Multimodal-Learning.md

Multimodal Learning

Title	Date	Abstract	Comment	CodeRepository
CoRe-BT: A Multimodal Radiology-Pathology-Text Benchmark for Robust Brain Tumor Typing	2026-03-04	Show Accurate brain tumor typing requires integrating heterogeneous clinical evidence, including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), histopathology, and pathology reports, which are often incomplete at the time of diagnosis. We introduce CoRe-BT, a cross-modal radiology-pathology-text benchmark for brain tumor typing, designed to study robust multimodal learning under missing modality conditions. The dataset comprises 310 patients with multi-sequence brain MRI (T1, T1c, T2, FLAIR), including 95 cases with paired H&E-stained whole-slide pathology images and pathology reports. All cases are annotated with tumor type and grade, and MRI volumes include expert-annotated tumor masks, enabling both region-aware modeling and auxiliary learning tasks. Tumors are categorized into six clinically relevant classes capturing the heterogeneity of common and rare glioma subtypes. We evaluate tumor typing under variable modality availability by comparing MRI-only models with multimodal approaches that incorporate pathology information when present. Baseline experiments demonstrate the feasibility of multimodal fusion and highlight complementary modality contributions across clinically relevant typing tasks. CoRe-BT provides a grounded testbed for advancing multimodal glioma typing and representation learning in realistic scenarios with incomplete clinical data.	Under... Under review, MICCAI 2026	None
Online Data Curation for Object Detection via Marginal Contributions to Dataset-level Average Precision	2026-03-03	Show High-quality data has become a primary driver of progress under scale laws, with curated datasets often outperforming much larger unfiltered ones at lower cost. Online data curation extends this idea by dynamically selecting training samples based on the model's evolving state. While effective in classification and multimodal learning, existing online sampling strategies rarely extend to object detection because of its structural complexity and domain gaps. We introduce DetGain, an online data curation method specifically for object detection that estimates the marginal perturbation of each image to dataset-level Average Precision (AP) based on its prediction quality. By modeling global score distributions, DetGain efficiently estimates the global AP change and computes teacher-student contribution gaps to select informative samples at each iteration. The method is architecture-agnostic and minimally intrusive, enabling straightforward integration into diverse object detection architectures. Experiments on the COCO dataset with multiple representative detectors show consistent improvements in accuracy. DetGain also demonstrates strong robustness under low-quality data and can be effectively combined with knowledge distillation techniques to further enhance performance, highlighting its potential as a general and complementary strategy for data-efficient object detection.	preprint version	None
DREAM: Where Visual Understanding Meets Text-to-Image Generation	2026-03-03	Show Unifying visual representation learning and text-to-image (T2I) generation within a single model remains a central challenge in multimodal learning. We introduce DREAM, a unified framework that jointly optimizes discriminative and generative objectives, while learning strong visual representations. DREAM is built on two key techniques: During training, Masking Warmup, a progressive masking schedule, begins with minimal masking to establish the contrastive alignment necessary for representation learning, then gradually transitions to full masking for stable generative training. At inference, DREAM employs Semantically Aligned Decoding to align partially masked image candidates with the target text and select the best one for further decoding, improving text-image fidelity (+6.3%) without external rerankers. Trained solely on CC12M, DREAM achieves 72.7% ImageNet linear-probing accuracy (+1.1% over CLIP) and an FID of 4.25 (+6.2% over FLUID), with consistent gains in few-shot classification, semantic segmentation, and depth estimation. These results demonstrate that discriminative and generative objectives can be synergistic, allowing unified multimodal models that excel at both visual understanding and generation.		None
SGMA: Semantic-Guided Modality-Aware Segmentation for Remote Sensing with Incomplete Multimodal Data	2026-03-03	Show Multimodal semantic segmentation integrates complementary information from diverse sensors for remote sensing Earth observation. However, practical systems often encounter missing modalities due to sensor failures or incomplete coverage, termed Incomplete Multimodal Semantic Segmentation (IMSS). IMSS faces three key challenges: (1) multimodal imbalance, where dominant modalities suppress fragile ones; (2) intra-class variation in scale, shape, and orientation across modalities; and (3) cross-modal heterogeneity with conflicting cues producing inconsistent semantic responses. Existing methods rely on contrastive learning or joint optimization, which risk over-alignment, discarding modality-specific cues or imbalanced training, favoring robust modalities, while largely overlooking intra-class variation and cross-modal heterogeneity. To address these limitations, we propose the Semantic-Guided Modality-Aware (SGMA) framework, which ensures balanced multimodal learning while reducing intra-class variation and reconciling cross-modal inconsistencies through semantic guidance. SGMA introduces two complementary plug-and-play modules: (1) Semantic-Guided Fusion (SGF) module extracts multi-scale, class-wise semantic prototypes that capture consistent categorical representations across modalities, estimates per-modality robustness based on prototype-feature alignment, and performs adaptive fusion weighted by robustness scores to mitigate intra-class variation and cross-modal heterogeneity; (2) Modality-Aware Sampling (MAS) module leverages robustness estimations from SGF to dynamically reweight training samples, prioritizing challenging samples from fragile modalities to address modality imbalance. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets and backbones demonstrate that SGMA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, with particularly significant improvements in fragile modalities.		None
