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 Computation and Language
Sep 1

SocialReasonBench: A Video-QA Benchmark for Social Reasoning with Counterfactual Narrative Videos

SocialReasonBench is a new video‑multiple‑choice QA benchmark designed to test socially grounded reasoning in interactive narrative videos. It uses branching gameplay footage from *Detroit: Become Human*, where player choices create alternative social outcomes that can be verified against the game’s script and flowchart. The benchmark includes seven reasoning dimensions—such as intent recognition, emotional empathy, moral dilemma, counterfactual reasoning, and causal antecedent—and employs a multi‑agent pipeline to curate clips, ground answer labels, and generate theory‑guided questions with diagnostic distractors.

By Zheyu Huang, Zijing Shi, Haozhe Luo, Huadong Tang, Mingyu Liu, Meng Fang, Ling Chen
arXiv AI
Sep 1

When Images Look Right and Retrieve Wrong: Coverage-Guided Cross-Scale Re-Indexing for Knowledge-Faithful Generative Perception

The paper introduces CERES, a closed‑loop multimodal indexing framework that addresses semantic collapse in multimodal generation by building a three‑level semantic pyramid and using scale‑routed cross‑attention to generate images that remain retrievable by their original queries. CERES employs a co‑occurrence‑aware router, a lightweight U‑Net generator, and a soft‑Jaccard coverage objective to ensure generated images cover the intended concepts, verified by re‑indexing with a frozen vision‑language model and an external DINOv2 probe. Experiments on four pansharpening benchmarks show state‑of‑the‑art performance, especially under extreme scale variation, and significant improvements in concept‑query retrieval and image‑text ranking metrics.

By Guangyuan Dong, Chuang Liu, Haoyu Wang, Yangchen Zeng, Jiaqi Zhang, Li Jiuxing, Xiaoyang Yu, Pinlong Zhao, Yuchao Hou, Ziwei Li, Zheng Lin, Alexander Lim Han Yang, Yusen Wu
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

When Models Hear What They Expect: Diagnosing Prosodic Heuristics in Multimodal Sarcasm Detection

The study investigates how multimodal large language models (MLLMs) use prosodic cues in sarcasm detection. By testing Qwen2.5‑Omni and Qwen3‑Omni on Mandarin Chinese and English across five modality conditions, the authors find that adding audio increases false positives without improving true positives. Acoustic error analysis shows that models rely on a stereotypical prosodic pattern—elevated pitch and irregular pausing—that does not align with genuine sarcasm cues, and manipulating these dimensions alone can raise false positive rates up to 60%. The same effect appears in Gemini 3 Flash Preview, indicating the heuristic is not limited to a single architecture.

By Yongjian Chen, Pengfei Wei, Yiqun Sun, Zhu Li, Lawrence B. Hsieh
arXiv AI
Sep 1

TEMPO: Temporally-grounded Multi-task Post-training for Large Audio-Language Models

TEMPO is a unified model that adds temporally‑grounded capabilities to large audio‑language models, enabling timestamping of events, speakers, and sounds in audio, speech, and music. It introduces a supervised fine‑tuning stage featuring atomic timestamp tokens, a time‑aware projector with sinusoidal encodings, and a distance‑aware Gaussian loss, trained via a synthetic‑to‑real curriculum. Additionally, TEMPO employs reinforcement learning (GRPO) as a refinement step, and achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on a benchmark of 10K samples across five timestamping tasks, surpassing Audio Flamingo Next and Qwen3‑Omni.

By Apoorva Kulkarni, Kaousheik Jayakumar, Sreyan Ghosh, Utathya Aich, Ramani Duraiswami, Dinesh Manocha
arXiv AI
Sep 1

SafeAtlas-VL: Beyond Binary Multimodal Safety with Large-Scale Data and Guard Models

SafeAtlas-VL introduces a large multimodal safety dataset with 1.5 million instances, rating image, request, and response risks on a five‑level ordinal scale across 15 harm categories and 55 subcategories. The accompanying SafeAtlas‑Bench provides 5,000 held‑out cases for evaluating ordinal predictions and continuous risk scores. Models trained on this data, including an 8B Guard model, achieve state‑of‑the‑art performance, outperforming prior benchmarks by about 4% in F1 score.

By Zongrui Wang, Xiangyang Zhu, Sicheng Wang, Han Wang, Dingyi Rong, Zeyu Zhang, Chunyi Li, Yue Shi, Kaiwei Zhang, Zicheng Zhang, Yuan Tian, Qi Jia, Yan Teng, Wei Sun, Ning Liu, Guangtao Zhai
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 1

CL4D: Contrastive Language-4D Pretraining for Vision-Language Reasoning in Dynamic Scenes

arXiv:2608.18734v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: 4D understanding and reasoning is a fundamental capability for embodied AI agents operating in dynamic physical environments. However, existing vis...

By Kumal Hewagamage, Isuranga Senavirathne, Sasika Amarasinghe, Hasitha Gallella, Dulanga Weerakoon, Vigneshwaran Subbaraju, Ranga Rodrigo
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

SciOrch: Learning to Orchestrate Expert LLMs for Solving Frontier Multimodal Scientific Reasoning Tasks

arXiv:2606.15872v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Frontier scientific reasoning remains a major challenge for large language models (LLMs), where even the strongest commercial systems fall short of...

By Jingru Guo, Xiangyuan Xue, Lian Zhang, Wanghan Xu, Siki Chen, Philip Torr, Wanli Ouyang, Lei Bai, Zhenfei Yin
arXiv AI
Sep 1

Responsible Integration of AI in Cancer Genomics: Barriers, Risks, and Pathways to Trustworthy Clinical Translation

arXiv:2608.30912v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) are increasingly used to extract, integrate, and interpret biomedical knowledge rele...

By Bahar \.Ilgen, Yiannos Tolias, Denise K\"uhnert, Paraskevi Papadopoulou, Magnus Westerlund, Dominik Heider, Katharina Ladewig, Georges Hattab
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

Context-Aware Interleaved Batching for WhisperX

Context-Aware Interleaved Batching for WhisperX proposes a new batching strategy that combines WhisperX’s fast intra-audio batching with Whisper’s sequential context retention. By using voice activity detection (VAD) to define segment boundaries, the algorithm stabilizes Whisper’s text conditioning and preserves continuous historical context across batched audio segments. Experiments on long‑form audio benchmarks show reduced Word Error Rate and improved proper noun transcription while maintaining high‑throughput inference speeds.

By Carlos Bain, Max Bain