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 AI
Sep 4

Exploring the Potential of Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training for Multi-Source Remote Sensing Data

The paper introduces OmniRSCLIP, an end‑to‑end contrastive learning framework that extends the CLIP architecture to handle heterogeneous remote sensing sensors such as SAR, multi‑spectral imaging, and hyperspectral imaging. It achieves this by employing Spectral‑Spatial Basis Decomposition to adapt arbitrary‑channel inputs without losing pretrained visual knowledge, and a spectral‑context‑aware mask‑based contrastive learning scheme to improve fine‑grained image‑text alignment. The authors also build OmniRS5M, a large‑scale image‑text corpus covering multiple sensor modalities, and demonstrate that OmniRSCLIP maintains strong RGB performance while effectively supporting these diverse remote sensing data types.

By Xiangyang Miao, Kelu Yao, Yekai Huang, Xiaogang Xu, Junxiao Xue, Minjun Shen, Chenghui Lv, Shanji Liu, Yaying Chen, Chao Li
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Do GUI Agents Know When Not to Act? Enabling Conflict-Aware Termination for Multimodal GUI Agents

The paper introduces CONFLICTGUI, a benchmark that tests GUI agents on instruction-internal and instruction‑GUI context conflicts, revealing that many agents over‑comply with infeasible instructions. To address this, the authors propose CONFLICTGUARD, an inference‑time framework that couples a feasibility verification protocol with a conditional action modulation mechanism, enabling agents to assess instruction logic and GUI evidence before acting. Experiments on five agents show that CONFLICTGUARD significantly improves conflict‑task success while maintaining normal task performance.

By Zhaoyuan Huang, Tianjie Ju, Pengzhou Cheng, Zheng Wu, Yansi Li, Chuanbiao Song, Jun Lan, Huijia Zhu, Weiqiang Wang, Zhuosheng Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 4

Sensing Which Modality Matters: Evidence-Gated Regularization for Robust VLA Policies

The paper introduces Evidence‑Gated Regularization (EGR), a modality‑agnostic training objective that mitigates modality entanglement in Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) policies. EGR uses per‑frame, per‑sensor task‑relevance signals to enforce invariance on low‑evidence sensors and single‑sensor sufficiency on high‑evidence ones, adding no inference‑time overhead. Evaluations on a BEHAVIOR‑1K benchmark and two real‑robot setups (bi‑manual Kinova arms with RGB cameras and a single‑arm MELFA ASSISTA with vision and GelSight tactile sensors) show significant improvements in success rates across various corruption and fallback scenarios.

By Yue Yang, Diego Romeres, Chiori Hori, Gedas Bertasius, Daniel Szafir, Siddarth Jain
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Listen to the Latents: Self-Correcting Speech Recognition in Large Audio Language Models Through Hidden-State Interactions

The paper introduces Hybrid Search, a method that refines warm-initialized large language model (LLM) based automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems by exploiting interactions between ASR hidden states and the base LLM’s hidden states. By identifying tokens with high semantic dependence and selectively correcting them, the approach surpasses traditional global LLM‑correction techniques such as rescoring and late fusion. The study demonstrates that even after warm initialization, LLM‑based ASR models can further benefit from their base LLM during inference.

By Chan-Jan Hsu, Jaeyeon Kim, Chao-Han Huck Yang, Shinji Watanabe, Hung-yi Lee, Carlos Busso
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 4

Dual-Form ASR: Semantics-Aware Inverse Text Normalization for Chinese Speech Recognition

Dual-Form ASR (DF-ASR) is a framework that unifies spoken-form ASR and semantics-aware written-form inverse text normalization (ITN) for Chinese speech recognition. It uses paired spoken- and written-form supervision generated and judged by a large language model, and introduces an ITN-MWER objective to penalize errors on normalization-sensitive spans. DF-ASR also employs a REQUIRE-ITN/FORBID-ITN protocol to separately evaluate required normalization and forbidden-span preservation, achieving superior performance over open-source ASR-ITN systems while maintaining prompt-level control between transcript forms.

