Multimodal models

Vision-language models, speech and cross-modal systems that read, look and listen in the same forward pass.

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arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

TontaubeV1: Streaming Text-to-Speech with Hierarchical Codec Modeling and Bounded Context

TontaubeV1 is a streaming text‑to‑speech model that preserves natural prosody while running on a single consumer GPU. It encodes speech with a hierarchical DualCodec representation at 12.5 Hz, separating a semantic stream from successive acoustic refinements, and uses Qwen3‑derived transformers to predict the semantic stream, utterance duration, and acoustic refinements. The system supports up to one minute of reference audio for voice conditioning, streams with a 200 ms latency to first audio, and achieves real‑time factors of 0.08 (single input) and 0.02 (eight concurrent inputs).

By Fritz Cremer, Jonathan Cremer
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 10

On-Policy Distillation for Vision-Language Model Adaptation, an Effective Paradigm on Low-Quality Multimodal Data

arXiv:2609.10321v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge distillation offers an efficient route to transfer a task-adapted vision-language teacher to a compact student. The training target in curren...

By Hongyuan Zhang, Xianda Guo, Yanlun Peng, Qianlong Yang, Yubin Guo, Pinhan Fu, Mulin Chen, Xiaozhen Qiao, Ping Luo
arXiv AI
Sep 10

MVFA: A Multi-View Text-Guided Multimodal Fusion LLM Adapter for Sentiment Analysis and Emotion Recognition

arXiv:2609.06188v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal sentiment analysis and emotion recognition in conversations demand effective modeling of heterogeneous interactions across textual, acoustic...

By Pengfei Shao, Jisheng Dang, Jiawen Fang, Ning Liu, Wencan Zhang, Bimei Wang, Jingwen Zhao, Jianhuang Lai, Qi Tian, Tat-Seng Chua
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Monte Carlo-Based Ex-Ante Assessment of the Green Benefits of an AI-Driven Smart Agriculture Platform in Hainan

The paper presents a Monte Carlo-based framework to quantify the green benefits of an AI-driven smart agriculture platform in Hainan. By integrating large-language-model question answering, multimodal pest diagnosis, IoT sensing, satellite remote sensing, and a closed-loop field record system, the study builds a cradle-to-farm-gate carbon accounting model and simulates three crop scenarios (mango, winter vegetable, rice). Results show median reductions of 23.5% in pesticide use, 21.0% in fertilizer, 16.5% in irrigation water, and 21.5% in carbon intensity, with high probabilities for fertilizer and carbon reductions but lower for water savings.

By Zhaoyang Li, Ruijie Zhang, Zhaoji Sun, Lu Zhang
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Reason Through the Latent! Making Latent Visual Reasoning Necessary

The paper introduces Causal Visual Recurrent Reasoning (CVRR), a method that forces multimodal models to rely on latent visual states by using recurrent computation as the sole image‑conditioned path to prediction. CVRR initializes recurrence from the question hidden state after a pretrained vision‑language model has processed the image, repeatedly updates this state while re‑reading the same visual evidence, and removes all other visual traces before decoding. Experiments on several benchmarks show that CVRR maintains strong performance while other latent reasoners lose visual competence, and causal interventions confirm that predictions depend on the recurrent visual trajectory.

By Suhyeong Park, Junha Jung, Jaewoo Kang
arXiv AI
Sep 10

VoT: Vision-of-Thought for Unified Multimodal Representation Alignment

The paper introduces Vision-of-Thought (VoT), a framework that inserts a discrete visual-thinking layer between vision‑language models (VLMs) and diffusion transformers (DiTs). Instead of using VLMs solely as text encoders, they act as multimodal planners that generate VoT tokens—high‑level visual plans such as objects and layouts—before pixel rendering. A specialized VoT tokenizer is trained with a closed‑loop objective combining VLM alignment, feature reconstruction, and vector‑quantization losses, ensuring the tokens are semantically readable by the VLM while preserving necessary visual information. Experimental results show that VoT improves semantic alignment and offers a structured, interpretable interface for controllable generation.

By Jingxiang Sun, Chao Liao, Zhengxiong Luo, Chaorui Deng, Chen-lin Zhang, Junke Wang, Ceyuan Yang, Haoqi Fan, Weilin Huang
arXiv AI
Sep 10

A*-Thought-V2: Efficient Latent Reasoning via Geometric Dynamics of LLM

A*-Thought-V2 is a framework that models Chain-of-Thought reasoning as a geometric trajectory in a 3D PCA space, using explicit-implicit latent tokens to compress steps that deviate from the main question-to-solution direction. The method measures alignment angles to decide which steps remain text and which become latent, and introduces stepwise embedding forcing and label forcing to train the architecture. Experiments on Qwen models show up to 2.6% accuracy gains, halved response length, and significant reductions in computation and training time.

