The paper presents a scale‑aware 3D deep‑learning framework for detecting brain metastases in multimodal MRI. It trains separate 3D U‑Nets on two spatial fields of view (96³ and 64³ voxels) and fuses their probability maps via weighted late fusion. On a 97‑patient cohort, this cross‑FOV fusion improved lesion‑level precision and F1 while markedly reducing false positives compared to individual models, demonstrating that complementary spatial context enhances detection performance.
By Sylvain Jaume, Hongming Wang, Simon K. Warfield
The paper introduces MUC-FL, a block‑wise marginal utility contribution framework that selectively transmits only the most impactful data blocks in federated learning to reduce communication overhead. Applied to a multimodal dataset derived from multiple MIMIC clinical datasets, the method identifies 24 out of 1,135 candidate blocks (1.76%) as carrying meaningful improvement signals, potentially cutting communication by 45‑50% while preserving or enhancing model quality. The deduplication‑based block selection achieves a macro F1 score of 0.8566 versus 0.8155 for standard federated optimization, showing improved performance especially for underrepresented classes.
By Akshay Mhatre, Vikram Karthick, Deepti Gupta, Jia Zou
ABACUS is a 3‑billion‑parameter vision‑language model that simultaneously tackles object counting, crowd counting, referring‑expression counting, and count‑faithful image generation. It introduces density‑aware adaptive zooming with an objectness map, a boundary‑aware count policy trained via GRPO to avoid over‑ or under‑counting at crop edges, and a cycle‑consistent GRPO strategy that scores generated images for count accuracy and aesthetic quality without external critics. The model sets new state‑of‑the‑art performance on seven benchmarks, outperforming both specialized and larger generalist models.
By Anindya Mondal, Sauradip Nag, Anjan Dutta
V‑Retrver is an evidence‑driven retrieval framework that treats universal multimodal retrieval as an agentic reasoning process grounded in visual inspection. It allows multimodal large language models to selectively acquire visual evidence through external tools, alternating between hypothesis generation and targeted visual verification. The approach is trained with a curriculum that blends supervised activation, rejection‑based refinement, and reinforcement learning, achieving an average 23.0% improvement in retrieval accuracy across multiple benchmarks.
By Dongyang Chen, Chaoyang Wang, Dezhao Su, Xi Xiao, Zeyu Zhang, Jing Xiong, Qing Li, Yuzhang Shang, Shichao Kan
The paper introduces IRS (Incongruity-Resolution Supervision), a framework that breaks humor understanding into three parts: identifying mismatches in a visual scene, creating coherent reinterpretations of those mismatches, and aligning these interpretations with human preferences. IRS uses structured reasoning traces to guide models from visual perception to humorous interpretation, and it is evaluated on the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest. Experiments on 7B, 32B, and 72B models show that IRS improves caption matching and ranking, with the 72B model achieving 76.10% ranking accuracy—outperforming non-expert humans and all other multimodal baselines—and demonstrates transferable reasoning patterns in zero‑shot settings.
By Hatice Merve Vural, Doga Kukul, Ege Erdem Ozlu, Demir Ekin Arikan, Bob Mankoff, Erkut Erdem, Aykut Erdem
The paper presents a method for robust multimodal sentiment analysis that handles incomplete or noisy modalities. It introduces a completeness estimation technique to measure how much sentiment-relevant information remains in partial data, guiding the reconstruction of missing semantics. A joint training strategy stabilizes multi-task learning for sentiment prediction and completeness estimation, and experiments on three benchmark datasets show improved semantic reconstruction and sentiment accuracy.
By Han-Jun Choi, Byunggill Joe, Saim Shin, Jin Yea Jang
CLIP-RD introduces a relational distillation framework for efficient CLIP knowledge distillation, featuring Vertical Relational Distillation (VRD) and Cross Relational Distillation (XRD). VRD aligns intra‑modal similarity distributions between teacher and student, while XRD aligns cross‑modal similarity distributions to enforce bidirectional symmetry. This joint modeling of multidirectional relational structures improves the student’s embedding geometry, yielding a 1.8%p performance gain over CLIP‑KD across various architectures, tasks, and corruption settings with minimal training‑time overhead.
