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 Machine Learning
Sep 17

Physics-Informed Sylvester Normalizing Flows for Bayesian Inference in Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy

The paper presents a Bayesian inference framework for magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) that employs Sylvester normalizing flows (SNFs) to approximate posterior distributions over metabolite concentrations. A physics-based decoder incorporates prior knowledge of MRS signal formation, ensuring realistic distribution representations. Validation on simulated 7T proton MRS data shows accurate metabolite quantification, well-calibrated uncertainties, and insights into parameter correlations and multi‑modal distributions.

By Julian P. Merkofer, Dennis M. J. van de Sande, Alex A. Bhogal, Ruud J. G. van Sloun
arXiv AI
Sep 17

SAGE: Governed Artifact Generation from Enterprise Guidelines

SAGE is a governed multi‑stage LLM pipeline that transforms enterprise guideline documents—containing narrative text, tables, and images—into structured artifacts. It uses a shared versioned rule store, schema‑validated contracts, and provenance tracking to validate, score, and reconcile extracted rules, automatically approving high‑confidence outputs while flagging uncertain items for human review. In a test on 120 documents, SAGE reduced processing time from days to 20–100 minutes and achieved a 96% success rate with only 3.2% hallucination.

By Mohammadreza Sediqin, Shivali Dalmia, Sumukha Thoppanahalli, Srinivasa Karthikeya Reddy Kovvuri, Abhishek Mukherji
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Imitation Learning for Autonomous Driving in CARLA

The paper presents a compact multimodal policy trained via behavioral cloning to drive autonomously in the CARLA simulator. Using five‑frame histories of RGB images, LiDAR, telemetry, and lane waypoints, the 1.36‑million‑parameter model predicts throttle, brake, and steering at 20 Hz. Trained on 236,882 windows (≈3.3 hours of driving) from 448 captures, the policy drives for hours on both training and unseen routes without collisions, demonstrating qualitative transfer and recovery from large trajectory deviations.

By Jordy Kieto
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Learning Heterogeneous Preferences

The paper introduces a method for learning heterogeneous, individually conditioned utility functions—termed individuated utility—by leveraging rational choice theory. It presents a multi-stage architecture that estimates these functions from multimodal data and evaluates it on a large dataset of aesthetic judgments about automotive wheel designs. Results show that individuated models outperform universal utility models and foundation baselines, indicating that annotator disagreement reflects meaningful preference diversity.

By Shiwali Mohan, Matt Hong, Dule Shu, Aniek Fransen, Shabnam Hakimi, Matt Klenk
arXiv AI
Sep 17

The Mirage of Calibrated Confidence: Trajectory-Independence of Verbalized Confidence in Vision-Language Models

The paper investigates how Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) often report high confidence even after self‑correcting or arriving at wrong answers, a phenomenon the authors attribute to the verbalized confidence being largely independent of the model’s reasoning trajectory. By analyzing content variation, token masking, and hesitation markers, the authors demonstrate that confidence does not adequately reflect the actual reasoning process and that calibration training can sometimes worsen this disconnect. To address this blind spot, they introduce the Trajectory‑Grounding Score (TGS) in two forms—TGS‑self and TGS‑pair—and propose TGS‑Bench, a suite of 10 benchmarks that reveal divergences between conventional calibration metrics and trajectory‑grounded confidence.

By Jisoo Yang, Jaeho Han, Trung X. Pham, Junyeong Kim
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Lost in Perception: Isolating Perceptual and Reasoning Failures in Multimodal Physics and Geometry Reasoning

The paper introduces a five-task diagnostic experiment that separates perceptual and reasoning failures in multimodal large language models on physics and geometry benchmarks. It finds that misinterpreting diagrams hurts performance even on text-only solvable problems, and that accuracy improves when models receive human-authored captions. The study shows that correcting captions can recover many errors, revealing distinct reasoning bottlenecks that differ by domain, while a heavily pretrained model still underperforms and often truncates reasoning traces.

By Raj Jaiswal, Sree Krishna Uppalapati, Dhruvkumar Patel, Ria Khatoniar, Tanuja Ganu, Rajiv Ratn Shah
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Rethinking Domain Specialization for Open-Ended Scientific Reasoning in Astronomy Language Models

The paper investigates whether domain-specific fine‑tuning benefits open‑ended scientific reasoning in astronomy. Using a curated 300‑question QA benchmark from 2017–2026 Olympiad‑style materials, the authors compare open‑weight, API‑served general‑purpose, multimodal, and astronomy‑specialized language models. Results show that strong general‑purpose models set the highest correctness baseline, but variations in metric agreement, judge sensitivity, benchmark composition, and modality suggest that domain specialization is task‑ and deployment‑dependent and that domain‑specific evaluation is crucial for scientific workflows.