By Fengrun Zhang, Li Fu, Wangjin Zhou, Lu Fan, Youzheng Wu, Xiaodong He
arXiv AI
Sep 4

GraFT: A Training-Free Framework for Spatial Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models via 3D Scene Graphs

GraFT is a training‑free framework that enhances spatial reasoning in multimodal large language models by integrating a compact 3D scene graph (3DSG). It offers deterministic geometry via symbolic tools, allocentric layout through bird’s‑eye‑view rendering, and visual‑attribute grounding using egocentric frames. Experiments on ScanQA and VSI‑Bench show significant performance gains, with CIDEr increasing by 27% and improvements up to 65% over baseline models.

By Junqing Du, Fernando Ropero, Erkin Turkoz, Yanfeng Zhang, Lu Liu
arXiv AI
Sep 4

CauseCollab: Causal Unified and Modality-Agnostic Network for Heterogeneous Collaborative Perception

CauseCollab is a causal unified and modality‑agnostic network designed to improve collaborative perception across heterogeneous sensor modalities. It disentangles semantic factors from modality‑specific confounders using causal metric learning and employs a context‑guided Unified Converter to maintain cross‑modal semantic consistency. The approach requires only minimal adapter training when adding new modalities and achieves state‑of‑the‑art results on the OPV2V and DAIR‑V2X datasets, especially in scenarios with large modality gaps.

By Weize Li, Yang Li, Quan Yuan, Xiaoyuan Fu, Guiyang Luo, Jinglin Li
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 4

Beyond Small Patches: Black-Box Detection and Purification of Diverse Backdoor Triggers

The paper introduces TRIM, a black‑box defense for backdoor attacks in computer vision models. TRIM identifies and removes malicious trigger regions at inference time using region‑based segmentation, adaptive trigger discovery via inpainting and diffusion, and selective purification, without needing model internals, training data, or clean samples. Experiments on various datasets and trigger types show TRIM reduces attack success rates to as low as 1.16% while maintaining high clean accuracy.

By Ahmed Abdelnaby, Mohamed Elmahallawy
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 4

Invoice Haystack: Benchmarking Document Retrieval and Visual Question Answering Under Strong Visual Homogeneity

The paper introduces Invoice Haystack, a benchmark of 1,500 anonymized invoices and 200 question‑answer pairs that tests document retrieval and visual question answering under strong visual homogeneity. It shows that existing benchmarks suffer from embedding collapse, with Invoice Haystack’s mean pairwise cosine similarity at 0.73 versus 0.38 and 0.31 in DocHaystack and InfoHaystack. The authors propose VL‑RAG, a hybrid retrieval‑augmented generation framework that combines text and visual embeddings and a VLM‑based verification filter, achieving 60.0% Recall@1 on Invoice Haystack‑500 and improving performance on other benchmarks.

By Heethanjan Kanagalingam, Thenukan Pathmanathan, Mokeeshan Vathanakumar, Basim Azam, Sarah Monazam Erfani, Naveed Akhtar
arXiv AI
Sep 4

CulturalMenuBench: Probing the Knowledge-Application Gap in Multimodal Culinary Reasoning

CulturalMenuBench is a new benchmark comprising 4,870 culinary items in 10 languages across 18 regions, designed to test multimodal language models on tasks that combine dish recognition, step-by-step cooking images, ingredients, procedural text, and regional labels. The benchmark reveals a large knowledge‑application gap: models that score over 94% on standard multiple‑choice questions fall to at most 56% when attributing dishes to Chinese regional cuisines, indicating that cultural knowledge is present but not activated by visual input. Diagnostic analyses show that accuracy is driven by visual distinctiveness rather than cultural structure, and that removing sequential cooking images selectively harms process‑grounded tasks, confirming the need for procedural evidence.

