arXiv AI

MCIF: Multimodal Crosslingual Instruction-Following Benchmark from Scientific Talks

arXiv:2507. 19634v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in large language models have laid the foundation for multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), which unify text, speech, and vision within a single framework.

arXiv AI
Aug 24

Is Multimodal Speculative Decoding Ready for Diffusion-Based Parallel Drafting? A Survey and Empirical Diagnosis

The paper surveys multimodal speculative decoding, examining whether diffusion-based block‑parallel generative drafting—successful in text‑only LLMs—can be applied to Vision‑Language, Video‑Language, Audio, and Vision‑Language‑Action models. It introduces a taxonomy separating drafter‑side parallelism from other design choices, and presents an empirical comparison across benchmarks such as OCR, VQA, visual reasoning, and image captioning. The study highlights current limitations, outlines open challenges, and suggests future research directions for multimodal speculative decoding.

By Yantao Li, Huanlin Gao, Fang Zhao, Chao Tan, Qiang Hui, Shuting Liu, Fuyuan Shi, Ting Lu, Shaoan Zhao, Xueqiang Guo, Xinpei Su, Jianbing Zhang, Xinyu Dai, Kai Wang, Shiguo Lian
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

Almieyar-Oryx-BloomBench: A Bilingual Multimodal Benchmark for Cognitively Informed Evaluation of Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2606. 05531v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite the rapid progress of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), the field lacks benchmarks that rigorously diagnose their true reasoning abilities and chart meaningful progress toward human-like multimodal intelligence.

By Mohammad Mahdi Abootorabi, Omid Ghahroodi, Anas Madkoor, Marzia Nouri, Doratossadat Dastgheib, Mohamed Hefeeda, Ehsaneddin Asgari
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 AI
Sep 7

MM-IFEval-Pro: A Multilingual and Attack-Resistant Benchmark for Instruction-Following in Vision-Language Models

MM-IFEval-Pro is a new multilingual benchmark for evaluating instruction-following in vision-language models, covering both Chinese and English tasks. It includes 4 major task categories, 24 subcategories, and 8 instruction categories with 52 subcategories, each sample featuring an average of 3.0 constraints to mimic complex instruction scenarios. A reinforcement-learning training set with Chinese and adversarial instructions improves model performance on MM-IFEval-Pro and transfers well to other multimodal benchmarks, showing strong cross-task and cross-language generalization.

By Changming Xiao, Zhenliang Ni, Jinhui He, Han Shu, Jie Hu
arXiv AI
Aug 28

VFA: Empowering Multilingual MLLMs via Vision-Free Adaptation

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
arXiv AI
Jul 14

PivotMerge: Bridging Heterogeneous Multimodal Pre-training via Post-Alignment Model Merging

arXiv:2604. 22823v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) rely on multimodal pre-training over diverse data sources, where different datasets often induce complementary cross-modal alignment capabilities.

By Zibo Shao, Baochen Xiong, Xiaoshan Yang, Yaguang Song, Qimeng Zhang, Haifeng Chen, Changsheng Xu
arXiv AI
Aug 12

HSSBench: Benchmarking Humanities and Social Sciences Ability for Multimodal Large Language Models

arXiv:2506. 03922v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated significant potential to advance a broad range of domains.

By Zhaolu Kang, Junhao Gong, Jiaxu Yan, Wanke Xia, Yian Wang, Ziwen Wang, Huaxuan Ding, Zhuo Cheng, Wenhao Cao, Zhiyuan Feng, Siqi He, Shannan Yan, Junzhe Chen, Xiaomin He, Chaoya Jiang, Wei Ye, Kaidong Yu, Xuelong Li
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Lens: Bringing the Right Semantic Perspective into Focus for Training-Free Multimodal Representation Learning

The paper introduces Lens, a training‑free framework that aligns multimodal representations with the semantic perspective required by downstream tasks. Lens uses a task‑specific readout phrase to anchor the perspective and then aggregates token states after the full input, ensuring the extracted representation reflects task‑conditioned evidence integration rather than generic salient content. The method achieves a Precision@1 of 63.9 across 36 MMEB datasets, outperforming the nearest training‑free baseline by 10.2 points.

By Xinran Liu, Shouqian Shi, Yixian Chen, Ruizhi Chen, Xin-Wei Yao, Sheng Zhong