The paper investigates when auxiliary context can genuinely improve multi‑modal time series forecasting. It identifies two necessary dataset‑level conditions: the target must not be dominated by a last‑value shortcut (low autocorrelation) and the context must provide additional information beyond history (non‑zero conditional mutual information). Experiments on a large mixture‑of‑experts model and several fusion mechanisms show that only when both conditions hold does context routing yield a substantial reduction in mean‑squared error; otherwise its contribution collapses to a capacity floor.
By Ruizhe Zhou, Gaoyuan Du, Xiaoyang Liu, Haoqi Yao, Deepayan Chakrabarti, Jiating Lin, Yixuan Shen
The paper investigates when frequency decomposition aids Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) by introducing a dual‑branch, spectrally‑gated architecture (DBSG‑PINN) that separates low‑ and high‑frequency components. Experiments on five one‑dimensional PDE benchmarks show that frequency decomposition significantly reduces error—up to 59.2% on a multimodal wave problem—when the target solution is spectrally complex, but offers little improvement on smoother problems and can even worsen performance on a simple 1D wave benchmark. The adaptive gate’s effectiveness scales with the spectral richness of the solution, suggesting it exploits frequency structure rather than adding noise.
By Shubham Rai
CVE‑SAI is a method for e‑commerce product attribute indexing that first infers a candidate attribute from the primary image and question, then uses counterfactual visual evidence to decide whether to admit that candidate into the index. It employs Focus‑Zone Distortion to create an attribute‑specific visual‑dependence proxy and Evidence‑Guided Attention Redistribution to refine scoring, ensuring that only visually supported and risk‑controlled attributes are indexed. Experiments on Amazon Berkeley Objects demonstrate improved attribute inference, evidence localization, and controlled retrieval performance with minimal unsafe exposure.
By Xiaolong Sun, Qichao Wang, Hangyu Li, Liang Chen
The paper shows that only a small subset of attention heads in vision-language models is responsible for selecting critical visual tokens. By pruning tokens based on similarity before LLM reasoning and then applying head‑aware pruning during reasoning, the proposed ProViP framework achieves high task performance with significant speedups. Experiments on LLaVA‑1.5‑7B demonstrate 95.9% performance retention and a 1.62× inference speedup at an 88.9% pruning ratio.
By Chaofang Ma, Lin Jiang, Carol Jingyi Li, Xingyu Liu, Zeyu Li, Jiang Xu, Wei Zhang
The paper introduces a lightweight multimodal vision‑language framework based on TinyCLIP for fine‑grained classification of early‑stage apple fruitlet anatomy (calyx, fruitlet body, peduncle) in orchard images. Using a dataset of 600 high‑resolution RGB images, the model employs domain‑specific language prompts and a sliding‑window inference strategy to produce interpretable heatmaps for whole‑image localization. Achieving macro‑F1 of 0.93 on an NVIDIA T4 GPU and maintaining accuracy after INT8 quantization, the system is optimized for edge deployment on NVIDIA Jetson hardware with model sizes around 127‑137 MB and millisecond‑level inference.
By Ranjan Sapkota, William Bu, Chen Chen, Yunjun Xu, Manoj Karkee
The paper introduces a scalable product‑linking system that uses a retrieve‑then‑match cascade. First, a lightweight text cross‑encoder auto‑resolves the majority of merchant‑catalog product pairs with high precision, while an agentic multimodal vision‑language model handles the remaining ambiguous cases by inspecting images and performing web searches. This approach balances computational cost and accuracy, improving overall link coverage from 68% to 77% without requiring fine‑tuning of the agent.
By Jian Wang, Steven Xu, Sanjyot Thete, Maryam Barouti, Tom Tang, Elaine Wu, Charu Sareen, Kyle MacDonald
The paper introduces STDSH-MARL, a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning framework that uses a dual-stage hypergraph attention mechanism to capture spatio-temporal dependencies in corridor traffic signal control. It employs a hybrid discrete action space to jointly set signal phase configurations and green durations, allowing more adaptive timing. Experiments on a corridor network show that STDSH-MARL outperforms state‑of‑the‑art baselines, notably reducing tram waiting times while balancing overall network efficiency, tram priority, and bus service quality.