ICYM2I: The illusion of multimodal informativeness under missingness	2026-03-02	Show Multimodal learning is of continued interest in artificial intelligence-based applications, motivated by the potential information gain from combining different data modalities. However, modalities observed in the source environment may differ from the modalities observed in the target environment due to multiple factors, including cost, hardware failure, or the perceived \textit{informativeness} of a given modality. This change in missingness patterns between the source and target environment has not been carefully studied. Na{ï}ve estimation of the information gain associated with including an additional modality without accounting for missingness may result in improper estimates of that modality's value in the target environment. We formalize the problem of missingness, demonstrate its ubiquity, and show that the subsequent distribution shift induces bias when the missingness process is not explicitly accounted for. To address this issue, we introduce ICYM2I (In Case You Multimodal Missed It), a framework for the evaluation of predictive performance and information gain under missingness through inverse probability weighting-based correction. We demonstrate the importance of the proposed adjustment to estimate information gain under missingness on synthetic, semi-synthetic, and real-world datasets.	Publi... Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2026	None
Large Language Models in Bioinformatics: A Survey	2026-03-01	Show Large Language Models (LLMs) are revolutionizing bioinformatics, enabling advanced analysis of DNA, RNA, proteins, and single-cell data. This survey provides a systematic review of recent advancements, focusing on genomic sequence modeling, RNA structure prediction, protein function inference, and single-cell transcriptomics. Meanwhile, we also discuss several key challenges, including data scarcity, computational complexity, and cross-omics integration, and explore future directions such as multimodal learning, hybrid AI models, and clinical applications. By offering a comprehensive perspective, this paper underscores the transformative potential of LLMs in driving innovations in bioinformatics and precision medicine.	Accepted by ACL 2025	None
Disentangled Multi-modal Learning of Histology and Transcriptomics for Cancer Characterization	2026-02-28	Show Histopathology remains the gold standard for cancer diagnosis and prognosis. With the advent of transcriptome profiling, multi-modal learning combining transcriptomics with histology offers more comprehensive information. However, existing multi-modal approaches are challenged by intrinsic multi-modal heterogeneity, insufficient multi-scale integration, and reliance on paired data, restricting clinical applicability. To address these challenges, we propose a disentangled multi-modal framework with four contributions: 1) To mitigate multi-modal heterogeneity, we decompose WSIs and transcriptomes into tumor and microenvironment subspaces using a disentangled multi-modal fusion module, and introduce a confidence-guided gradient coordination strategy to balance subspace optimization. 2) To enhance multi-scale integration, we propose an inter-magnification gene-expression consistency strategy that aligns transcriptomic signals across WSI magnifications. 3) To reduce dependency on paired data, we propose a subspace knowledge distillation strategy enabling transcriptome-agnostic inference through a WSI-only student model. 4) To improve inference efficiency, we propose an informative token aggregation module that suppresses WSI redundancy while preserving subspace semantics. Extensive experiments on cancer diagnosis, prognosis, and survival prediction demonstrate our superiority over state-of-the-art methods across multiple settings. Code is available at https://github.com/helenypzhang/Disentangled-Multimodal-Learning.		Code Link
Beyond DAGs: A Latent Partial Causal Model for Multimodal Learning	2026-02-27	Show Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) are a standard tool in causal modeling, but their suitability for capturing the complexity of large-scale multimodal data is questionable. In practice, real-world multimodal datasets are often collected from heterogeneous generative processes that do not conform to a single DAG. Instead, they may involve multiple, and even opposing, DAG structures with inverse causal directions. To address this gap, in this work, we first propose a novel latent partial causal model tailored for multimodal data representation learning, featuring two latent coupled variables parts connected by an undirected edge, to represent the transfer of knowledge across modalities. Under specific statistical assumptions, we establish an identifiability result, demonstrating that representations learned by MultiModal Contrastive Learning (MMCL) correspond to the latent coupled variables up to a trivial transformation. This result deepens our understanding of the why MMCL works, highlights its potential for representation disentanglement, and expands the utility of pre-trained models like CLIP. Synthetic experiments confirm the robustness of our findings, even when the assumptions are partially violated. Most importantly, experiments on a pre-trained CLIP model embodies disentangled representations, enabling few-shot learning and improving domain generalization across diverse real-world datasets. Together, these contributions push the boundaries of MMCL, both in theory and in practical applications.		None
When Does Multimodal Learning Help in Healthcare? A Benchmark on EHR and Chest X-Ray Fusion	2026-02-27	Show Machine learning holds promise for advancing clinical decision support, yet it remains unclear when multimodal learning truly helps in practice, particularly under modality missingness and fairness constraints. In this work, we conduct a systematic benchmark of multimodal fusion between Electronic Health Records (EHR) and chest X-rays (CXR) on standardized cohorts from MIMIC-IV and MIMIC-CXR, aiming to answer four fundamental questions: when multimodal fusion improves clinical prediction, how different fusion strategies compare, how robust existing methods are to missing modalities, and whether multimodal models achieve algorithmic fairness. Our study reveals several key insights. Multimodal fusion improves performance when modalities are complete, with gains concentrating in diseases that require complementary information from both EHR and CXR. While cross-modal learning mechanisms capture clinically meaningful dependencies beyond simple concatenation, the rich temporal structure of EHR introduces strong modality imbalance that architectural complexity alone cannot overcome. Under realistic missingness, multimodal benefits rapidly degrade unless models are explicitly designed to handle incomplete inputs. Moreover, multimodal fusion does not inherently improve fairness, with subgroup disparities mainly arising from unequal sensitivity across demographic groups. To support reproducible and extensible evaluation, we further release a flexible benchmarking toolkit that enables plug-and-play integration of new models and datasets. Together, this work provides actionable guidance on when multimodal learning helps, when it fails, and why, laying the foundation for developing clinically deployable multimodal systems that are both effective and reliable. The open-source toolkit can be found at https://github.com/jakeykj/CareBench.		Code Link
