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 28

Training-Free Pronunciation Transcription via Text-Constrained Acoustic Rescoring

The paper introduces a training‑free speech‑and‑text‑to‑pronunciation (ST2P) pipeline that combines lexical candidates from G2P tools with acoustic rescoring using frozen pretrained S2P models. By performing a left‑to‑right greedy search over whole‑sequence negative log‑likelihoods, the method achieves a dramatic reduction in character error rate on Japanese corpora, outperforming both baseline G2P/S2P approaches and commercial multimodal LLMs. The approach is also significantly faster—3–3.5× faster than beam search and twice as fast as direct decoding—while maintaining high accuracy across multiple languages.

By Hikaru Asano, Yotaro Kubo, So Kuroki
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 28

THA: Weighted Finite-State Text Normalization and Inverse Text Normalization for Khmer

The paper introduces Tha, a Khmer text normalization and inverse text normalization toolkit that uses weighted finite-state transducers. Tha processes entire lines in a single shortest-path search and employs a second transducer to prevent token boundaries within Khmer syllables. On Google's Khmer test suite, Tha achieves perfect agreement on 274 cardinals and correctly rewrites 153 of 158 real TTS prompts.

By Seanghay Yath
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 28

MexHat: A Dataset for Hate Speech Detection in Mexican Spanish Videos

MexHat is a newly released video dataset aimed at improving hate‑speech detection in Mexican Spanish. It contains roughly 1,000 clips annotated for three broad categories—no negative content, offensive content, and hate‑speech—as well as a finer classification into three hate‑speech sub‑categories. The paper presents dataset statistics and baseline results, underscoring the challenges of detecting culturally and contextually nuanced hate speech in multimodal content.

By Itzel Tlelo-Coyotecatl, Hugo Jair Escalante
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 28

Asymmetric Classifier-Free Guidance for Target-Speaker ASR

The paper introduces asymmetric classifier‑free guidance (CFG) for target‑speaker ASR using Whisper, where a speaker‑conditioned branch predicts the target transcript and a speaker‑unconditioned branch predicts serialized multi‑speaker transcripts. CFG modulates the influence of speaker conditioning during decoding via a single guidance scale, which is first set globally on development data and then refined per utterance by a lightweight encoder‑based predictor while keeping the recognition model fixed. The resulting system yields up to 21.8% relative WER reduction over a condition‑only baseline and 5.6% over standard conditional decoding under domain shifts.

By Yiwen Guan, Jacob Whitehill
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 28

Symbiotic Architecture for Post-Hoc Audio Extension of Frozen Language Models

The paper introduces a symbiotic architecture that equips large language models with audio‑understanding abilities without fine‑tuning their weights. It uses an injector module to write audio‑conditioned vectors into the LLM’s key‑value cache, allowing the model to act as an audio language model while keeping the backbone unchanged. The approach improves scalability—since injection cost depends on the injector width—and preserves the LLM’s original text performance, outperforming conventional frozen‑LLM methods and approaching fine‑tuned ALM results on audio tasks.

By Yotaro Kubo, Qi Sun, Yujin Tang
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 28

MM-VeriAgent: Learning to Use Extensive Tools to Verify Multimodal Misinformation with Reinforcement Learning

MM-VeriAgent is a reinforcement‑learning framework that learns to verify multimodal misinformation by leveraging a specialized toolkit called MM-VeriTools. The toolkit encapsulates the strongest models for textual, visual, and cross‑modal forgery analysis as callable tools with a unified interface. To improve training efficiency, the authors introduce a Tool‑Execution Cache that pre‑executes candidate tool calls and reuses cached outputs, resulting in substantial accuracy gains on MMFakeBench and reduced online tool executions during training.

By Peipei Li, Shuhan Xia, Shengyang Liu, Zekun Li, Ran He
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 28

Timo: $\textbf{T}$aming Mult$\textbf{i}$modal Diffusion Transformer for Human $\textbf{Mo}$tion Generation

The paper introduces Timo, a kinematics-aware multimodal diffusion transformer designed for human motion generation. Timo employs fully shared multimodal attention, flow matching, and geometric/rotational-kinematics supervision to better coordinate articulated motion, and uses a two-stage curriculum to align motion with text captions. The authors also present a new benchmark of 40,025 clips from six datasets, showing that Timo outperforms state‑of‑the‑art methods, achieving a 40.8% relative improvement over Kimodo on average.

By Zhao Wang, Jiangtao Hu, Jack Yu, Tao Yu
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 28

Does Understanding Inform Generation in Unified Multimodal Models? From Analysis to Path Forward

The paper introduces UniSandbox, a decoupled evaluation framework with controlled synthetic datasets, to study whether understanding informs generation in Unified Multimodal Models. Results show a notable understanding‑generation gap, especially in reasoning generation and knowledge transfer. Explicit Chain‑of‑Thought (CoT) in the understanding module bridges this gap, and self‑training can internalize CoT for implicit reasoning during generation; query‑based architectures also exhibit latent CoT‑like properties that aid knowledge transfer.

By Yuwei Niu, Weiyang Jin, Jiaqi Liao, Chaoran Feng, Peng Jin, Bin Lin, Zongjian Li, Bin Zhu, Weihao Yu, Li Yuan
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 28

Diagnosing the Sources of Compositional Failure in Vision-Language Models: A Controlled Analysis

arXiv:2609.31456v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) often struggle with compositional reasoning tasks, but the reasons for this underperformance remain unclear. A common hyp...

