang, Lei Bai, Tianshu Yu
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
Sep 10

MoEMB: Scaling Universal Multimodal Embeddings with Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Models

MoEMB introduces a mixture‑of‑experts (MoE) approach to scale universal multimodal embeddings (UME) without increasing the size of the output vector or relying on autoregressive decoding. By expanding encoder capacity along the expert axis, MoEMB achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on MMEB‑V2 and MRMR benchmarks with only 3 B active parameters, outperforming TTE‑based methods that use more than four times as many active parameters and require significantly more compute. The paper also presents the first comprehensive study of adaptive computation for MoE‑based embeddings, exploring training‑time and inference‑time strategies to further improve efficiency for large‑scale retrieval and recommendation systems.

By Xuanming Cui, Shlok Kumar Mishra, Wentao Bao, Aashu Singh, Zihao Wang, Xiangjun Fan, Jun Xiao, Ser-Nam Lim, Jianpeng Cheng
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 17

Correct When Paired, Wrong When Split: Decoupling and Editing Modality-Specific Neurons in MLLMs

arXiv:2606. 17057v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Although Knowledge Editing provides an efficient mechanism for updating the knowledge of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), we find that current paradigms still suffer from an important yet remain underexplored issue : editing decoupling failure, where entity-related knowledge can be updated when the model is triggered by multimodal inputs (text--image query pairs), however, it often reverts to outdated pre-edit facts when the paired inputs are split into unimodal ones.

By Tingchao Fu, Wenkai Wang, Fanxiao Li, Huadong Zhang, Jinhong Zhang, Dayang Li, Yunyun Dong, Renyang Liu, Wei Zhou
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 10

When to Align, When to Predict: A Phase Diagram for Multimodal Learning

arXiv:2606. 11190v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cross-modal alignment (CA) and cross-modal prediction (CP) are the dominant paradigms for multimodal representation learning, yet there is no systematic understanding of when each succeeds, when each fails, and when cross-modal training helps at all -- a gap that leaves practitioners, especially in scientific domains like biomedicine or astrophysics, with heterogeneous instruments and multiple levels of organization and measurement, unable to diagnose why standard methods underperform the best single modality.

By Ilay Kamai, Hugues Van Assel, Aviv Regev, Hagai B. Perets, Randall Balestriero
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 23

UnDA: Unpaired Domain Alignment for Cross-Modal Knowledge Transfer in Medical Imaging

Multimodal based approaches often outperform single modality approaches in downstream tasks as the different modalities provide complementary information, yet acquiring paired clinical data remains a significant challenge in real world scenarios. While cross-modal knowledge distillation addresses this, existing methods often struggle with large modality gaps and the propagation of noise from uncertain source-domain predictions.