TRIDENT: Tri-Modal Molecular Representation Learning with Taxonomic Annotations and Local Correspondence	2026-02-26	Show Molecular property prediction aims to learn representations that map chemical structures to functional properties. While multimodal learning has emerged as a powerful paradigm to learn molecular representations, prior works have largely overlooked textual and taxonomic information of molecules for representation learning. We introduce TRIDENT, a novel framework that integrates molecular SMILES, textual descriptions, and taxonomic functional annotations to learn rich molecular representations. To achieve this, we curate a comprehensive dataset of molecule-text pairs with structured, multi-level functional annotations. Instead of relying on conventional contrastive loss, TRIDENT employs a volume-based alignment objective to jointly align tri-modal features at the global level, enabling soft, geometry-aware alignment across modalities. Additionally, TRIDENT introduces a novel local alignment objective that captures detailed relationships between molecular substructures and their corresponding sub-textual descriptions. A momentum-based mechanism dynamically balances global and local alignment, enabling the model to learn both broad functional semantics and fine-grained structure-function mappings. TRIDENT achieves state-of-the-art performance on 11 downstream tasks, demonstrating the value of combining SMILES, textual, and taxonomic functional annotations for molecular property prediction.	Accep... Accepted to NeurIPS 2025	None
The Trinity of Consistency as a Defining Principle for General World Models	2026-02-26	Show The construction of World Models capable of learning, simulating, and reasoning about objective physical laws constitutes a foundational challenge in the pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence. Recent advancements represented by video generation models like Sora have demonstrated the potential of data-driven scaling laws to approximate physical dynamics, while the emerging Unified Multimodal Model (UMM) offers a promising architectural paradigm for integrating perception, language, and reasoning. Despite these advances, the field still lacks a principled theoretical framework that defines the essential properties requisite for a General World Model. In this paper, we propose that a World Model must be grounded in the Trinity of Consistency: Modal Consistency as the semantic interface, Spatial Consistency as the geometric basis, and Temporal Consistency as the causal engine. Through this tripartite lens, we systematically review the evolution of multimodal learning, revealing a trajectory from loosely coupled specialized modules toward unified architectures that enable the synergistic emergence of internal world simulators. To complement this conceptual framework, we introduce CoW-Bench, a benchmark centered on multi-frame reasoning and generation scenarios. CoW-Bench evaluates both video generation models and UMMs under a unified evaluation protocol. Our work establishes a principled pathway toward general world models, clarifying both the limitations of current systems and the architectural requirements for future progress.	119 p... 119 pages, 50 figures	None
Towards Multimodal Domain Generalization with Few Labels	2026-02-26	Show Multimodal models ideally should generalize to unseen domains while remaining data-efficient to reduce annotation costs. To this end, we introduce and study a new problem, Semi-Supervised Multimodal Domain Generalization (SSMDG), which aims to learn robust multimodal models from multi-source data with few labeled samples. We observe that existing approaches fail to address this setting effectively: multimodal domain generalization methods cannot exploit unlabeled data, semi-supervised multimodal learning methods ignore domain shifts, and semi-supervised domain generalization methods are confined to single-modality inputs. To overcome these limitations, we propose a unified framework featuring three key components: Consensus-Driven Consistency Regularization, which obtains reliable pseudo-labels through confident fused-unimodal consensus; Disagreement-Aware Regularization, which effectively utilizes ambiguous non-consensus samples; and Cross-Modal Prototype Alignment, which enforces domain- and modality-invariant representations while promoting robustness under missing modalities via cross-modal translation. We further establish the first SSMDG benchmarks, on which our method consistently outperforms strong baselines in both standard and missing-modality scenarios. Our benchmarks and code are available at https://github.com/lihongzhao99/SSMDG.	Accep... Accepted to CVPR 2026	Code Link
SoPE: Spherical Coordinate-Based Positional Embedding for Enhancing Spatial Perception of 3D LVLMs	2026-02-26	Show 3D Large Vision-Language Models (3D LVLMs) built upon Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress across various multimodal tasks. However, their inherited position-dependent modeling mechanism, Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE), remains suboptimal for 3D multimodal understanding. The vanilla RoPE formulation fails to preserve essential three-dimensional spatial structures when encoding 3D tokens, and its relative distance computation overlooks angular dependencies, hindering the model's ability to capture directional variations in visual representations. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Spherical Coordinate-based Positional Embedding (SoPE). Our method maps point-cloud token indices into a 3D spherical coordinate space, enabling unified modeling of spatial locations and directional angles. This formulation preserves the inherent geometric structure of point-cloud data, enhances spatial awareness, and yields more consistent and expressive geometric representations for multimodal learning. In addition, we introduce a multi-scale frequency mixing strategy to fuse feature information across different frequency domains. Experimental results on multiple 3D scene benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our approach, while real-world deployment experiments further demonstrate its strong generalization capability.	CVPR 2026	None
