arXiv Computation and Language

Omnilingual-MsASR: Benchmarking Multimodal, Multilingual, Long-Form Multi-Speaker ASR of Omni Large Language Models

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

OmniFusion: Simultaneous Multilingual Multimodal Translations via Modular Fusion

OmniFusion is an end‑to‑end multilingual multimodal translation system that fuses a pretrained multimodal foundation model (Omni 2.5‑7B) with a translation large language model (SeedX PPO‑7B). By connecting hidden states from multiple layers of the multimodal model to the translation LLM, OmniFusion can translate speech, speech‑and‑image, and text‑and‑image inputs while reducing simultaneous speech‑translation latency by about one second compared to cascaded pipelines. The approach improves overall translation quality by leveraging both audio and visual context.

By Sai Koneru, Matthias Huck, Jan Niehues
arXiv AI
Oct 2

SONIC-O1: A Real-World Benchmark for Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models on Audio-Video Understanding

SONIC‑O1 is a new benchmark designed to evaluate multimodal large language models on audio‑video understanding. It contains 60 hours of 231 clips across 13 real‑world conversational domains, with 4,958 human‑verified annotations and demographic metadata. The benchmark tests open‑ended summarization, multiple‑choice question answering, and temporally grounded reasoning, revealing performance gaps between model families and across demographic groups.

By Ahmed Y. Radwan, Christos Emmanouilidis, Hina Tabassum, Deval Pandya, Shaina Raza
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 7

Training-Free Speech-Centric Omni Understanding with Frozen VLMs

The paper introduces Training-Free Omni (TFO), a plug‑and‑play framework that transforms a frozen vision‑language model (VLM) into a speech‑centric omni model without modifying its architecture or requiring multimodal re‑alignment. TFO leverages Whisper to generate confidence‑filtered, timestamped transcripts and routes them through the VLM’s existing language interface, leaving the visual pathway untouched. Evaluations on 56 benchmarks across 21 languages show that TFO matches or surpasses native omni models on audio‑visual tasks, improves audio‑only performance, and preserves strong visual and reasoning capabilities.

By Ankan Deria, Hanoona Rasheed, Xilin He, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Salman Khan
arXiv AI
Aug 26

EXAM$^2$: $\underline{Ex}tending$ $\underline{A}udio$ $Understanding$ $in$ $\underline{M}ultilingual$ $and$ $\underline{M}ultimodal$ $Analysis$

EXAM$^2$ is a new benchmark for audio understanding that covers six languages and multiple modalities—speech, sound, music, mixed-audio, and visual images—providing 5,667 multiple-choice questions, 22,614 image instances, and 135,684 multilingual translations. It evaluates large audio language models (LALMs) and multimodal large language models (LLMs), revealing significant gaps in multilingual and cross‑modal performance. The authors also introduce Gemma3n-EXAM$^2$, a lightweight fusion model that improves multilingual results by up to 12.4% and multimodal results by 21.7% over a strong baseline.

By Jiawen Wang, Xiaoxue Gao, Zi Haur Pang, Nancy F. Chen
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 14

Empowering Long-form Omni-modal Understanding with Robust Audio Perception

arXiv:2607. 10299v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in large-scale multimodal models have drivenremarkable progress in vision-language tasks; however, comprehensiveomni-modal understanding remains under-explored, largely due to thescarcity of datasets with rich, explicitly aligned auditory cues.

By Kaiying Yan, Luoyi Sun, Xiao Zhou, Weidi Xie