arXiv AI

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.

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
Aug 28

LLaVAFlow: Preserving Latent Alignment Flow for Parameter-Efficient Multimodal Fine-Tuning

LLaVAFlow is an information‑theoretic distillation framework designed to preserve cross‑modal alignment in Multimodal Large Language Models during visual instruction tuning. It compresses the mutual information between extracted relations and MLLM embeddings to refine alignment flow, and then maximizes mutual information between pretrained and fine‑tuned alignment flows to transfer compact alignment information. Experiments demonstrate that LLaVAFlow effectively maintains alignment flow, improving downstream performance and generalization.

By Muyao Yuan, Muyan Jiao, Jiangyong Ying, Weizhan Zhang, Yuanhong Zhang, Lan Ma, Yuan Gao, Haipeng Du
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

ChronoSteer: Bridging Large Language Model and Time Series Foundation Model via Synthetic Cross-Modal Alignment Dataset

ChronoSteer is a decoupled agentic framework that bridges large language models and time series foundation models by learning cross‑modal alignment from synthetic paired supervision. It converts textual events into revision instructions that steer a frozen time‑series model, discretizes these instructions into a compact codebook to reduce semantic divergence, and then refines the predictions with a two‑stage training strategy. The authors also release a leakage‑controlled multimodal benchmark and report a 25.8% improvement in zero‑shot prediction accuracy over the unimodal backbone.

By Chengsen Wang, Qi Qi, Zhongwen Rao, Lujia Pan, Jingyu Wang
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
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