arXiv AI

Beyond Surface Imitation: Contrastive Modeling for Reasoning Path Alignment in Multimodal In-Context Learning

The paper introduces a multimodal in‑context learning framework that uses contrastive demonstration modeling to align large language models’ responses with the required reasoning paths. By contrasting suboptimal and better responses and incorporating a response‑conditioned retrieval mechanism, the method explicitly guides models beyond surface imitation. Experiments on various multimodal tasks, especially visual question answering, show consistent performance gains.

arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 23

Visual Grounding First, Multimodal In-context Learning Follows

The paper introduces ProCoRe, a contrastive reinforcement learning approach that improves visual grounding in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for in-context learning (ICL). By generating captions for contrastive image pairs, decomposing them into propositions, and optimizing contrastive rewards, ProCoRe enhances alignment with relevant visual evidence without requiring ICL-formatted training data. The method achieves significant gains in multimodal ICL classification accuracy and captioning ROUGE-L over the Qwen-VL-3-8B baseline and outperforms state‑of‑the‑art ICL‑data‑dependent methods across multiple benchmarks. Additionally, the authors present PICL, a personalized multimodal ICL captioning benchmark designed to test genuine understanding of visual demonstrations.

By Minhyuk Seo, Minjae Lee, Chaeeun Lee, Wei Lin, Muhammad Jehanzeb Mirza, Tinne Tuytelaars, Jonghyun Choi
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 4

Hyper-ICL: Attention Calibration with Hyperbolic Anchor Distillation for Multimodal In-Context Learning

arXiv:2606. 04434v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal In-Context Learning (ICL) has emerged as a practical inference paradigm for Multimodal Large Language Models, where a small set of interleaved image-text In-Context Demonstrations (ICDs) conditions the model to solve new tasks.

By Niloufar Alipour Talemi, Hossein Kashiani, Fatemeh Afghah
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 22

Cognitive Action Reasoning for Proactive Robots from Human-Centered Multimodal Observations

The paper introduces ProAction, a multimodal dataset of 10,000 samples comprising visual, audio, and text inputs across 12 daily-life scenarios, designed to support the Proactive Robot Action Reasoning (ProRobo) problem. It presents a two-stage human-in-the-loop annotation pipeline that incorporates appraisal and Theory-of-Mind considerations to generate cognitively grounded high-level action labels. The authors benchmark multimodal large language models and propose MMC2Act, showing that training on ProAction significantly improves proactive action reasoning compared to general-purpose models.

By Zhihao Gu, Kechao Zhu, Yuanfeng Wu, Mohan Liu, Ankit Kumar Shaw, ChenDong Hong, Xuanyu Chen, Dengchen Mei, Xu Tianyi, Lin Wang
arXiv AI
Sep 28

Can Linguistic Reasoning Vectors Enhance Multimodal Reasoning Ability?

The paper introduces LIFT, a lightweight vector‑intervention technique that transfers reasoning capability from a base large language model (LLM) to a vision‑language model (VLM) without retraining the VLM backbone. LIFT defines Reasoning Vectors as differences in hidden states between a reasoning path with an explicit trace and a solver path without it, and injects these vectors into the VLM’s language‑side activations. Experiments on two VLMs across six reasoning benchmarks show that vectors derived from the base LLM consistently outperform those derived from the aligned VLM, indicating that the base LLM is a more effective source for recovering degraded reasoning. "whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that a simple, frozen‑backbone intervention can partially restore reasoning abilities in multimodal models, highlighting the value of leveraging the original language model’s reasoning power."

By Ziyi Wang, Li Li, Aolin Zhou, Yankun Shen, Chonghan Liu, Shuxia Lin, Xu Yang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 25

SyncLoop: A Multimodal Dual-Loop Framework for Self-Improving Mathematical Reasoning

arXiv:2507. 16518v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown impressive reasoning capabilities.

By Xiuwei Chen, Wentao Hu, Hanhui Li, Yongxin Wang Jun Zhou, Zisheng Chen, Meng Cao, Yihan Zeng, Kui Zhang, Yu-Jie Yuan, Jianhua Han, Hang Xu, Xiaodan Liang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 15

TwinICL: Diagnosing Multimodal In-Context Learning through Paired Counterfactuals

TwinICL is a procedurally generated benchmark that pairs matched text and image versions of tasks to enable controlled comparison of in‑context learning (ICL) across modalities. Experiments on six open‑weight models and 38 tasks show that multimodal ICL consistently underperforms text‑only ICL, with varying gaps by task family. Interventions targeting visual access, task framing, and reasoning can recover strong multimodal performance on a diagnostic subset, yet a modality gap remains even when explicit task instructions are provided, highlighting the dual role of demonstrations as context and evidence.

By Zihan Xue, Po-Yi Lu, Serhii Honcharenko, Zih-Ching Chen, Hsuan-Tien Lin, Nanyun Peng, I-Hung Hsu, Kuan-Hao Huang
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

MMEmb-R1: Reasoning-Enhanced Multimodal Embedding with Pair-Aware Selection and Adaptive Control

MMEmb-R1 is a multimodal embedding framework that enhances reasoning by treating it as a latent variable and selecting beneficial reasoning paths through pair-aware selection and counterfactual intervention. It uses reinforcement learning to invoke reasoning only when necessary, reducing unnecessary computation and latency. On the MMEB-V2 benchmark, MMEmb-R1 achieves a state‑of‑the‑art score of 71.2 with just 4 B parameters.

By Yuchi Wang, Dingkang Yang, Haiyang Yu, Weikang Bian, Jiefeng Long, Xiao Liang, Chao Feng, Hongsheng Li