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 Computer Vision
Sep 22

A$^2$Safe: Counterfactual Evidence-Aligned Adaptive Agent Collaboration for Safe and Effective Visual Question Answering

A$^2$Safe is a framework for safe and effective Visual Question Answering that aligns counterfactual evidence with adaptive agent collaboration. It uses a Grounded Safety Evidence Board to make safety decisions explicit, enforcing invariance to safety‑irrelevant changes while allowing appropriate transitions when risk‑critical evidence changes. The system achieves a 95.72 SIUO safety score, reduces benign refusals on MOSSBench to 14.67%, and maintains a 78.34 average VQA score with 27.8% token overhead.

By Quanxing Xu, Ling Zhou, Xian Zhong, Jinyu Tian, Xiaohua Huang, Rubing Huang, Chia-Wen Lin
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 22

0.5\%>100\%: Bidirectional Reciprocal Learning for Referring Image Segmentation

The paper introduces Bidirectional Reciprocal Learning (BRL), a parameter‑efficient fine‑tuning framework for referring image segmentation that operates on frozen vision foundation models. BRL employs two lightweight adapters—Reciprocal Attention Adapter (RAA) for token‑level cross‑modal attention and Reciprocal Gate Adapter (RGA) for channel‑level gating—to enable hierarchical, bidirectional information flow between vision and language. Experiments on RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg show that BRL outperforms existing methods while updating fewer than 0.5% of backbone parameters.

By Xiaoqiang Lu, Licheng Jiao, Lingling Li, Yuting Yang, Long Sun, Wenping Ma, Xu Liu, Fang Liu
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 22

VideoGen-Agent: Reinforcing Video Generation Agents

VideoGen-Agent is a multimodal agent that uses multitask agentic reinforcement learning to coordinate external tools for video generation. It learns to augment, generate, and verify videos through multi‑turn interactions, guided by prompts and intermediate observations. On the new VABench benchmark, the agent improves base text‑to‑video performance by 19.1 points, and further upgrades to generation tools raise the score to 86.1, with human raters favoring the upgraded configuration in 84.3% of comparisons.

By Binxu Li, Haoyi Duan, Yuhui Zhang, Yaohui Zhang, Zihao Lin, Kaituo Feng, Suozhi Huang, Xiangyi Li, Yu Li, Chunyuan Li, Shilong Liu, Mengdi Wang
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 22

Cognitive Action Reasoning for Proactive Robots from Human-Centered Multimodal Observations

The paper introduces ProAction, a multimodal dataset of 10,000 samples comprising visual, audio, and text inputs across 12 daily-life scenarios, designed to support the Proactive Robot Action Reasoning (ProRobo) problem. It presents a two-stage human-in-the-loop annotation pipeline that incorporates appraisal and Theory-of-Mind considerations to generate cognitively grounded high-level action labels. The authors benchmark multimodal large language models and propose MMC2Act, showing that training on ProAction significantly improves proactive action reasoning compared to general-purpose models.

By Zhihao Gu, Kechao Zhu, Yuanfeng Wu, Mohan Liu, Ankit Kumar Shaw, ChenDong Hong, Xuanyu Chen, Dengchen Mei, Xu Tianyi, Lin Wang
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 22

Graded-Relevance Composed Multimodal Retrieval for E-commerce Visual Search at Scale

The paper introduces GradCIR, a method for training composed image retrieval (CIR) systems on graded relevance rather than binary relevance. It uses a vision‑language model to generate queries and 4‑level relevance labels, an iterative feedback loop to mine hard negatives, and a hierarchy‑aware angular objective to directly optimize graded labels. Experiments on a Walmart catalog and FashionIQ show significant NDCG improvements and the system is deployed in Walmart’s live visual‑search traffic.

By Anubhav Gupta, Hrushikesh Mohapatra, Prijith Chandra, Asish Mohapatra, Anuj Garg, Arvind Maan, Sudip Datta, Venkat Bulusu, Sitesh Kumar Jalan
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

Generalized Multimodal Foundation Model

The paper introduces a generalized multimodal foundation model that can handle arbitrary combinations of modalities and prediction tasks. It trains on large-scale synthetic multimodal datasets with diverse causal structures to learn transferable multimodal correlations. Experiments on 18 real-world datasets across 12 modalities and 11 tasks show competitive performance compared to specialized models without task-specific adaptation.

By Huizi Cui, Zongbo Han, Chenggong Ding, Naichuan Xiao, Jialong Yang, Jingdong Chen, Guangyu Wang, Qinghua Hu, Changqing Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

CSC: Calibrated Simplicity for Conflict-Aware Social Bot Detection in the LLM Era

The paper introduces CSC, a calibrated-simplicity framework for detecting social bots in the era of large language models. CSC combines a simplified prototype-guided graph expert, calibrated simplex-constrained fusion, and a lightweight inconsistency expert to address modality conflict between semantic and structural signals. Experiments on TwiBot-22, TwiBot-20, and MGStBot-large demonstrate that CSC improves calibrated decision quality while maintaining competitive performance across benchmarks.

By Yipeng Qian, Pengjie Zhao, Chaoxi Niu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

Spatial-Interactor: Learning Spatial Reasoning through Interaction with the Observable Physical World

arXiv:2609.23038v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spatial reasoning is essential for vision-language models (VLMs) to understand and act in the physical world. Reasoning in dynamic environments requi...

By Kaixiang Yao, Xu Wang, Miao Pan, Hu Xiyue, Weishi Wang, Daniel Dahlmeier, Jintao Chen, Yongliang Shen, Xuhong Zhang, Wenqi Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

MMS-VPR: A Fine-Grained Multimodal Street-Level Visual Place Recognition Dataset and Evaluation Benchmark for Dense Pedestrian Environments

arXiv:2505.12254v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Existing visual place recognition (VPR) datasets predominantly rely on vehicle-mounted imagery, offer limited multimodal diversity, and under...

By Yiwei Ou, Xiaobin Ren, Ronggui Sun, Guansong Gao, Kaiqi Zhao, Manfredo Manfredini