The paper introduces MASA, a method for Wild Test-Time Adaptation that uses a frozen multimodal large language model to provide structured semantic anchors, thereby avoiding the self-referential loop common in existing WTTA techniques. MASA selects a small, diverse set of reliability-ranked anchors, encodes their descriptions, propagates them to nearby test samples, and stores this visual‑semantic information in an online prototype memory. The stored descriptors enable lightweight adaptation of normalization parameters, and MASA is evaluated on the WTTA ImageNet‑C benchmark with ResNet and ViT backbones under limited‑batch, mixed‑domain, and imbalanced‑label‑shift scenarios.
By Zhenbin Wang, Lei Zhang, Lituan Wang, Yan Wang, Zhao Zhang, Wei Huang
The paper introduces SubTTA, a test-time adaptation method for vision‑language models that aligns the semantic subspaces of visual and textual modalities to improve zero‑shot predictions. It addresses two issues: the modality gap caused by distribution shifts and visual nuisance that masks task‑specific semantics. By minimizing chordal distance between principal subspaces and projecting visual features onto a task‑specific textual subspace, SubTTA refines decision boundaries and achieves an average 2.24% improvement over existing TTA methods.
By Zhichen Zeng, Wenxuan Bao, Xiao Lin, Ruizhong Qiu, Tianxin Wei, Xuying Ning, Yuchen Yan, Chen Luo, Monica Xiao Cheng, Jingrui He, Hanghang Tong
arXiv:2605. 18160v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In recent years, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, primarily attributed to effective paradigms for integrating visual and textual information.
By Xinpeng Dong, Min Zhang, Kairong Han, Xu Tan, Fei Wu, Kun Kuang
arXiv:2608. 18339v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot capabilities yet remain sensitive to real-world distribution shifts during inference.
By Qi Yu, Zhichen Zeng, Katherine Tieu, Xiyuan Yang, Ruizhong Qiu, Yuchen Yan, Lihui Liu, Yanjun Zhao, Lingjie Chen, Jingrui He, Hanghang Tong
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
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
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
MinCU is a new benchmark for grounded minimal‑change understanding that presents pairs of near‑identical images differing by a single atomic variation in object category, attribute, count, or spatial position. Models are evaluated on their ability to describe the change, localize the changed region, and identify the changed entity. The authors also introduce SG‑ISA, a structured autoregressive method that decomposes the task into a Think‑Locate‑Describe sequence, showing that fine‑tuning with SG‑ISA improves both grounding accuracy and description quality while reducing reasoning‑token overhead.
By Chaoqian Mu, Wenhao Wu, Zichen Liang, Jiaxu Li, Lijun Wang, Yifan Wang, Huchuan Lu
PRISM is a training‑free framework that efficiently selects visual instruction data for multimodal large language models by addressing the anisotropy in visual feature distributions, which causes a Global Semantic Drift. By implicitly re‑centering visual semantics, PRISM removes the influence of global background features, cutting data‑selection and model‑tuning time to 30% of conventional pipelines while improving performance across eight multimodal and three language benchmarks, achieving a 101.7% relative gain over baseline models.
By Jinhe Bi, Aniri, Zengjie Jin, Yifan Wang, Danqi Yan, Wenke Huang, Xiaowen Ma, Sikuan Yan, Artur Hecker, Mang Ye, Xun Xiao, Hinrich Schuetze, Volker Tresp, Yunpu Ma
arXiv:2503. 06211v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Text-pretrained language models (LMs) encode rich world knowledge, but adapting them to process and generate perceptual modalities such as audio and images while effectively leveraging that knowledge remains challenging.
By Santiago Cuervo, Adel Moumen, Yanis Labrak, Sameer Khurana, Antoine Laurent, Mickael Rouvier, Phil Woodland, Ricard Marxer
arXiv:2607. 08839v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are typically designed under the assumption that all modalities available during training will also be accessible at inference.
By Dominick Reilly, Qiyu Wu, Hiromi Wakaki, Srijan Das, Yuki Mistufuji
arXiv:2606. 12809v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are trained on massive multimodal data, making data unlearning increasingly important as data owners may request the removal of specific content.
By He Li, Haoang Chi, Qizhou Wang, Yunxin Mao, Zhiheng Zhang, Jie Tan, Tongliang Liu, Wenjing Yang, Bo Han