arXiv Machine Learning

MARS: Harmonizing Multimodal Convergence via Adaptive Rank Search

arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 19

MLLM Frame Subset Ensembling for Audio-Visual Video QA and MLLM-based Reranking for Ad-hoc Video Search in TRECVID 2025

The paper describes the CERTH-ITI team’s approach to the TRECVID 2025 Ad-hoc Video Search (AVS) and Video Question Answering (VQA) tracks. For AVS, a two-stage framework uses foundation vision‑language models for initial retrieval and a Multimodal‑LLM for reranking, improving contextual matching without training. In VQA, an audio‑visual MLLM is fine‑tuned and enhanced with inference‑time scaling; answer generation employs majority voting over responses from random frame subsets, while multiple‑choice responses use mean‑pooling logits, yielding top performance on VQA metrics.

By Andreas Goulas, Damianos Galanopoulos, Ioannis Patras, Vasileios Mezaris
arXiv Computation and Language
2d ago

Modality-Aware Expert Pruning for MoE-Based Multimodal Large Language Models

The paper introduces Modality-Aware Expert Pruning (MAEP), a training‑free method that decomposes expert importance by modality in a single forward pass for Mixture‑of‑Experts multimodal large language models. MAEP uses a Delta‑H Output metric to measure the impact of removing an expert and leverages low‑attention vision tokens as a stable pruning signal, while preserving text‑side importance. Experiments on three MoE‑based MLLMs show that MAEP reduces the BF16 expert weight footprint by about 27 GB (≈47% of total memory), enabling a 58 GB model to fit on a single 40 GB GPU and outperforming modality‑agnostic baselines on most multimodal benchmarks.

By Donggeun Kim
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 15

Query-Conditioned Spherical Centroid Aggregation for Multimodal Retrieval

The paper introduces SCALAR, a query‑conditioned spherical centroid aggregator that assigns relevance‑based weights to each available modality before computing a spherical centroid. SCALAR supports arbitrary modality subsets, is trained with rank‑8 LoRA adapters on masked views, and achieves positive aggregation gains on four of five benchmarks, outperforming prior symmetric aggregators. With only 4.8 million trainable parameters, SCALAR attains the highest text‑to‑video R@1 on three benchmarks and surpasses the released GRAM checkpoint under test‑time modality dropout by 3.2 to 10.9 R@1.

By Ambuj Mehrish, Anindya Nag, Sebastiano Vascon