The paper introduces Training-Free Omni (TFO), a plug‑and‑play framework that transforms a frozen vision‑language model (VLM) into a speech‑centric omni model without modifying its architecture or requiring multimodal re‑alignment. TFO leverages Whisper to generate confidence‑filtered, timestamped transcripts and routes them through the VLM’s existing language interface, leaving the visual pathway untouched. Evaluations on 56 benchmarks across 21 languages show that TFO matches or surpasses native omni models on audio‑visual tasks, improves audio‑only performance, and preserves strong visual and reasoning capabilities.
By Ankan Deria, Hanoona Rasheed, Xilin He, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Salman Khan
arXiv:2606. 07643v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in Omni-Multimodal Large Language Models (Omni-MLLMs) have enabled strong integration of vision, audio, and language.
By Yaoting Wang, Ziyi Zhang, Wenming Tu, Shaoxuan Xu, Wenjie Du, Cheng Liang, Weijun Wang, Yuanchao Li, Guangyao Li, Hao Fei, Yuanchun Li, Henghui Ding, Yunxin Liu
arXiv:2605.07593v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Real-world audio-visual understanding requires chaining evidence that is sparse, temporally dispersed, and split across the visual and auditory str...
By Hengyi Feng, Hao Liang, Mingrui Chen, Bohan Zeng, Meiyi Qiang, Zhengyang Zhao, Zimo Meng, Zeang Sheng, Wentao Zhang
SONIC‑O1 is a new benchmark designed to evaluate multimodal large language models on audio‑video understanding. It contains 60 hours of 231 clips across 13 real‑world conversational domains, with 4,958 human‑verified annotations and demographic metadata. The benchmark tests open‑ended summarization, multiple‑choice question answering, and temporally grounded reasoning, revealing performance gaps between model families and across demographic groups.
By Ahmed Y. Radwan, Christos Emmanouilidis, Hina Tabassum, Deval Pandya, Shaina Raza
AVTrace is a diagnostic suite designed to evaluate audio‑visual temporal reasoning in omni models. It covers tasks such as onset and span grounding, synchronization, next‑step prediction, cross‑modal localization, chain parsing, and event‑conditioned comprehension, providing 34,114 training examples and balanced development and test splits. Five open omni models were tested, all scoring below the majority‑label baseline on synchronization verification and showing low performance on chain parsing and event‑conditioned tasks, while parameter‑efficient temporal post‑training improved some metrics.
By Longyin Zhang, Parth Sakhare Mahendra, Chengwei Wei, Ning Zhang, Lim Ming Chong, Sirui He, Ai Ti Aw
Long audio-video reasoning is difficult for omnimodal LLMs because the decisive evidence is often sparse, cross-modal, and too expensive to preserve with uniformly high-fidelity inputs. We introduce OmniReasoner, a tool-use post-training framework for Thinking with Long Audio-Video: omni-modal LLMs learn, via supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, to decide whether and where to call a zoom-in tool before answering.
Omnilingual-MsASR is a new benchmark designed to evaluate omni‑modal large language models on long‑form, multi‑speaker automatic speech recognition across six languages, with recordings up to 30 minutes and up to 20 speakers. The benchmark provides parallel audio and video inputs to test cross‑modal consistency and the models’ ability to use complementary cues from both modalities. Evaluations of leading omni‑modal LLMs show significant performance gaps, with many models achieving word error rates above 100%, underscoring challenges in temporal localization, speaker disambiguation, and cross‑modal synergy.
By Yuan Ge, Pei Zhang, Xize Cheng, Lingzhou Mu, Mingyang Wang, Jin Xu, Baosong Yang, Shengxiang Gao, Jingbo Zhu, Zhengtao Yu, Tong Xiao
The paper introduces Cue2Narrate, a two‑stage pipeline that jointly predicts what visual events to narrate and when to insert the narration in long, untrimmed movie clips. It uses a dual‑head audio‑visual localizer to identify visual cue and narration windows, followed by a LoRA‑adapted vision‑language model that generates concise audio descriptions, trained with a Description Ranking Loss. The authors also present the LongLSMDC benchmark, comprising up to 8‑minute clips, and show that Cue2Narrate outperforms video‑only and audio‑only baselines by 5–12 points in average mAP and improves AD generation over fine‑tuned base VLMs.
By Akshita Gupta, Aditya Arora, Federico Tombari, Marcus Rohrbach, Anna Rohrbach
arXiv:2607. 10299v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in large-scale multimodal models have drivenremarkable progress in vision-language tasks; however, comprehensiveomni-modal understanding remains under-explored, largely due to thescarcity of datasets with rich, explicitly aligned auditory cues.
By Kaiying Yan, Luoyi Sun, Xiao Zhou, Weidi Xie
LEAP is a framework for long audio‑video question answering that avoids encoding entire recordings by dividing them into fixed‑duration blocks. It performs a lightweight localization pass on each block to score short candidate windows, then pools the highest‑ranked windows for a single bounded answer pass, keeping the answer input and peak context independent of recording length. The method trains both a localization LoRA and an answer LoRA, supports causal streaming queries, and achieves significant performance gains over baseline models on multiple AVQA benchmarks.
By Juyi Lin, Zhiqiang Lao, Jiali Cui, Lin Zhao, Pu Zhao, Dichang Zhang, Arman Akbari, Yu Qi, Xinru Jiang, Yanzhi Wang, Heather Yu, Liang Peng
Audio Description (AD) provides spoken narration of visual events during dialogue gaps, making movies accessible to visually impaired audiences. The problem requires determining both what (which visua...
OmniTrace is a framework that attributes each sentence generated by an omni‑modal language model to specific source units—text chunks, images, or audio/video segments—by interpreting late‑layer attention as a mass distribution over these units, without requiring additional forward passes or per‑modality tuning. The method demonstrates that a single generation pass can recover 77–96 % of the effect of traditional leave‑one‑out attribution, which would otherwise need up to 41 extra passes. OmniTrace’s source selections are causally important for responses and align closely with human‑marked evidence, achieving higher AUROC scores than existing baselines on both document and video tasks.
By Qianqi Yan, Yichen Guo, Ching-Chen Kuo, Shan Jiang, Hang Yin, Yang Zhao, Xin Eric Wang