The paper introduces TIC‑Bench, a new benchmark for evaluating multimodal large language models on deeply interleaved text‑image contexts. It covers logical, temporal, and spatial association tasks, totaling 2,280 questions across eight specific types. The authors benchmarked ten state‑of‑the‑art MLLMs, finding a significant performance gap versus human experts and highlighting persistent challenges in integrating evidence across interleaved visual and textual inputs.
By Zihao Wang, Xi Xiang, Yuwen Sun, Yingyu Li, Yabo Zhang, Yihan Zeng, Fan Li, Wangmeng Zuo
The study examines how Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) integrate visual evidence into language‑based decisions by applying layer‑wise causal interventions on video‑text attention pathways in a video‑based generative multiple‑choice setting. Findings reveal that visual information is primarily incorporated while processing candidate answer options, with nouns serving as key semantic anchors and verbs becoming important during temporal reasoning. The research also uncovers a distinct pattern in temporal reasoning, indicating that VLMs struggle to reconstruct sequential information across video frames, possibly due to linguistic biases in temporal expressions.
By Davide Testa, Hugh Mee Wong, Alessandro Lenci, Bernardo Magnini, Albert Gatt
Current instruction-based image retrieval systems are powerful but limited to single-turn interactions, failing to capture the iterative nature of complex, real-world visual searches. To overcome this limitation, we introduce Contextual Composed Image Retrieval (CoCo-IR), a novel task that enables users to progressively refine search results through interactions.
arXiv:2609.18323v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Recent Omni-Modal Generative Models (Omni-Models) have advanced content generation toward unified modeling of text, images, video, and audio. MiniMax-H...
By Haoyu Zhao, Zihao Zhao, Tianyu Deng, Ziqin Xu, Zihao Zhang, Xudong Wang, Jinxiang Guo, Chen Gao, Ziyi Ye, Yeying Jin, Jiaxi Gu, Zuxuan Wu, Shuicheng Yan
arXiv:2604. 01280v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering (KB-VQA) requires Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to identify and combine fine-grained visual cues with retrieved textual evidence.
By Marco Morini, Sara Sarto, Marcella Cornia, Lorenzo Baraldi, Rita Cucchiara
The paper investigates how multimodal large language models (MLLMs) handle conflicting evidence presented in text, image, or both forms. Across 13 MLLMs and two datasets, the authors find that models are not robust to knowledge conflict: they tend to accept contradictory image evidence more readily than contradictory text, and when both modalities conflict the preference is arbitrary, depending on input order, model, and dataset. The instability degrades multimodal retrieval-augmented generation and can be exploited by adversarial attacks, while simple mitigation techniques such as prompting, steering, and direct preference optimization largely fail, with supervised fine‑tuning offering only moderate improvement.
By Jungyeon Lee, Yejin Yoon, Taeuk Kim
arXiv:2606. 09585v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) improves the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) and has been extended to Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs).
By Yutong Bian, Dongjie Cheng, Heming Xia, Yongqi Li, Wenjie Li
arXiv:2606. 19965v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly expected to act on visual information, yet the same scene may require different actions under different task contexts.
By Yihao Wang, Zijian He, Jie Ren, Keze Wang
arXiv:2608. 11907v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As Large Vision-Language Models increasingly aim to integrate visual generation and understanding within a single parameter space, evaluating such structural unification in a cohesive manner remains a critical challenge.
By Hao Zhang, Jiaxin Qi, Zhijiang Tang, Jianqiang Huang
Video-HolmesV2 is a new benchmark that tests multimodal large language models on their ability to reason with spatio‑temporal audio‑visual evidence in long videos. It requires models to justify answers with precise evidence, uses a multi‑model cross‑verification pipeline and a spatio‑temporal evidence‑aware metric, and introduces an audio‑text guided token compression framework to reduce long‑context noise. In evaluations, even strong proprietary models score below 60% while the proposed approach outperforms comparable open‑source omni‑models.
By Zhaoyang Wei, Zipeng Wang, Yushe Cao, Chenhui Qiang, Shuaibing Cheng, Xuesong Yang, Sen Nie, Bowen Jiang, Wenchao Ding, Yanchao Hao, Zheng Wei, Xuehui Yu, Zhenjun Han
arXiv:2608. 11907v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As Large Vision-Language Models increasingly aim to integrate visual generation and understanding within a single parameter space, evaluating such structural unification in a cohesive manner remains a critical challenge.
By Hao Zhang, Jiaxin Qi, Zhijiang Tang, Jianqiang Huang
Multimodal Large Language Models have demonstrated impressive video understanding, yet their ability to reason over long-form narratives is often masked by visual-centric evaluations and inefficient c...