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The paper introduces SCALAR, a query‑conditioned spherical centroid aggregator that assigns relevance‑based weights to each available modality before computing a spherical centroid. SCALAR supports arbitrary modality subsets, is trained with rank‑8 LoRA adapters on masked views, and achieves positive aggregation gains on four of five benchmarks, outperforming prior symmetric aggregators. With only 4.8 million trainable parameters, SCALAR attains the highest text‑to‑video R@1 on three benchmarks and surpasses the released GRAM checkpoint under test‑time modality dropout by 3.2 to 10.9 R@1.
The Modality Maturity Index (MMI) is a new benchmark that evaluates large language models on their ability to handle five different modalities—text, image, audio, video, and document—across up to three-input and three-output combinations. It contains 893 self‑contained questions, each with human‑authored rubric criteria for the expected output modalities, and measures performance via an MMI Value and a Modality Presence Score (MPS). Experiments on five frontier multimodal models show low MPS scores, indicating limited modality availability, and confirm that LLM judges can reliably assess output correctness against human‑blind rubric scoring on 70.8% of cases.
arXiv:2609.37114v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: DANCo (Dimensionality from Angle and Norm Concentration) jointly calibrates nearest-neighbor distance and angular statistics and consistently reaches s...
The paper investigates how kernel-based metrics like KID and KAD perform as two‑sample tests on real embeddings of symbolic music, audio, and images. By applying mean shifts, isotropic contractions, and rotations to one sample, the authors find that the default kernels often fail to detect rotations at 780 samples per side, while they reliably detect mean shifts. Adjusting kernel bandwidths or using alternative kernels (e.g., narrower Gaussian, Laplace) restores sensitivity, and the authors recommend reporting the sample budget and detectable changes for any reported kernel distance.
DANCo (Dimensionality from Angle and Norm Concentration) jointly calibrates nearest-neighbor distance and angular statistics and consistently reaches state-of-the-art accuracy on clean intrinsic-dimen...
arXiv:2606. 11190v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cross-modal alignment (CA) and cross-modal prediction (CP) are the dominant paradigms for multimodal representation learning, yet there is no systematic understanding of when each succeeds, when each fails, and when cross-modal training helps at all -- a gap that leaves practitioners, especially in scientific domains like biomedicine or astrophysics, with heterogeneous instruments and multiple levels of organization and measurement, unable to diagnose why standard methods underperform the best single modality.