By Xiaocai Zhang, Neema Nassir, Milad Haghani
The study introduces a clinician‑in‑the‑loop benchmark to assess whether large language models can generate evidence‑grounded Brief Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (B‑HiTOP) item profiles from multimodal data, including passive sensing, ecological momentary assessment, and questionnaires. Using the GLOBEM dataset, the authors create 14,592 participant‑day instances aligned to 29 B‑HiTOP items across five spectra, and evaluate evidence compatibility rather than diagnostic accuracy. Two‑stage prediction improves compatibility for EMA and questionnaire evidence but reduces it for passive sensing and combined evidence, yielding more conservative score distributions across models, spectra, and evidence settings.
By Xiyun Hu, Xiangyuan Xue, Yuting Lyu, Hanya Shao, Jingping Nie
TacForcing is a streaming action‑generation framework that incorporates execution‑time tactile feedback into contact‑rich manipulation. It replaces a separate reactive controller with a streaming action expert that conditions actions on evolving tactile observations, and introduces Execution‑Aware Tactile Attention (EATA) to focus tactile conditioning on actions near execution. The method achieves 65% success in six simulated UniVTAC tasks and 69% in three real‑world contact‑rich manipulation tasks, outperforming strong baselines.
By Jianbo Zhou, Boyuan Zhao, Yuzheng Zhang, Yiyang Chen, Wenxin Chen, Qiuyue Li, Xiangyang Gu, Yuhan Cao, Xiao Xia, Yanzhe Hu, Zhijie Deng
In 2026, the SHROOM-Visions shared task was launched at the UncertaiNLP Workshop co‑located with EMNLP to address hallucinations in large vision‑language models. The task builds on the SHEEP dataset and asks participants to detect and classify fine‑grained hallucination spans in image‑conditioned text generation across four languages (Chinese, English, French, Italian) using a five‑class taxonomy. The competition attracted 27 teams and over 600 system submissions, with top systems achieving character‑level, label‑conditioned, and IoU scores of 0.58, 0.46, and 0.51 respectively, surpassing baselines by 30‑40 points.
By Ra\'ul V\'azquez, Aman Sinha, Chuyuan Li, Claudio Savelli, Eduardo Cal\`o, Emilio Raimond, Stella Frank, Hengyu Luo, Flavio Giobergia, Vincent Segonne, Lorenzo Vaiani, J\"org Tiedemann, Timothee Mickus
The paper introduces MCNet, a neural network that assigns a Modality Contribution Score (MCS) to each patient, indicating how much structural MRI versus amyloid PET drives the diagnostic decision for Alzheimer’s disease. Across 327 ADNI-3 participants, MCNet achieved strong three‑class staging (AUC = 0.881) and the MCS showed a clear, statistically significant increase in PET dominance from cognitively normal to AD. The method was validated on an independent OASIS‑3 cohort and compared favorably to SHAP, suggesting it can guide personalized imaging and clinical trial decisions.
By Dawa Chyophel Lepcha, Aaliya Ali, Sophie A. Martin, Deepika Koundal, Pierrick Coupe, Shabbir Syed-Abdul
The paper examines a multimodal approach that combines a self‑supervised GNN encoder with an alternating optimization scheme involving a language‑model teacher. Despite the expectation that this joint strategy would enhance predictive performance, the authors find that the combined model fails to deliver significant gains. They identify six key factors—ranging from anchor strength trade‑offs to misaligned representation spaces—that explain why the integration of text knowledge does not fully benefit graph learning.
By Fumiaki Kimino (SOKENDAI), Ryoma Sato (SOKENDAI, National Institute of Informatics)
The Planetary Prediction Engine (PPE) is an autonomous AI system that transforms natural-language queries into end-to-end geospatial predictions. It automatically retrieves and fuses multimodal datasets from open-web and Earth observation sources, incorporates foundation model embeddings, and searches task‑specific model families with overfitting safeguards. Across multiple domains, PPE outperforms state‑of‑the‑art baselines, improving regression metrics for CDC health indicators, FEMA risk indices, and the Social Vulnerability Index, doubling accuracy for Nigerian food security indicators, and achieving higher recall in Ebola outbreak nowcasting.
By Evelyn Ma, Rama Kumar Pasumarthi, Kishwar Shafin, Mandar Sharma, Mimi Sun, Hamed Sadeghi, Dav M. Ebengo, Mbulayi Onesime, Rouslan Solomakhin, John Wamburu, William Ogallo, Aisha Walcott-Bryant, Sanxing Chen, Arbaaz Muslim, Yael Mayer, Ronald Ho, Roy Lee, Ruth Alcantara, Abdoulaye Diack, Monica Bharel, Lambert Rosique, Jeremy Amez-Droz, Christopher Haire, James Manyika, Yossi Matias, Niv Efron, Gautam Prasad, Shravya Shetty
The paper introduces MSM‑Seg, a dual‑memory segmentation framework for 3D multi‑modal brain tumor segmentation. It combines a modality‑and‑slice memory attention module to capture cross‑modal and spatial‑slice dependencies, a multi‑scale category‑agnostic prompt encoder for whole‑tumor guidance, and a modality‑adaptive fusion decoder to integrate complementary decoding information. Experiments on various MRI datasets show that MSM‑Seg surpasses state‑of‑the‑art methods for metastases and glioma tumor segmentation.