By Vanessa Lama, Sanjay Das, Emily Herron, Yuan-Sen Ting, Tijmen de Haan, Junqi Yin, Tirthankar Ghosal, Feiyi Wang
arXiv AI
Sep 17

EDCT-Bench: Uncovering Faithfulness Gaps in VLMs via Explanation-Driven Counterfactual Testing

EDCT-Bench is a benchmark that evaluates the faithfulness of Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) by using Explanation‑Driven Counterfactual Testing (EDCT). EDCT extracts visual concepts from a model’s natural language explanation, applies minimal verified edits to those concepts, and checks whether the model’s answer and explanation remain consistent with the edited image. The benchmark covers three domains—knowledge‑intensive VQA, safety‑critical driving, and 3D spatial reasoning—and reveals significant faithfulness gaps in current VLMs, while also showing that EDCT‑generated counterfactuals can improve training.

By Sihao Ding, Santosh Vasa, Aditi Ramadwar, Thomas Monninger
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Confidence Comes from Experience: Experiential Confidence Estimation from Reasoning to Agents

The paper introduces XConf, an experiential confidence estimator that augments a language model’s current inference with a record of its past graded episodes. By recalling similar past tasks and reflecting on past outcomes, XConf generates confidence scores without accessing logits or updating weights, achieving superior discrimination and calibration across diverse benchmarks. The method demonstrates significant gains in selective prediction, improving success rates on agent tasks by up to 8.7 points.

By Caiqi Zhang, Xiaochen Zhu, Chengzu Li, Yulong Chen, Dharshan Kumaran, Nigel Collier
arXiv AI
Sep 17

CapMap-MS-TTA: 3rd Place Solution for the MUMU Track of the 8th LSVOS Challenge at ECCV 2026

The paper presents CapMap-MS-TTA, a unified multimodal model that achieved third place in the MUMU track of the 8th Large-scale Video Object Segmentation Challenge. The solution tackles image tagging, open‑vocabulary object detection, and English captioning under strict resource limits, using an expanded keyword lexicon and lightweight expand‑hints for tagging, and Florence‑2 with multi‑scale and horizontal‑flip TTA plus label‑aware NMS for detection. The approach improves the reproduced Florence‑2 baseline from 15.16 to a best public score of 16.4815 without fine‑tuning.

By Chengfeng Qiu, Kaifeng Wei
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

Integrated Optimization of Automated Warehouse Operations and Last-Mile Transport for Differentiated On-Demand Delivery

The paper introduces an integrated optimization framework that links automated warehouse operations with last‑mile multi‑modal transport for differentiated on‑demand delivery. It employs a deep reinforcement learning approach—MORM‑AGDQN for warehouse scheduling and MRMH‑HCVRP for external routing—to balance service level, cost, and demand. The results demonstrate significant performance gains, including a 100 % on‑time delivery rate, a 29.3 % reduction in average last‑mile delivery time, a 46.4 % cut in total transportation distance, and a high‑priority service rate exceeding 92 % while maintaining cost‑customer satisfaction balance.

By Xiaozhu Sun, Bilal Farooq
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

LightSleepX: A Lightweight, Inception-Based Dual-Modal Network for Sleep Staging

LightSleepX is a lightweight, inception‑based dual‑modal network designed for sleep staging in resource‑constrained environments. It uses depthwise separable convolutions, multi‑scale enhanced attention for efficient EEG/EOG feature extraction, and a Mamba encoder for long‑range temporal modeling. On public benchmarks, it achieves 85.9% accuracy on Sleep‑EDF‑20 and 81.8% on ISRUC‑S3 with only 0.049M parameters and 195.9 MFLOPs.

By Yi Wang
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 17

T-SANDHI: Tone Sandhi-aware Adaptive Network with Decoupled Hybrid Injection for Low-resource Taiwanese Hokkien Speech Recognition

T‑SANDHI is a lightweight Taiwanese Hokkien ASR model that addresses tone sandhi by decoupling surface acoustics from lexical intent on a frozen Whisper backbone. It uses a lexicon‑guided multi‑task learning framework with text‑derived pseudo labels and a hybrid injection module that dynamically gates independent citation and sandhi phonetic streams. Experiments on the TAT‑MOE corpus and two blind test sets show that this explicit disentanglement resolves tonal mapping confusion and outperforms baselines while keeping parameter usage low.

By Hung-Yang Sung, Chien-Chun Wang, Tien-Hong Lo, Yu-Sheng Tsao, Yung-Chang Hsu, Berlin Chen
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 17

PANORAMA: Panoptic Grounded Captioning via Mask Proposal Selection

PANORAMA introduces a new panoptic grounded captioning framework that jointly generates detailed image captions and associates each phrase with precise pixel-level masks. The authors create PanoCaps, a human‑annotated benchmark with dense captions and near‑complete pixel coverage, and propose a phrase‑mask matching protocol with a generalized Panoptic Quality metric. PANORAMA conditions a pretrained segmenter on contextualized phrase representations, learns to select appropriate masks, and achieves state‑of‑the‑art grounding performance on PanoCaps and other pixel‑level tasks.

