MIRAGE is a controlled study that examines how multimodal personal agents use historical evidence when conversation state changes. The study keeps evidence, questions, and scoring constant while varying only the conversation state, then checks if agents can determine answerability, recover the correct source, and answer from it. Results across seven multimodal backbones show distinct failure regimes before and after compaction, heavy reliance on context continuity by open-weight models, and mixed effects of retrieval pressure on source attribution.
By Yu Liu, Wenxiao Zhang, Cheng Hu, Cong Cao, Fangfang Yuan, Xinyu Wang, Jin B. Hong, Yanbing Liu
The paper introduces Omni Demand Understanding (ODU), a benchmark designed to test whether multimodal models can infer a user's underlying demand from complex audio‑visual interactions. ODU requires models to detect the presence of a demand and infer intent using multimodal and conversational context, evaluated across single‑turn and multi‑turn scenarios. The authors built ODU‑Bench through a taxonomy‑guided approach, agentic video generation, and human‑recorded interactions, and found that even top models like Gemini 3.1 Pro recover only 44.7% of key information, with many models exhibiting high false‑trigger rates.
By Qi Chen, Yunfei Chu, Haolin He, Yifan Yang, Zihan Liu, Yuxuan Wang, Ziyang Ma, Ruiyang Xu, Meng Gao, Yinsong Yan, Ling Wang, Hui Wang, Wen Huang, Yiheng Chen, Guanrou Yang, Qiuqiang Kong, Jin Xu, Xie Chen
The article surveys multi‑turn conversational AI, highlighting its shift from isolated text prompts to sustained, multimodal interactions that involve clarifying goals, revising requests, and switching topics. It reviews literature across text‑only dialogue, AudioLLMs, multimodal and omni‑modal systems, and tool‑augmented agents, organizing findings around datasets, models, training, evaluation, and cross‑cutting challenges. The analysis reveals that while multimodal perception and action have progressed rapidly, systems still struggle with persistent memory, cross‑turn grounding, full‑duplex interaction, robust evaluation, and cultural alignment.
By Syeda Faiza Ahmed, Zien Sheikh Ali, Hunzalah Hassan Bhatti, Firoj Alam, Shammur Absar Chowdhury
arXiv:2606. 08239v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made substantial advancements in video understanding, yet the reliability of their responses remains underexplored.
By Yiheng Wang, Yueqian Lin, Lichen Zhu, Yudong Liu, Hai "Helen" Li, Yiran Chen
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:2603. 18558v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Long-form video question answering requires reasoning over extended temporal contexts, making frame selection a critical bottleneck for multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) bound by finite context windows.
By Dan Ben-Ami, Gabriele Serussi, Kobi Cohen, Chaim Baskin
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
arXiv:2606. 09169v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In recent years, unified multimodal models (UMMs) have emerged to support both understanding and generation within a single framework.
By Lingyi Meng, Zecong Tang, Haoran Li, Tengju Ru, Zhejun Cui, Weitong Lian, Qi Kang, Hangshuo Cao, Yichen Zhu, Yechi Liu, Kaixuan Wang, Yu-Jie Yuan, Chunwei Wang, Yu Zhang, Bo Dai
arXiv:2609.36798v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Omni-modal large language models (LLMs) are expected to answer a question using the modality it explicitly refers to. However, existing training para...
By Yueran Ma, Ronghao Lin
CLIMB is a training‑free inference‑time framework for multimodal retrieval‑augmented generation. It builds a compact complementary evidence pool using an MMR‑style objective that balances relevance and redundancy, then refines answers with a confidence‑controlled critic that scores relevance, specificity, and cross‑modal alignment. The method stops refinement when confidence no longer rises, improving performance on Encyclopedic‑VQA and InfoSeek without altering the retriever or language model.
By Hang Gao, Wujiang Xu, Zhixing Zhang, Kai Mei, Jingyi Yang, Dimitris N. Metaxas
arXiv:2607. 08497v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent unified multimodal models show a single architecture can jointly perform vision/language understanding and image generation/editing.
By Feng Wang, Canmiao Fu, Zhipeng Huang, Chen Li, Jing Lyu, Ge Li
arXiv:2609.00551v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Multimodal memory offers a scalable interface for long-video question answering, but existing methods often retrieve captions, frames, transcripts, s...
By Yijun Chen, Yaqi Zheng, Yanya Li, Boyi Xiao, Buqiang Xu, Shuofei Qiao, Jizhan Fang, Xinle Deng, Yunzhi Yao, Xuehai Wang, Liuxin Zhang, Hui Li, Huajun Chen, Shumin Deng