By Jeannie Chung, Hanna Jang, Ingyeong Yang, Uiwon Hwang, Jaehyeong Sim
KairosAgent is an agentic framework that combines a large language model (LLM) reasoner with a time series foundation model (TSFM) forecaster to tackle cross‑domain multimodal time series forecasting. It dynamically invokes analytical tools to improve the LLM’s numerical comprehension and semantic reasoning, then fuses the reasoning outcomes into the TSFM pipeline for more accurate predictions. The approach is further enhanced by a curated large‑scale trajectory corpus and a reinforcement learning paradigm with multi‑turn refinement and turn‑level credit assignment, achieving superior zero‑shot forecasting performance.
By Kun Feng, Ziwei Shan, Yuchen Fang, Yiyang Tan, Sihan Lu, Shuqi Gu, Xingyu Lu, Lintao Ma, Kan Ren
The paper introduces a densely labeled coastal dataset of over 1,000 images from Oahu, Hawaii, featuring 18 semantic classes and 7,400 annotated instances. Seven modern vision‑language models were evaluated using text‑to‑mask, mask‑to‑mask, and mask‑to‑text alignment experiments. Results show that broad landscape classes are recognized more accurately than conventional object and coastal classes, with coastal concepts posing the greatest challenge; however, performance differences are not solely due to environmental context, and alternative textual labels improve recognition of several coastal concepts.
By Seth Knoop, Chad R. Samuelson, Gabriel R. Slade, Brady Moon, Joshua G. Mangelson
OmniHallu is a unified framework for detecting hallucinations in multimodal large language models across both comprehension and generation tasks involving image, video, and audio modalities. It introduces OmniHallu-Bench, a 10,000-sample benchmark with claim-level human annotations for six cross-modal tasks (I2T, V2T, A2T, T2I, T2V, T2A). The system uses a multi‑agent architecture that decomposes outputs into atomic claims, verifies them with modality‑specific experts, and aggregates evidence through structured reasoning, while a preference‑optimized verifier reduces expert calls by 66% with minimal performance loss.
By Jianjiang Yang, Peihang Li, Shanqing Xu, Mengchen Qian, Lu Zhang, Meng Luo
The paper presents the first controlled study of Whisper adaptation for Greek Automatic Lyric Transcription (ALT), addressing challenges such as melodic variability, rhythmic irregularity, and accompaniment interference. It explores model scaling, multitask training with transcribe-translate ratios, and a two‑stage speech‑to‑singing adaptation, while curating a segment‑level aligned singing dataset from the Greek Audio Dataset. Results show that larger models consistently improve performance, multitask learning benefits smaller models, and the two‑stage adaptation achieves a 27.2% WER, establishing the first Greek ALT benchmark.
By Maria Frangiadaki, Dimitrios Damianos, Kosmas Kritsis, Vassilis Katsouros
The paper investigates whether Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) can understand visual persuasiveness by evaluating image‑message pairs that humans consistently judge as persuasive. It introduces Visual Persuasive Factors (VPFs), a taxonomy from cognitive psychology, to quantify visual cues influencing persuasive judgments. Empirical analysis shows VLMs tend to over‑predict persuasiveness, partially reproducing human patterns but often generating false positives, and that VPF‑guided interventions can improve performance only when properly framed.
By Gyuwon Park, Hyounghun Kim
The paper investigates how to combine synthetic and real historical images to improve OCR for the endangered Manchu language. Using 60,000 synthetic and 20,306 real word images, the authors evaluate three vision‑language models and a compact CRNN across synthetic‑only, real‑only, joint, and sequential training regimes. Adding real data boosts word accuracy to 95–96%, and ensembling the best recognizers raises it to 98.27% without further training.