FujiView: Multimodal Late-Fusion for Predicting Scenic Visibility	2026-02-25	Show Visibility of natural landmarks such as Mount Fuji is a defining factor in both tourism planning and visitor experience, yet it remains difficult to predict due to rapidly changing atmospheric conditions. We present FujiView, a multimodal learning framework and dataset for predicting scenic visibility by fusing webcam imagery with structured meteorological data. Our late-fusion approach combines image-derived class probabilities with numerical weather features to classify visibility into five categories. The dataset currently comprises over 100,000 webcam images paired with concurrent and forecasted weather conditions from more than 40 cameras around Mount Fuji, and continues to expand; it will be released to support further research in environmental forecasting. Experiments show that YOLO-based vision features dominate short-term horizons such as "nowcasting" and "samedaycasting", while weather-driven forecasts increasingly take over as the primary predictive signal beyond $+1$d. Late fusion consistently yields the highest overall accuracy, achieving ACC of approx 0.89 for same-day prediction and up to 84% for next-day forecasts. These results position Scenic Visibility Forecasting (SVF) as a new benchmark task for multimodal learning.	9 pag... 9 pages (including references), 8 figures, 2 tables. Accepted to the IEEE/CVF WACV 2026 proceedings. Introduces a large human-labeled Mount Fuji visibility dataset; public release forthcoming	None
MultiModalPFN: Extending Prior-Data Fitted Networks for Multimodal Tabular Learning	2026-02-25	Show Recently, TabPFN has gained attention as a foundation model for tabular data. However, it struggles to integrate heterogeneous modalities such as images and text, which are common in domains like healthcare and marketing, thereby limiting its applicability. To address this, we present the Multi-Modal Prior-data Fitted Network (MMPFN), which extends TabPFN to handle tabular and non-tabular modalities in a unified manner. MMPFN comprises per-modality encoders, modality projectors, and pre-trained foundation models. The modality projectors serve as the critical bridge, transforming non-tabular embeddings into tabular-compatible tokens for unified processing. To this end, we introduce a multi-head gated MLP and a cross-attention pooler that extract richer context from non-tabular inputs while mitigates attention imbalance issue in multimodal learning. Extensive experiments on medical and general-purpose multimodal datasets demonstrate that MMPFN consistently outperforms competitive state-of-the-art methods and effectively exploits non-tabular modalities alongside tabular features. These results highlight the promise of extending prior-data fitted networks to the multimodal setting, offering a scalable and effective framework for heterogeneous data learning. The source code is available at https://github.com/too-z/MultiModalPFN.	Accep... Accepted to CVPR 2026	Code Link
Synergizing Understanding and Generation with Interleaved Analyzing-Drafting Thinking	2026-02-24	Show Unified Vision-Language Models (UVLMs) aim to advance multimodal learning by supporting both understanding and generation within a single framework. However, existing approaches largely focus on architectural unification while overlooking the need for explicit interaction between the two capabilities during task solving. As a result, current models treat understanding and generation as parallel skills rather than synergistic processes. To achieve real synergy, we introduce the interleaved Analyzing-Drafting problem-solving loop (AD-Loop), a new think paradigm that dynamically alternates between analytic and drafting operations. By interleaving textual thoughts with visual thoughts, AD-Loop enables models to iteratively refine both comprehension and outputs, fostering genuine synergy. To train this mechanism, we design a two-stage strategy: supervised learning on interleaved thought data to initialize alternation, followed by reinforcement learning to promote adaptive and autonomous control. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AD-Loop consistently improves performance across standard benchmarks for both understanding and generation, with strong transferability to various UVLMs architectures. Visual analyses further validate the effectiveness of implicit visual thoughts. These results highlight AD-Loop as a principled and broadly applicable strategy for synergizing comprehension and creation. The project page is at https://sqwu.top/AD-Loop.	28 pa... 28 pages, 17 figures, 6 tables, ICLR conference	None
Momentum Memory for Knowledge Distillation in Computational Pathology	2026-02-24	Show Multimodal learning that integrates genomics and histopathology has shown strong potential in cancer diagnosis, yet its clinical translation is hindered by the limited availability of paired histology-genomics data. Knowledge distillation (KD) offers a practical solution by transferring genomic supervision into histopathology models, enabling accurate inference using histology alone. However, existing KD methods rely on batch-local alignment, which introduces instability due to limited within-batch comparisons and ultimately degrades performance. To address these limitations, we propose Momentum Memory Knowledge Distillation (MoMKD), a cross-modal distillation framework driven by a momentum-updated memory. This memory aggregates genomic and histopathology information across batches, effectively enlarging the supervisory context available to each mini-batch. Furthermore, we decouple the gradients of the genomics and histology branches, preventing genomic signals from dominating histology feature learning during training and eliminating the modality-gap issue at inference time. Extensive experiments on the TCGA-BRCA benchmark (HER2, PR, and ODX classification tasks) and an independent in-house testing dataset demonstrate that MoMKD consistently outperforms state-of-the-art MIL and multimodal KD baselines, delivering strong performance and generalization under histology-only inference. Overall, MoMKD establishes a robust and generalizable knowledge distillation paradigm for computational pathology.	Accep... Accepted by CVPR 2026	None
Closing the gap in multimodal medical representation alignment	2026-02-23	Show In multimodal learning, CLIP has emerged as the de-facto approach for mapping different modalities into a shared latent space by bringing semantically similar representations closer while pushing apart dissimilar ones. However, CLIP-based contrastive losses exhibit unintended behaviors that negatively impact true semantic alignment, leading to sparse and fragmented latent spaces. This phenomenon, known as the modality gap, has been partially mitigated for standard text and image pairs but remains unknown and unresolved in more complex multimodal settings, such as the medical domain. In this work, we study this phenomenon in the latter case, revealing that the modality gap is present also in medical alignment, and we propose a modality-agnostic framework that closes this gap, ensuring that semantically related representations are more aligned, regardless of their source modality. Our method enhances alignment between radiology images and clinical text, improving cross-modal retrieval and image captioning.	Accepted at MLSP2025	None