By Sara Pieri, Evangelos Kazakos, Shizhe Chen, Josef Sivic, Cordelia Schmid
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 17

Divide and Conquer: A Hybrid Strategy Defeats Multimodal Large Language Models

The paper introduces JMLLM, a multimodal jailbreaking approach that targets text, visual, and auditory inputs to expose vulnerabilities in large language models. It also presents TriJail, a new dataset containing jailbreak prompts across all three modalities. Experiments on TriJail and AdvBench show higher attack success rates and lower time overhead compared to existing methods.

By Yanxu Mao, Peipei Liu, Tiehan Cui, Zhaoteng Yan, Congying Liu, Datao You
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 17

Multi-View Mixture-of-Experts with Vision-Language Reranking for Cross-View Object Geo-Localization

The paper introduces MVLGeo, a unified framework for cross-view object geo-localization that combines multiple viewpoints into a single model. It employs Vision‑Language Reranking to use contextual text from the query view, a multi‑view Mixture‑of‑Experts architecture to share knowledge and reduce redundancy, and an adaptive elliptical prior for positional encoding. Experiments on CVOGL benchmarks show that MVLGeo achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance and robustness to input degradation.

By Xuyu Fan, Qi Ming, Zhu Han, Liuqian Wang, Siyuan Cao, Xiaohan Zhang, Xudong Zhao, Mingjing Zhao, Yuhan Zhang
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 17

Vocabulary-Guided Gait Recognition

The paper introduces Vocabulary‑Guided Gait Recognition (Gait‑World), a new paradigm that leverages human vocabularies and Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) to better understand and recognize gait. It proposes the α‑Gait model, which uses a Vocabulary Relation Mapper and a Gait Fine‑grained Detector to align vocabulary prompts with gait features, addressing the challenge of heterogeneous embedding spaces. Experiments on multiple gait datasets demonstrate the potential of incorporating VLM‑derived vocabulary information into gait recognition.

By Panjian Huang, Saihui Hou, Chunshui Cao, Xu Liu, Yongzhen Huang
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 17

Divide and Conquer: Mixture-of-Bottleneck Experts in Informative Ordinal Space for Video-based Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

The paper proposes a Mixture-of-Bottleneck (MoB) framework for video-based multimodal sentiment analysis that treats sentiment as an ordinal regression problem, splitting it into polarity recognition and intensity prediction. MoB assigns modality‑specific latent experts to each sub‑task, learns compact, task‑relevant representations via an information bottleneck, and fuses these experts with a multimodal bottleneck routing module and hard mining strategy. Experiments on four datasets and language models demonstrate that MoB captures fine‑grained intra‑ and inter‑modal dynamics, improving performance and enabling more trustworthy localization of nuanced sentiment signals.

By Ronghao Lin, Qiaolin He, Zefeng Lu, Yichu Liu, Li Huang, Sijie Mai, Haifeng Hu, Yap-peng Tan
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 17

Lumen: Parameter-Efficient Alignment of Pretrained Vision and Language Encoders for Zero-Shot Computational Pathology

Lumen is a pathology vision‑language model that aligns frozen unimodal foundation models (Virchow2 and BioMedBERT) using rank‑4 adapters and projection heads, training only 0.40% of the total parameters on the QUILT‑1M corpus. It achieves the highest mean chance‑corrected balanced accuracy (0.546) across nine zero‑shot patch benchmarks and demonstrates strong performance on lymph‑node metastasis detection, with AUROC scores of 0.964 internally and 0.955 externally. While it ranks third in cross‑modal retrieval, Lumen’s low‑parameter training yields competitive results at both patch and slide levels.

By Kiarash Tajbakhsh, Abdelrahman Faqieh, Michael Jopiti, Javier Garcia-Baroja, Philipp Zens, Branislav Zagrapan, Yuri Tolkach, Martin D. Berger, Aurel Perren, Bastian Dislich, Inti Zlobec, Amjad Khan
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 17

Sim-to-Real Traffic Scene Understanding by Decoupling Semantics from Caption Generation with V-JEPA

The paper presents a decoupled framework for sim-to-real traffic scene understanding, separating semantic fact extraction from caption generation. It uses a frozen V-JEPA encoder for predictive scene representations and a lightweight Llama-based predictor for VQA, followed by a training-free structured refinement that leverages statistical priors, inter-question relationships, and temporal consistency. The refined facts are then fed to Qwen3-VL-8B to produce pedestrian and vehicle descriptions, achieving top performance on the 2026 AI City Challenge Track 2 benchmark with 87.09% VQA accuracy and an overall S2 score of 60.0853.

By Nguyen Hoai Thuong Bui, Thanh Nguyen Vo, Trinh Tra Giang Nguyen, Ha Duc Bui