By Yan Hon Michael Chung, Hanlin Wang
Recursive Code World Models (RCWM) present a framework that reconstructs complex 3D worlds from a single reference image by combining a Recursive Scene Program (RSP) representation with a construction solver that recursively calls itself. The RSP encodes the world as compositional scene code, while each solver invocation follows a global‑local‑global recursion: it first establishes the whole scene, then recursively reconstructs unresolved parts, and finally revisits the whole to refine composition. This approach preserves scene‑wide geometry and relationships, propagates a shared camera projection across levels, and uses a vision‑language coding agent to compare reference images with scene renders, enabling fine‑scale structure refinement and improved reconstruction over prior methods.
By Zhiqi Li, Yuxuan Liao, Bo Zhu
The paper presents SEAR, a system for Task 2 of the second Multilingual Conversational Speech Language Model Challenge. It adapts Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct with a segment‑evidence‑aware pipeline that converts timestamped ASR into event spans, expands and crops them, and then generates both semantic and acoustic multiple‑choice questions using Qwen3.6-27B and Gemini 3.1 Flash‑Lite. After rigorous checks, 359,825 verified MCQs across 21 languages and accents are produced, and the system achieves 90.92% accuracy on the official evaluation set.
By Huy Hoang Le, Long-Bao Nguyen, Minh Tri Dao
The paper introduces methods to improve speech recognition for multilingual video transcription using Whisper-based tools, targeting cross‑cultural understanding. It reports an average transcription error rate of 30% across seven languages, which can be lowered to 20% with modest fine‑tuning. The authors also release associated speech and metadata to aid community refinement of these techniques.
By Michael Picheny
The paper introduces a new perspective on entity rarity in multimodal entity linking by using knowledge‑graph structural metrics instead of popularity metrics, revealing many rare entities previously overlooked. Experiments show that state‑of‑the‑art models suffer a 15.4–39.9% accuracy drop on these rare‑entity slices. The authors propose a training‑free framework that combines reasoning and retrieval with a vision‑language model, achieving a 6.9% overall accuracy gain and up to 23.3% improvement on rare entities, and release a new benchmark MERLIN‑Rare for focused evaluation.
By Parinthapat Pengpun, Simran Khanuja, Graham Neubig
MedGEN-Bench is a new benchmark for open‑ended multimodal medical generation that addresses limitations in current medical visual benchmarks, such as query‑image misalignment, closed‑ended answer spaces, and text‑centric outputs. The dataset contains 6,422 image‑text pairs across six imaging modalities, 15 clinical tasks, and 27 subtasks, including VQA, image editing, and contextual multimodal generation pairs. Evaluation combines reference‑based fidelity metrics with a structured, checklist‑guided assessment by a medical VLM judge, and preliminary results show that image‑output tasks remain unsaturated while contextual augmentation improves image‑instruction similarity.
By Junjie Yang, Yuhao Yan, Gang Wu, Rui Qian, Zhisheng Chen, Haijiang Li, Yuhe Wu, Qichao Zhao, Dawen Tian, Xiang Wan, Fenglei Fan, Wenjian Qin, Yongquan Zhang, Feiwei Qin, Changmiao Wang
MultiHuSE is a multimodal dataset featuring 2,407 high‑definition videos of 50 diverse actors delivering 1,463 text samples in four psychological humour styles—affiliative, aggressive, self‑enhancing, and self‑deprecating—plus neutral content. Each text is performed by multiple actors, allowing analysis of expressive diversity, and a subset includes emotion annotations. Baseline experiments show that multimodal fusion improves humour style classification accuracy over unimodal approaches, especially for affiliative humour.
By Mary Ogbuka Kenneth, Foaad Khosmood, Abbas Edalat
The paper critiques current optimization-based methods for balancing modalities in Multimodal Sentiment Analysis, arguing they overpromise and underdeliver. It introduces a unified evaluation framework that tests gradient- and loss-based balancing strategies, provides a theoretical diagnosis showing these methods conflate fitting speed with discriminative contribution, and proposes a research agenda for held‑out discriminative modality valuation. Experiments on CMU‑MOSI and CMU‑MOSEI demonstrate that no strategy consistently outperforms Late Concatenation, performance is highly sensitive to hyperparameters, and ratio calibration does not yield reliable gains, highlighting that loss is not utility and gradients are not importance.
By Ioanna Kaffeza, Efthymios Georgiou, Alexandros Potamianos