The paper presents a method for linking written English keywords to spoken Hindi utterances using only visual grounding. By extracting English tags from images with captioning systems and aligning Hindi speech segments via self‑supervised features, the authors build an alignment‑based model that outperforms previous attention‑based neural approaches. The study also shows that adding negative examples improves alignment quality, demonstrating that cross‑lingual word‑to‑speech mappings can be learned without transcriptions or explicit training.
arXiv:2606.29997v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Automatic evaluation of image and video captioning is essential for benchmarking multimodal systems, although standard evaluation metrics show limi...
By Shuitsu Koyama, Kazuki Matsuda, Yuiga Wada, Shinnosuke Hirano, Daichi Yashima, Komei Sugiura
arXiv:2606. 08847v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite the success of image generation from text descriptions, it still faces challenges that are difficult to overcome in domains such as natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV).
By Ahmed Abdelmoneim Mazrou, Haidy Maher El-Amir, Ali Hamdi
BanglaVerse is a new benchmark that evaluates multilingual vision‑language models on Bengali culture, covering nine visual domains and expanding to four languages and five Bangla dialects for a total of about 32,200 artifacts. It includes visual question answering and captioning tasks built from 1,152 manually curated images. Experiments show that models perform worse on dialectal variants and that missing cultural knowledge, rather than visual grounding, is the main bottleneck.
By Nurul Labib Sayeedi, Md. Faiyaz Abdullah Sayeedi, Shubhashis Roy Dipta, Mahbub E Sobhani, Rubaya Tabassum, Ariful Ekraj Hridoy, Mehraj Mahmood, Md. Tarek Hasan, Swakkhar Shatabda
Automatic evaluation of image and video captioning is essential for benchmarking multimodal systems, although standard evaluation metrics show limited alignment with human judgments. Recent approaches using large language models (LLMs), commonly referred to as LLM-as-a-Judge, have improved alignment with human judgments but still suffer from a mismatch between large-vocabulary language modeling and evaluation over a small label set.
The paper introduces Temporally-Grounded Language Generation (TGLG), a benchmark that tests vision‑language models on their ability to produce semantically accurate and temporally precise utterances in real‑time settings. It identifies perceptual updating and contingency awareness as key capabilities, curates datasets from sports broadcasting and egocentric interactions, and proposes the TRACE metric to jointly evaluate semantic similarity and temporal alignment. The authors also present VLM‑TSI, a model that interleaves visual and linguistic tokens in a time‑synchronized manner, achieving better performance than a strong baseline yet still showing modest overall results, underscoring the challenge of real‑time VLMs.
By Keunwoo Peter Yu, Joyce Chai
arXiv:2608. 07886v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language grounding connects language to visual content, yet most existing formulations reduce grounding to a unidirectional localization problem: given a prespecified text phrase or category name, identify the corresponding image region.
By Jieyu Zhang, Ziqi Gao, Luke Zettlemoyer, Ranjay Krishna
arXiv:2606. 17950v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual information helps resolve ambiguity in coreference resolution, leading to notable performance gains.
By Jinghan Wu, Jing Li, Ivor W. Tsang, Xuetao Zhang
arXiv:2509.18369v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Adapting vision-language models in low-resource languages remains challenging, as they often produce fluent text about the wrong objects. This stem...
By Riad Ahmed Anonto, Sardar Md. Saffat Zabin, M. Saifur Rahman
The paper introduces Redemption Score (RS), a multi‑modal evaluation framework for image captioning that combines three complementary signals: Mutual Information Divergence for global image‑text alignment, DINO‑based perceptual similarity of cycle‑generated images for visual grounding, and LLM text embeddings for contextual similarity to human references. RS fuses these signals to provide a more holistic assessment, achieving a Kendall‑τ of 58.42 on Flickr8k and outperforming most prior methods. The framework demonstrates consistent performance across Conceptual Captions and MS COCO, offering a robust evaluation that captures both visual accuracy and text quality.
By Ashim Dahal, Ankit Ghimire, Saydul Akbar Murad, Nick Rahimi
The paper investigates using raw, unlabeled video as a mid‑training phase for a pretrained language model. By encoding video frames into visual tokens and training the model to predict the next token, the authors mid‑train Qwen3‑1.7B on YT‑Temporal‑1B clips. The resulting model outperforms a non‑mid‑trained counterpart by 2.9 points on video benchmarks and 5.1 points on image benchmarks, while maintaining comparable text performance.
By Jaedong Hwang, Xiaoqian Shen, Ernie Chang, Changsheng Zhao, Chong Zhou, Saksham Suri, Qi Qian, Zechun Liu, Lemeng Wu, Qinsi Wang, Raghuraman Krishnamoorthi, Wei Wen
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