By Yuxiang Luo, Qing Xu, Hai Huang, Yuqi Ouyang, Xiangjian He, Zhen Chen, Wenting Duan, Jiebo Luo
The paper presents 3DGAA, a fabrication-first framework that generates view-consistent, geometry-preserving adversarial wraps for vehicles using 3D Gaussian splatting optimization. It ensures consistency across viewpoints, illumination, and occlusion while limiting changes to vehicle geometry, producing realistic print-only textures that significantly reduce detection confidence and average precision in simulations and physical tests. Ablation and efficiency studies analyze the impact of physical filtering, augmentation, and shape-consistency regularization, and the method demonstrates robustness against common preprocessing defenses and cross-detector transferability.
By Yixun Zhang, Lizhi Wang, Junjun Zhao, Wending Zhao, Feng Zhou, Yonghao Dang, Jianqin Yin
The study introduces Auditable CT Phenotyping (ACT), a method that uses report-derived radiological observations to predict 221 electronic-health-record phenotypes from CT scans. Trained on 38,317 patients and evaluated on 25,183 held‑out patients, ACT outperformed five vision‑language baselines and CT‑CLIP in both zero‑shot and linear probing settings. Analysis of the model’s probes revealed that a small set of observations, such as aortic and coronary calcification, dominated top predictions, but restricting the observation bank to clinician‑specified evidence improved interpretability without sacrificing accuracy.
By Riga Wu, Walter Witschey, Yicheng Li, Felix Barajas Ordonez, Keno K. Bressem, Lisa C. Adams, Gary E. Weissman, Li Shen, Christos Davatzikos, Eduardo Barbosa, Daniel Truhn, Tianyu Han
MMEmb-R1 is a multimodal embedding framework that enhances reasoning by treating it as a latent variable and selecting beneficial reasoning paths through pair-aware selection and counterfactual intervention. It uses reinforcement learning to invoke reasoning only when necessary, reducing unnecessary computation and latency. On the MMEB-V2 benchmark, MMEmb-R1 achieves a state‑of‑the‑art score of 71.2 with just 4 B parameters.
By Yuchi Wang, Dingkang Yang, Haiyang Yu, Weikang Bian, Jiefeng Long, Xiao Liang, Chao Feng, Hongsheng Li
OmniPhys is a large-scale multimodal benchmark designed to evaluate physics understanding and reasoning in models. It contains 15,246 questions and 19,850 images sourced from Chinese educational materials ranging from middle school to university level, with detailed annotations for fine-grained analysis. The benchmark also tests models’ ability to generate structured physics diagrams, a key component of authentic problem solving, and highlights gaps in current multimodal large language models.
By Hao Chen, Yumin Lin, Nadila Yushanjiang, Xin Lin, Min Zhang
OVO‑S‑Bench is a fully human‑annotated benchmark designed to evaluate streaming spatial intelligence in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). It contains 1,680 questions derived from 348 source videos, each with a query timestamp and evidence interval, and tests models on four levels of abstraction: instantaneous egocentric perception, spatiotemporal context tracking, generative spatial reasoning, and allocentric spatial mapping. Across 38 MLLMs, Gemini‑3.1‑Pro scored 59.2 versus 92.2 for human experts, with allocentric spatial mapping identified as the main challenge, and the benchmark reveals that chain‑of‑thought reasoning can worsen spatial errors when not grounded in the stream.
By Yifei Li, Pengyiang Liu, Yuhang Zang, Zhongyue Shi, Qi Fu, Hongye Hao, Jiwen Lu
GTPred is a new benchmark for geo‑temporal prediction that evaluates multi‑modal large language models (MLLMs) on 370 images taken across 120 years worldwide. It assesses predictions by matching both the year and a hierarchical location sequence, and includes annotated reasoning chains to test intermediate reasoning. Experiments on 15 MLLMs show that while visual perception is strong, models still lack world knowledge and geo‑temporal reasoning, and that adding temporal data improves location inference.
By Jinnao Li, Tingzhu Chen, Changbo Wang