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:2511. 01390v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fine-grained cross-modal alignment aims to establish precise local correspondences between vision and language, forming a cornerstone for visual question answering and related multimodal applications.
By Xinyu Mao, Junsi Li, Haoji Zhang, Yu Liang, Ming Sun
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: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
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
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:2508. 12466v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Traditional multimodal learning approaches rely on alignment pre-training to bridge vision and language modalities, typically by projecting visual features into discrete text token spaces using large-scale image--text data.
By Xuhui Zhan, Tyler Derr
arXiv:2511. 12449v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have significantly advanced e-commerce product understanding.
By Zhanheng Nie, Chenghan Fu, Daoze Zhang, Junxian Wu, Wanxian Guan, Pengjie Wang, Jian Xu, Bo Zheng
arXiv:2506. 08774v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Different machine learning models can represent the same underlying concept in different ways.
By Fan Xu, Luis A. Leiva
arXiv:2606. 01207v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The choice between cross-attention and concatenation for multimodal fusion remains governed by practitioner intuition rather than principled understanding.
By Zhiqiang Zhou, Xuezhen Xie
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
arXiv:2507. 19634v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in large language models have laid the foundation for multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), which unify text, speech, and vision within a single framework.
By Sara Papi, Maike Z\"ufle, Marco Gaido, Beatrice Savoldi, Danni Liu, Ioannis Douros, Luisa Bentivogli, Jan Niehues