Multimodal Dataset Distillation Made Simple by Prototype-Guided Data Synthesis	2026-02-23	Show Recent advances in multimodal learning have achieved remarkable success across diverse vision-language tasks. However, such progress heavily relies on large-scale image-text datasets, making training costly and inefficient. Prior efforts in dataset filtering and pruning attempt to mitigate this issue, but still require relatively large subsets to maintain performance and fail under very small subsets. Dataset distillation offers a promising alternative, yet existing multimodal dataset distillation methods require full-dataset training and joint optimization of image pixels and text features, making them architecture-dependent and limiting cross-architecture generalization. To overcome this, we propose a learning-free dataset distillation framework that eliminates the need for large-scale training and optimization while enhancing generalization across architectures. Our method uses CLIP to extract aligned image-text embeddings, obtains prototypes, and employs an unCLIP decoder to synthesize images, enabling efficient and scalable multimodal dataset distillation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms optimization-based dataset distillation and subset selection methods, achieving state-of-the-art cross-architecture generalization.		None
CLCR: Cross-Level Semantic Collaborative Representation for Multimodal Learning	2026-02-23	Show Multimodal learning aims to capture both shared and private information from multiple modalities. However, existing methods that project all modalities into a single latent space for fusion often overlook the asynchronous, multi-level semantic structure of multimodal data. This oversight induces semantic misalignment and error propagation, thereby degrading representation quality. To address this issue, we propose Cross-Level Co-Representation (CLCR), which explicitly organizes each modality's features into a three-level semantic hierarchy and specifies level-wise constraints for cross-modal interactions. First, a semantic hierarchy encoder aligns shallow, mid, and deep features across modalities, establishing a common basis for interaction. And then, at each level, an Intra-Level Co-Exchange Domain (IntraCED) factorizes features into shared and private subspaces and restricts cross-modal attention to the shared subspace via a learnable token budget. This design ensures that only shared semantics are exchanged and prevents leakage from private channels. To integrate information across levels, the Inter-Level Co-Aggregation Domain (InterCAD) synchronizes semantic scales using learned anchors, selectively fuses the shared representations, and gates private cues to form a compact task representation. We further introduce regularization terms to enforce separation of shared and private features and to minimize cross-level interference. Experiments on six benchmarks spanning emotion recognition, event localization, sentiment analysis, and action recognition show that CLCR achieves strong performance and generalizes well across tasks.	This ... This study has been Accepted by CVPR 2026	None
A Survey on Cross-Modal Interaction Between Music and Multimodal Data	2026-02-21	Show Multimodal learning has driven innovation across various industries, particularly in the field of music. By enabling more intuitive interaction experiences and enhancing immersion, it not only lowers the entry barriers to the music but also increases its overall appeal. This survey aims to provide a comprehensive review of multimodal tasks related to music, outlining how music contributes to multimodal learning and offering insights for researchers seeking to expand the boundaries of computational music. Unlike text and images, which are often semantically or visually intuitive, music primarily interacts with humans through auditory perception, making its data representation inherently less intuitive. Therefore, this paper first introduces the representations of music and provides an overview of music datasets. Subsequently, we categorize cross-modal interactions between music and multimodal data into three types: music-driven cross-modal interactions, music-oriented cross-modal interactions, and bidirectional music cross-modal interactions. For each category, we systematically trace the development of relevant sub-tasks, analyze existing limitations, and discuss emerging trends. Furthermore, we provide a comprehensive summary of datasets and evaluation metrics used in multimodal tasks related to music, offering benchmark references for future research. Finally, we discuss the current challenges in cross-modal interactions involving music and propose potential directions for future research.	34 pages, 7 figures	None
MusicSem: A Semantically Rich Language--Audio Dataset of Natural Music Descriptions	2026-02-19	Show Music representation learning is central to music information retrieval and generation. While recent advances in multimodal learning have improved alignment between text and audio for tasks such as cross-modal music retrieval, text-to-music generation, and music-to-text generation, existing models often struggle to capture users' expressed intent in natural language descriptions of music. This observation suggests that the datasets used to train and evaluate these models do not fully reflect the broader and more natural forms of human discourse through which music is described. In this paper, we introduce MusicSem, a dataset of 32,493 language-audio pairs derived from organic music-related discussions on the social media platform Reddit. Compared to existing datasets, MusicSem captures a broader spectrum of musical semantics, reflecting how listeners naturally describe music in nuanced and human-centered ways. To structure these expressions, we propose a taxonomy of five semantic categories: descriptive, atmospheric, situational, metadata-related, and contextual. In addition to the construction, analysis, and release of MusicSem, we use the dataset to evaluate a wide range of multimodal models for retrieval and generation, highlighting the importance of modeling fine-grained semantics. Overall, MusicSem serves as a novel semantics-aware resource to support future research on human-aligned multimodal music representation learning.		None
Boosting Medical Visual Understanding From Multi-Granular Language Learning	2026-02-19	Show Recent advances in image-text pretraining have significantly enhanced visual understanding by aligning visual and textual representations. Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) has played a pivotal role in multimodal learning. However, its focus on single-label, single-granularity alignment limits its effectiveness in complex domains such as medical imaging, where images often correspond to multiple high-level labels (e.g., disease categories) across different annotation granularities (e.g., diagnostic description, clinical explanation). To address this, we propose Multi-Granular Language Learning (MGLL), a contrastive learning framework designed to improve both multi-label and cross-granularity alignment. MGLL leverages structured multi-label supervision, integrates textual descriptions across granularities, and introduces soft-label supervision with point-wise constraints to enhance alignment. MGLL employs smooth Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence to ensure cross-granularity consistency while maintaining computational efficiency as a plug-and-play module for vision-language models. Pretrained on our constructed large-scale multi-granular datasets and evaluated across multiple datasets, MGLL outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in downstream tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/HUANGLIZI/MGLL.	Accep... Accepted by ICLR 2026. 40 pages	Code Link