By Bo Zeng, Linfeng Gao, Peiqin Lin, Yu Zhao, Mingyan Zeng, Yu Tong, Xintong Wang, Linlong Xu, Longyue Wang, Weihua Luo, Qinggang Zhang, Jinsong Su
arXiv AI
Sep 4

NeoRed: A Knowledge-Logic-Alignment Multimodal Large Language Model for Neonatal Respiratory Disease Diagnosis

NeoRed is a multimodal large language model specifically designed for diagnosing neonatal respiratory diseases. It addresses two main limitations of existing models—domain gaps from adult data and inadequate integration of clinical context—by leveraging two real-world neonatal datasets (NeoCXR and NeoCXR-EV). The model incorporates a Knowledge-Logic-Alignment framework that injects diagnostic priors, aligns report semantics with diagnostic logic, and aligns visual features with imaging conclusions, achieving superior performance on neonatal benchmarks while maintaining adult benchmark performance.

By Yinan Liu, Hongtai Xia, Haoran Xu, Jiankang Hong, Jingkuan Song, Ye Luo
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 4

Continuous Actions from Discrete Minds: Latent-Aligned Planning for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

The paper introduces LaPla, a Vision‑Language‑Action framework that uses a latent‑aligned planning approach to convert discrete semantic reasoning into continuous, physics‑constrained driving actions. It employs a residual VQ‑VAE to encode vehicle kinematics into a structured latent space, then projects multimodal inputs—images, past actions, and text—directly into this latent space, allowing a frozen decoder to generate physically plausible trajectories without quantization errors. Experiments on nuScenes and NVIDIA AlpaSim show LaPla reduces long‑horizon L2 error by 15.52% and improves closed‑loop success rates by 33.34 percentage points while cutting inference latency.

By Ruoyu Yao, Yusen Xie, Qingzhao Liu, Pei Liu, Zewei Yang, Yipeng Zhu, Xiaolong Wang, Jun Ma
arXiv AI
Sep 4

WIDE: Wildcard Inference with Dynamic Expansion for Cross-Modal Generative Retrieval

WIDE: Wildcard Inference with Dynamic Expansion for Cross-Modal Generative Retrieval proposes a new approach to address information asymmetry in cross-modal retrieval. The method introduces Adaptive Entropy Thresholding to calibrate uncertainty, Asymmetry-aware Wildcard Decoding to emit wildcards instead of forced identifiers, and Blind-Spot Re-ranking to evaluate expanded candidates. Experiments on the M-BEIR benchmark show that WIDE outperforms existing generative retrieval methods by reducing forced hallucination while keeping index structures compact.

By Teng Guo, Xin Wang, Jiayou Xu, Keying Zhou, Jifeng Shen, Haoxin Ruan
arXiv AI
Sep 4

LightEMMA: A Longitudinal Evaluation of Vision-Language Models for Autonomous Driving

LightEMMA is a longitudinal evaluation framework that tests the autonomous driving performance of vision‑language models (VLMs) without fine‑tuning or prompt engineering. Using this protocol, the authors evaluated 15 VLMs from five major families on the nuScenes prediction benchmark and found that larger, more capable models do not consistently outperform earlier generations. The study identifies common failure modes such as overreliance on historical actions and difficulty reconciling conflicting visual cues, underscoring the need for domain‑specific adaptation to enhance VLM safety in autonomous driving.

By Zhijie Qiao, Haowei Li, Zhong Cao, Henry X. Liu
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Medical Reasoning in the Era of LLMs: A Systematic Review of Enhancement Techniques and Applications

The paper reviews how Large Language Models (LLMs) are being adapted for medical reasoning, moving beyond single-step answers to systems that can systematically, transparently, and verifiably reason. It introduces a taxonomy of enhancement techniques, split into training-time methods such as supervised fine‑tuning and reinforcement learning, and test-time methods like prompt engineering and multi‑agent systems. The review examines their application across text, image, and code modalities in key clinical areas—diagnosis, education, and treatment planning—and tracks the shift in evaluation benchmarks from simple accuracy to more nuanced assessments of reasoning quality and visual interpretability.

