arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 19

Domain-specific language alignment of multimodal embeddings towards explainable predictions

The paper introduces a framework that aligns multimodal embeddings with language by using captioning functions on interpretable auxiliary data, a soft contrastive loss, and a rank-based concept retrieval task. Applied to Earth observation embeddings, the method improves species distribution modelling, achieving state‑of‑the‑art performance on most metrics and better concept retrieval than prior vision‑language models. The aligned concepts enable recovery of species‑habitat associations and allow domain experts to interpret model predictions in natural language.

By Gabriel\.e Tij\=unaityt\.e, Thijs L. van der Plas, Mohamed-Bachir Belaid, Rob Knapen, Maciej J. Soja, Ioannis N. Athanasiadis
arXiv AI
Sep 17

MUSE: Benchmarking Large Vision-Language Models on Multi-Modal Understanding in Situated Education

MUSE is a new benchmark designed to evaluate large vision‑language models on artistic image understanding within situated educational contexts. It separates image annotation from question generation, offering twelve tasks that cover visual perception, semantic and affective interpretation, cultural understanding, and compositional reasoning across diverse artistic images from Singaporean, Southeast Asian, and Western traditions. The benchmark reveals significant gaps in model performance, especially in affective interpretation and compositional reasoning, and highlights common failure modes for trustworthy educational multimodal systems.

By Luyao Zhu, Xun Wei Yee, Wei Li, Mun Thye Mak, Wee Siong Ng
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
arXiv AI
Jul 7

HCSU: A Dataset and Benchmark for Fine-Grained Historical Calligraphy Style Understanding

arXiv:2607. 04147v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated fine-grained perception of calligraphy styles--a task vital to cultural heritage preservation--remains a critical challenge for Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), largely constrained by existing datasets that suffer from modal mixture and flattened labels.

By Yinsheng Yao, Yan Liu, Chen Ye