Characterizing the Predictive Impact of Modalities with Supervised Latent-Variable Modeling	2026-02-19	Show Despite the recent success of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), existing approaches predominantly assume the availability of multiple modalities during training and inference. In practice, multimodal data is often incomplete because modalities may be missing, collected asynchronously, or available only for a subset of examples. In this work, we propose PRIMO, a supervised latent-variable imputation model that quantifies the predictive impact of any missing modality within the multimodal learning setting. PRIMO enables the use of all available training examples, whether modalities are complete or partial. Specifically, it models the missing modality through a latent variable that captures its relationship with the observed modality in the context of prediction. During inference, we draw many samples from the learned distribution over the missing modality to both obtain the marginal predictive distribution (for the purpose of prediction) and analyze the impact of the missing modalities on the prediction for each instance. We evaluate PRIMO on a synthetic XOR dataset, Audio-Vision MNIST, and MIMIC-III for mortality and ICD-9 prediction. Across all datasets, PRIMO obtains performance comparable to unimodal baselines when a modality is fully missing and to multimodal baselines when all modalities are available. PRIMO quantifies the predictive impact of a modality at the instance level using a variance-based metric computed from predictions across latent completions. We visually demonstrate how varying completions of the missing modality result in a set of plausible labels.		None
Prompt When the Animal is: Temporal Animal Behavior Grounding with Positional Recovery Training	2026-02-18	Show Temporal grounding is crucial in multimodal learning, but it poses challenges when applied to animal behavior data due to the sparsity and uniform distribution of moments. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Positional Recovery Training framework (Port), which prompts the model with the start and end times of specific animal behaviors during training. Specifically, \port{} enhances the baseline model with a Recovering branch to reconstruct corrupted label sequences and align distributions via a Dual-alignment method. This allows the model to focus on specific temporal regions prompted by ground-truth information. Extensive experiments on the Animal Kingdom dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of \port{}, achieving an IoU@0.3 of 38.52. It emerges as one of the top performers in the sub-track of MMVRAC in ICME 2024 Grand Challenges.	Accep... Accepted by ICMEW 2024	None
Orthogonalized Multimodal Contrastive Learning with Asymmetric Masking for Structured Representations	2026-02-16	Show Multimodal learning seeks to integrate information from heterogeneous sources, where signals may be shared across modalities, specific to individual modalities, or emerge only through their interaction. While self-supervised multimodal contrastive learning has achieved remarkable progress, most existing methods predominantly capture redundant cross-modal signals, often neglecting modality-specific (unique) and interaction-driven (synergistic) information. Recent extensions broaden this perspective, yet they either fail to explicitly model synergistic interactions or learn different information components in an entangled manner, leading to incomplete representations and potential information leakage. We introduce \textbf{COrAL}, a principled framework that explicitly and simultaneously preserves redundant, unique, and synergistic information within multimodal representations. COrAL employs a dual-path architecture with orthogonality constraints to disentangle shared and modality-specific features, ensuring a clean separation of information components. To promote synergy modeling, we introduce asymmetric masking with complementary view-specific patterns, compelling the model to infer cross-modal dependencies rather than rely solely on redundant cues. Extensive experiments on synthetic benchmarks and diverse MultiBench datasets demonstrate that COrAL consistently matches or outperforms state-of-the-art methods while exhibiting low performance variance across runs. These results indicate that explicitly modeling the full spectrum of multimodal information yields more stable, reliable, and comprehensive embeddings.		None
OmniEarth-Bench: Towards Holistic Evaluation of Earth's Six Spheres and Cross-Spheres Interactions with Multimodal Observational Earth Data	2026-02-15	Show Existing benchmarks for multimodal learning in Earth science offer limited, siloed coverage of Earth's spheres and their cross-sphere interactions, typically restricting evaluation to the human-activity sphere of atmosphere and to at most 16 tasks. These limitations: narrow-source heterogeneity (single/few data sources), constrained scientific granularity, and limited-sphere extensibility. Therefore, we introduce OmniEarth-Bench, the first multimodal benchmark that systematically spans all six spheres: atmosphere, lithosphere, oceanosphere, cryosphere, biosphere, and human-activity sphere, and cross-spheres. Built with a scalable, modular-topology data inference framework and native multi-observation sources and expert-in-the-loop curation, OmniEarth-Bench produces 29,855 standardized, expert-curated annotations. All annotations are organized into a four-level hierarchy (Sphere, Scenario, Ability, Task), encompassing 109 expert-curated evaluation tasks. Experiments on 9 state-of-the-art MLLMs reveal that even the most advanced models struggle with our benchmarks, where none of them reach 35% accuracy, revealing systematic gaps in Earth-system cognitive ability. The dataset and evaluation code were released at OmniEarth-Bench (https://anonymous.4open.science/r/OmniEarth-Bench-B1BD).		None