By Zizhan Ma, Wenxuan Wang, Meidan Ding, Shiyi Zheng, Shengyuan Liu, Jie Liu, Jiaming Ji, Linlin Shen, Yixuan Yuan, Wenting Chen
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Making Every Tool Call Count: Necessary Tool-Evidence Path Rewards for Agentic Vision-Language Models

The paper introduces the Necessary Tool‑Evidence Path (NTEP) annotation scheme and its associated reward mechanism (NTEP‑R) to better supervise vision‑language models that use external tools. By explicitly specifying which evidence is needed and penalizing redundant tool calls, the authors train an 8B‑parameter model that shows improved accuracy and tool‑use efficiency across seven image‑grounded benchmarks. The approach demonstrates that fine‑grained supervision of tool‑evidence paths is essential for robust agentic VLM performance.

By Xingming Long, Yu Liu, Zhiwei Yang, Hanqi Feng, Shaojie Zhang, Barnabas Poczos, Chao Jiang, Zhenbo Luo, Lei Jiang, Pei Fu
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Traceable TTS: Toward Watermark-Free TTS with Strong Traceability

The paper introduces Traceable TTS, a framework that enables Text‑to‑Speech systems to attribute synthesized speech to their source models without embedding explicit watermarks. By jointly training the TTS model and a discriminator, the method improves traceability generalization while maintaining or slightly enhancing audio quality. This represents the first attempt at watermark‑free TTS with strong traceability, and the authors plan to release the code to support further research.

By Yuxiang Zhao, Yunchong Xiao, Yushen Chen, Zhikang Niu, Shuai Wang, Kai Yu, Xie Chen
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 4

Who Speaks for the Pruned? Visual Token Pruning as Coverage Optimization

CoverPruner is a training‑free visual token pruner that reframes token pruning as a representational coverage maximization problem. Instead of selecting which tokens to keep, it asks which surviving token best represents each removed token for a vision‑language model. Experiments on various VLM architectures show that CoverPruner consistently outperforms existing methods, especially under high compression rates.

By Qingchan Zhu, Weihang You, Hanqi Jiang, Changdi Yang, Tianming Liu, Geng Yuan
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 4

Coupled Tensor-Tensor Completion Method with Applications in Drug Repurposing

The paper introduces Coupled Tensor‑Tensor Completion (CTTC), a new framework that incorporates side information in tensor form to enhance tensor completion tasks. CTTC leverages hidden connections among multimodal tensors and is grounded in distance metric learning and group theory. Experiments on the DTD and LINCS datasets show that CTTC outperforms existing methods such as HaLRTC, CTRC, Cell, and NTDDR in both runtime and root‑sum‑of‑squares error for drug effect prediction.

By Maryam Bagherian, Albert Hung, Ivo Dinov, Joshua Welch
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 4

When Vision Meets Graphs: A Survey on Graph Reasoning and Learning

The survey titled "When Vision Meets Graphs: A Survey on Graph Reasoning and Learning" reviews how visual depictions of graphs can be used as inputs for graph reasoning and learning. It highlights that while Graph Neural Networks dominate graph machine learning, most pipelines ignore the visual form of graphs, despite scientists routinely interpreting graphs visually. The paper organizes existing work into three threads—vision for graph reasoning, vision for graph learning, and scientific graphs—aiming to clarify current capabilities and chart a path toward foundation models that perceive and reason about graphs like scientists do.

By Xinjian Zhao, Wei Pang, Zhixuan Yu, Xiangru Jian, Xiaozhuang Song, Yaoyao Xu, Zhongkai Xue, Dingshuo Chen, Shu Wu, Philip Torr, Tianshu Yu