By Xiaoang Xu, Siyuan Liu, Shuo Wang, Junlan Feng, Fanyu Meng, Zhu Zhang, Jixun Wang, Xiaorong Wang, Zihan Zhou, Xin Li, Chaojun Xiao, Yiming Zhang, Huijia Wu, Liuyu Xiang, Peipei Li, Zhaofeng He
arXiv AI
Sep 10

SAFIRE: Safety-Critical Benchmark for Fine-grained Fire and Smoke Understanding in Multimodal LLMs

SAFIRE is a large-scale benchmark for fire and smoke understanding in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), featuring 83,000 captioned images across 20 scenarios and 193,000 multiple-choice VQA questions derived from a 9.7K-image subset. The benchmark evaluates 10 dimensions of performance, from basic perception to higher-order reasoning, and employs a GPT‑5.4-assisted verification pipeline to ensure annotation quality. Experiments on ten open-source MLLMs (8B–38B) reveal an average accuracy of 61.9%, highlighting significant gaps in safety-critical reasoning, while fine-tuning vision encoders on just 7% of SAFIRE data boosts fire-scene classification accuracy from 20.1% to 64.5%. All resources are publicly available at https://risys-lab.github.io/SAFIRE/.

By Pengfei Li, Naufal Suryanto, Sicheng Zhang, Mohammad Alsharid, Muzammal Naseer
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Foundation Models for Generalizable Semantic and Goal-Oriented Communication

The paper introduces FMSGOC, a framework that leverages visual‑linguistic foundation models to improve semantic and goal‑oriented communication for 6G. By transmitting a sparse set of semantic anchors and using a pretrained diffusion model for masked completion, it reduces overfitting and achieves high rate efficiency, reaching 0.039 BPP while maintaining strong semantic fidelity and robustness on unseen data.

By Boliang Liu, Wint Yi Poe, Riccardo Trivisonno, Giuseppe Caire
arXiv AI
Sep 10

NormViz: A Benchmark and Framework for Grounding Multimodal Reasoning in Global Cultures

NormViz introduces a new benchmark, NormViz‑Bench, comprising 3,268 contrastive image pairs from 16 countries that test AI’s ability to recognize culturally relevant visual norms. Each pair differs only in a behavior that changes its cultural interpretation, and images are labeled as conforming, violating, or irrelevant to local norms, requiring both images to be correctly classified. The benchmark shows current VLMs perform poorly, and a complementary training set, NormViz‑Train, offers a path to improve performance by teaching models to link visual perception with cultural significance.

By Akhila Yerukola, Fabrice Y Harel-Canada, Simran Khanuja, Abhinav Sukumar Rao, Ashima Suvarna, Nanyun Peng, Saadia Gabriel, Maarten Sap
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Dual-Layer Semantic-Spatial Belief Mapping for Aerial Object Goal Navigation

The paper introduces AeroBelief, a dual‑layer semantic‑spatial belief mapping framework for aerial object goal navigation. It separates broad contextual plausibility (intuition layer) from target‑specific evidence (evidence layer) and fuses them into persistent spatial belief hotspots. The method also employs object‑conditioned visual reasoning and egocentric regional guidance, achieving state‑of‑the‑art success rates on the UAV‑ON benchmark.

By Jianqiang Xiao, Xiang Deng, Yuexuan Sun, Yanjin Wu, Wenbiao Yan, Liqiang Nie
arXiv AI
Sep 10

CS-CLIP: Compositional Scene Graph-guided CLIP for Robust Compositional Reasoning

CS-CLIP is a vision‑language model that improves compositional reasoning by using scene graphs to identify compositional elements and create structured negative examples through selective masking. The approach retains only the most contradictory negatives, encouraging the model to depend on compositional structure instead of surface cues. CS-CLIP achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on compositional reasoning benchmarks while maintaining strong cross‑modal retrieval and downstream visual reasoning capabilities with fewer training samples.

By SeongJun Jeong, Minjoon Jung, Woo Suk Choi, Youwon Jang, Byoung-Tak Zhang
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Emo-DVS: A Multimodal Benchmark for Privacy-Aware Emotion Recognition with Event Cameras

The paper introduces Emo-DVS, a large-scale, multimodal dataset combining event camera, audio, and text data for emotion recognition, designed to mitigate privacy concerns associated with RGB cameras. It proposes the Information‑Guided Gated Fusion (IGF) framework, which pre‑trains an event encoder on the dataset’s FAU subset, adaptively gates modalities to reduce noise, and aligns cross‑modal representations via mutual information maximization. Experiments show that IGF outperforms existing methods on this challenging tri‑modal benchmark.

By Jiaqi Chen, Qinfu Xu, Hao Zhuang, Liyuan Pan
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

Observing Health Outcomes Using Remote Sensing Imagery and Geo-Context Guided Visual Transformer

The paper introduces the Geo-Context Guided Visual Transformer, a model that augments remote sensing image analysis with geospatial embeddings and an asymmetric attention module. By converting heterogeneous geospatial variables into patch-aligned representations and assigning geospatial roles to attention heads, the approach improves disease prevalence prediction over existing vision-language and graph-based baselines. Ablation and visualization studies demonstrate its effectiveness and interpretability for health-related remote sensing tasks, especially when comprehensive geospatial data are scarce.

By Yu Li, Guilherme N. DeSouza, Praveen Rao, Chi-Ren Shyu