ML-ECS: A Collaborative Multimodal Learning Framework for Edge-Cloud Synergies	2026-02-15	Show Edge-cloud synergies provide a promising paradigm for privacy-preserving deployment of foundation models, where lightweight on-device models adapt to domain-specific data and cloud-hosted models coordinate knowledge sharing. However, in real-world edge environments, collaborative multimodal learning is challenged by modality heterogeneity (different modality combinations across domains) and model-structure heterogeneity (different modality-specific encoders/fusion modules. To address these issues, we propose ML-ECS, a collaborative multimodal learning framework that enables joint training between a server-based model and heterogeneous edge models. This framework consists of four components: (1) cross-modal contrastive learning (CCL) to align modality representations in a shared latent space, (2) adaptive multimodal tuning (AMT) to preserve domain-specific knowledge from local datasets, (3) modality-aware model aggregation (MMA) to robustly aggregate while mitigating noise caused by missing modalities, and (4) SLM-enhanced CCL (SE-CCL) to facilitate bidirectional knowledge transfer between cloud and edge. Experimental results on various multimodal tasks show that \pname consistently outperform state-of-the-art baselines under varying modality availability, achieving improvements of 5.44% to 12.08% in Rouge-LSum and improving both client- and server-side performance. In addition, by communicating only low-rank LoRA parameters and fused representations, ML-ECS achieves high communication efficiency, requiring only 0.65% of the total parameter volume.		None
Fusing Pixels and Genes: Spatially-Aware Learning in Computational Pathology	2026-02-15	Show Recent years have witnessed remarkable progress in multimodal learning within computational pathology. Existing models primarily rely on vision and language modalities; however, language alone lacks molecular specificity and offers limited pathological supervision, leading to representational bottlenecks. In this paper, we propose STAMP, a Spatial Transcriptomics-Augmented Multimodal Pathology representation learning framework that integrates spatially-resolved gene expression profiles to enable molecule-guided joint embedding of pathology images and transcriptomic data. Our study shows that self-supervised, gene-guided training provides a robust and task-agnostic signal for learning pathology image representations. Incorporating spatial context and multi-scale information further enhances model performance and generalizability. To support this, we constructed SpaVis-6M, the largest Visium-based spatial transcriptomics dataset to date, and trained a spatially-aware gene encoder on this resource. Leveraging hierarchical multi-scale contrastive alignment and cross-scale patch localization mechanisms, STAMP effectively aligns spatial transcriptomics with pathology images, capturing spatial structure and molecular variation. We validate STAMP across six datasets and four downstream tasks, where it consistently achieves strong performance. These results highlight the value and necessity of integrating spatially resolved molecular supervision for advancing multimodal learning in computational pathology. The code is included in the supplementary materials. The pretrained weights and SpaVis-6M are available at: https://github.com/Hanminghao/STAMP.	accep... accepted by ICLR 2026, 34 pages, 10 figures, 7tables	Code Link
Multimodal Classification via Total Correlation Maximization	2026-02-13	Show Multimodal learning integrates data from diverse sensors to effectively harness information from different modalities. However, recent studies reveal that joint learning often overfits certain modalities while neglecting others, leading to performance inferior to that of unimodal learning. Although previous efforts have sought to balance modal contributions or combine joint and unimodal learning, thereby mitigating the degradation of weaker modalities with promising outcomes, few have examined the relationship between joint and unimodal learning from an information-theoretic perspective. In this paper, we theoretically analyze modality competition and propose a method for multimodal classification by maximizing the total correlation between multimodal features and labels. By maximizing this objective, our approach alleviates modality competition while capturing inter-modal interactions via feature alignment. Building on Mutual Information Neural Estimation (MINE), we introduce Total Correlation Neural Estimation (TCNE) to derive a lower bound for total correlation. Subsequently, we present TCMax, a hyperparameter-free loss function that maximizes total correlation through variational bound optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TCMax outperforms state-of-the-art joint and unimodal learning approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/hubaak/TCMax.	Accep... Accepted for publication at ICLR 2026; 19 pages; 2 figures	Code Link
Explaining and Mitigating the Modality Gap in Contrastive Multimodal Learning	2026-02-13	Show Multimodal learning has recently gained significant popularity, demonstrating impressive performance across various zero-shot classification tasks and a range of perceptive and generative applications. Models such as Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) are designed to bridge different modalities, such as images and text, by learning a shared representation space through contrastive learning. Despite their success, the working mechanisms underlying multimodal learning are not yet well understood. Notably, these models often exhibit a modality gap, where different modalities occupy distinct regions within the shared representation space. In this work, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the emergence of modality gap by characterizing the gradient flow learning dynamics. Specifically, we identify the critical roles of mismatched data pairs and a learnable temperature parameter in causing and perpetuating the modality gap during training. Furthermore, our theoretical insights are validated through experiments on practical CLIP models. These findings provide principled guidance for mitigating the modality gap, including strategies such as appropriate temperature scheduling and modality swapping. Additionally, we demonstrate that closing the modality gap leads to improved performance on tasks such as image-text retrieval.	The f... The first two authors contributed equally to this work	None
Prototype-driven fusion of pathology and spatial transcriptomics for interpretable survival prediction	2026-02-12	Show Whole slide images (WSIs) enable weakly supervised prognostic modeling via multiple instance learning (MIL). Spatial transcriptomics (ST) preserves in situ gene expression, providing a spatial molecular context that complements morphology. As paired WSI-ST cohorts scale to population level, leveraging their complementary spatial signals for prognosis becomes crucial; however, principled cross-modal fusion strategies remain limited for this paradigm. To this end, we introduce PathoSpatial, an interpretable end-to-end framework integrating co-registered WSIs and ST to learn spatially informed prognostic representations. PathoSpatial uses task-guided prototype learning within a multi-level experts architecture, adaptively orchestrating unsupervised within-modality discovery with supervised cross-modal aggregation. By design, PathoSpatial substantially strengthens interpretability while maintaining discriminative ability. We evaluate PathoSpatial on a triple-negative breast cancer cohort with paired ST and WSIs. PathoSpatial delivers strong and consistent performance across five survival endpoints, achieving superior or comparable performance to leading unimodal and multimodal methods. PathoSpatial inherently enables post-hoc prototype interpretation and molecular risk decomposition, providing quantitative, biologically grounded explanations, highlighting candidate prognostic factors. We present PathoSpatial as a proof-of-concept for scalable and interpretable multimodal learning for spatial omics-pathology fusion.		None