By Mona Gandhi, Cenk Merih Olcay, Kuan-Chieh Lo, Santiago Castro, Christopher W. Myers, Srinivasan Parthasarathy
arXiv AI
Sep 28

BioEVAL: A global, multi-institutional benchmark of large language and multimodal models for bioengineering

BioEVAL is a global, multi‑institutional benchmark that evaluates large language and multimodal models on experimental reasoning tasks in bioengineering. It comprises 608 items across 11 bioengineering subfields, including 359 vetted multiple‑choice questions, 218 literature synthesis tasks, and 10 multimodal image‑interpretation problems. The benchmark was used to assess models such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok, revealing accuracies up to 90% on MCQs, a 0.72 similarity score on literature synthesis, and 80% accuracy on multimodal tasks, with notable variation across subfields.

By Shun Ye, Vinny Chandran Suja, Chenlong Li, Chongming Jiang, Reza Zamani, Xiang Li, Christopher Bain, Yuqi Zhou, Walker Peterson, Huidong Wang, Chenglang Hu, Jongchan Park, Xiao Cheng, Benjamin Swedlund, Sandra Murillo, Anjali Sivanandan, Shiyu Sun, Liang Lanfeng, Mohammad Tariqul Islam, Baju C. Joy, Ishaq N. Khan, Sreedhar S. Kumar, Gabriel Mercado-V\'asquez, James V. Vizzard, Jonathan M. Matthews, Helen Huang, Xiaolu Guo, Ethan Nicklow, Guorui Chen, Ryan A. Neff, Surjendu Maity, Hyeonjin Park, Han-ho Joo, Katherine Dong, Yuyan Cai, Weihang Huang, Yichen Zou, Rui Yan, Raphael Figueroa, Artem Goncharov, Bella Rose Schremmer, Lian Elsa Linton, Keisuke Goda, Liang Gao, Ke Cheng, Leonardo Morsut, Jennifer L. Wilson, Jianping Fu, Lim Chwee Teck, Deblina Sarkar, Andreas Hierlemann, Sava\c{s} Tay, Alexander Hoffmann, Donald Richieri Griffin, Jun Chen, Shana O. Kelley, Shyni Varghese, Jinwoo Cheon, Wilbur A. Lam, James J. Moon, Wilson W. Wong, Samir Mitragotri, Dino Di Carlo
arXiv AI
Sep 28

Can Linguistic Reasoning Vectors Enhance Multimodal Reasoning Ability?

The paper introduces LIFT, a lightweight vector‑intervention technique that transfers reasoning capability from a base large language model (LLM) to a vision‑language model (VLM) without retraining the VLM backbone. LIFT defines Reasoning Vectors as differences in hidden states between a reasoning path with an explicit trace and a solver path without it, and injects these vectors into the VLM’s language‑side activations. Experiments on two VLMs across six reasoning benchmarks show that vectors derived from the base LLM consistently outperform those derived from the aligned VLM, indicating that the base LLM is a more effective source for recovering degraded reasoning. "whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that a simple, frozen‑backbone intervention can partially restore reasoning abilities in multimodal models, highlighting the value of leveraging the original language model’s reasoning power."

By Ziyi Wang, Li Li, Aolin Zhou, Yankun Shen, Chonghan Liu, Shuxia Lin, Xu Yang
arXiv AI
Sep 28

A Survey on Fake Review Detection: From Pre-trained Language Models to Large Language Models

The article surveys fake review detection research, focusing on how pre‑trained language models (PLMs) and large language models (LLMs) influence both the generation of deceptive reviews and their detection. It reviews 211 studies from 2018 to early 2026, categorizing methods by evidence source—such as review text, sentiment, rating behavior, temporal metadata, user‑product graphs, multimodal content, external knowledge, and LLM‑generated signals—and by fusion level. The survey traces the evolution from traditional machine learning to PLM‑based and LLM‑based approaches, evaluates performance on Amazon, Yelp, and OpSpam benchmarks, and highlights open challenges including adversarial generation, cross‑domain transfer, uncertainty‑aware fusion, robustness to missing sources, interpretability, and trustworthy evaluation of AI‑generated deceptive content.

By Fanji Yang (Guizhou University of Finance and Economics), Huiyao Chen (Harbin Institute of Technology), Xi Yu (Guizhou University of Finance and Economics), Meishan Zhang (Harbin Institute of Technology), Xiaohong Xiao (Guizhou University of Commerce), Mingsen Deng (Guizhou University of Finance and Economics)
arXiv AI
Sep 28

Actively Resolving Contextual Uncertainty for Underspecified Tasks in Natural Language

The paper introduces CLUE, a framework that lets robots actively resolve contextual uncertainty for underspecified natural language tasks. CLUE employs an LLM-derived policy to generate task-relevant hypotheses and plans, then uses an online language-embedded map to ground these into actions, refining its plan through closed-loop interaction. Experiments on a Boston Dynamics Spot across diverse indoor and outdoor settings show CLUE achieving near-oracle performance and outperforming LLM planners without closed-loop feedback by a significant margin.

By Zachary Ravichandran, Jonathan Diller, Fernando Cladera, Varun Murali, George J. Pappas, Vijay Kumar