LLMs have shown strong in-context learning (ICL) capability, but extending it to Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) remains challenging. Prior multimodal ICL methods often rely on ICL-specific datasets for addit...
TwinICL is a procedurally generated benchmark that pairs matched text and image versions of tasks to enable controlled comparison of in‑context learning (ICL) across modalities. Experiments on six open‑weight models and 38 tasks show that multimodal ICL consistently underperforms text‑only ICL, with varying gaps by task family. Interventions targeting visual access, task framing, and reasoning can recover strong multimodal performance on a diagnostic subset, yet a modality gap remains even when explicit task instructions are provided, highlighting the dual role of demonstrations as context and evidence.
By Zihan Xue, Po-Yi Lu, Serhii Honcharenko, Zih-Ching Chen, Hsuan-Tien Lin, Nanyun Peng, I-Hung Hsu, Kuan-Hao Huang
arXiv:2609.15683v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: While In-Context Learning (ICL) enables models to adapt from exemplars without parameter updates, multimodal ICL remains largely underexplored, particu...
By Ziqian Fan, Shibo Xu, Junjie Li, Xiangyu Zhao, Shengyuan Ding, Yifan Yang, Zhenjie Yang, Haodong Duan, Yue Zhou, Zhihang Zhong, Xue Yang
The paper introduces a multimodal in‑context learning framework that uses contrastive demonstration modeling to align large language models’ responses with the required reasoning paths. By contrasting suboptimal and better responses and incorporating a response‑conditioned retrieval mechanism, the method explicitly guides models beyond surface imitation. Experiments on various multimodal tasks, especially visual question answering, show consistent performance gains.
By Mingbo Yang, Wenqiang Wang, Zhaolu Kang, Peng Chen, Yannan Chen, Sunshang Wang, Yan Xiao
The paper introduces AVA, a training‑free framework that improves interleaved multimodal in‑context learning for frozen large vision‑language models. AVA decomposes the interleaved context into per‑sample threads, selects influential demonstrations while removing redundancy, and calibrates consistency using a weak sibling model’s confidence. Across five vision‑language benchmarks, AVA raises performance by up to 2.4 points, narrows the visual performance gap on ScienceQA‑IMG, and remains robust even with 30% noisy demonstrations, all while keeping the LVLM frozen and adding only modest latency.
By Yigit Yilmaz, Elena Petrova, Mehmet Kaya, Lucia Rossi, Amir Rahman
arXiv:2606. 04434v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal In-Context Learning (ICL) has emerged as a practical inference paradigm for Multimodal Large Language Models, where a small set of interleaved image-text In-Context Demonstrations (ICDs) conditions the model to solve new tasks.
By Niloufar Alipour Talemi, Hossein Kashiani, Fatemeh Afghah