MTBench: A Multimodal Time Series Benchmark for Temporal Reasoning and Question Answering	2026-02-11	Show Understanding the relationship between textual news and time-series evolution is a critical yet under-explored challenge in applied data science. While multimodal learning has gained traction, existing multimodal time-series datasets fall short in evaluating cross-modal reasoning and complex question answering, which are essential for capturing complex interactions between narrative information and temporal patterns. To bridge this gap, we introduce Multimodal Time Series Benchmark (MTBench), a large-scale benchmark designed to evaluate large language models (LLMs) on time series and text understanding across financial and weather domains. MTbench comprises paired time series and textual data, including financial news with corresponding stock price movements and weather reports aligned with historical temperature records. Unlike existing benchmarks that focus on isolated modalities, MTbench provides a comprehensive testbed for models to jointly reason over structured numerical trends and unstructured textual narratives. The richness of MTbench enables formulation of diverse tasks that require a deep understanding of both text and time-series data, including time-series forecasting, semantic and technical trend analysis, and news-driven question answering (QA). These tasks target the model's ability to capture temporal dependencies, extract key insights from textual context, and integrate cross-modal information. We evaluate state-of-the-art LLMs on MTbench, analyzing their effectiveness in modeling the complex relationships between news narratives and temporal patterns. Our findings reveal significant challenges in current models, including difficulties in capturing long-term dependencies, interpreting causality in financial and weather trends, and effectively fusing multimodal information.	18 pages	None
Quantifying Multimodal Imbalance: A GMM-Guided Adaptive Loss for Audio-Visual Learning	2026-02-10	Show Multimodal learning integrates diverse modalities but suffers from modality imbalance, where dominant modalities suppress weaker ones due to inconsistent convergence rates. Existing methods predominantly rely on static modulation or heuristics, overlooking sample-level distributional variations in prediction bias. Specifically, they fail to distinguish outlier samples where the modality gap is exacerbated by low data quality. We propose a framework to quantitatively diagnose and dynamically mitigate this imbalance at the sample level. We introduce the Modality Gap metric to quantify prediction discrepancies. Analysis reveals that this gap follows a bimodal distribution, indicating the coexistence of balanced and imbalanced sample subgroups. We employ a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) to explicitly model this distribution, leveraging Bayesian posterior probabilities for soft subgroup separation. Our two-stage framework comprises a Warm-up stage and an Adaptive Training stage. In the latter, a GMM-guided Adaptive Loss dynamically reallocates optimization priorities: it imposes stronger alignment penalties on imbalanced samples to rectify bias, while prioritizing fusion for balanced samples to maximize complementary information. Experiments on CREMA-D, AVE, and KineticSound demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms SOTA baselines. Furthermore, we show that fine-tuning on a GMM-filtered balanced subset serves as an effective data purification strategy, yielding substantial gains by eliminating extreme noisy samples even without the adaptive loss.		None
Towards Uniformity and Alignment for Multimodal Representation Learning	2026-02-10	Show Multimodal representation learning aims to construct a shared embedding space in which heterogeneous modalities are semantically aligned. Despite strong empirical results, InfoNCE-based objectives introduce inherent conflicts that yield distribution gaps across modalities. In this work, we identify two conflicts in the multimodal regime, both exacerbated as the number of modalities increases: (i) an alignment-uniformity conflict, whereby the repulsion of uniformity undermines pairwise alignment, and (ii) an intra-alignment conflict, where aligning multiple modalities induces competing alignment directions. To address these issues, we propose a principled decoupling of alignment and uniformity for multimodal representations, providing a conflict-free recipe for multimodal learning that simultaneously supports discriminative and generative use cases without task-specific modules. We then provide a theoretical guarantee that our method acts as an efficient proxy for a global Hölder divergence over multiple modality distributions, and thus reduces the distribution gap among modalities. Extensive experiments on retrieval and UnCLIP-style generation demonstrate consistent gains.		None
REMIND: Rethinking Medical High-Modality Learning under Missingness--A Long-Tailed Distribution Perspective	2026-02-09	Show Medical multi-modal learning is critical for integrating information from a large set of diverse modalities. However, when leveraging a high number of modalities in real clinical applications, it is often impractical to obtain full-modality observations for every patient due to data collection constraints, a problem we refer to as 'High-Modality Learning under Missingness'. In this study, we identify that such missingness inherently induces an exponential growth in possible modality combinations, followed by long-tail distributions of modality combinations due to varying modality availability. While prior work overlooked this critical phenomenon, we find this long-tailed distribution leads to significant underperformance on tail modality combination groups. Our empirical analysis attributes this problem to two fundamental issues: 1) gradient inconsistency, where tail groups' gradient updates diverge from the overall optimization direction; 2) concept shifts, where each modality combination requires distinct fusion functions. To address these challenges, we propose REMIND, a unified framework that REthinks MultImodal learNing under high-moDality missingness from a long-tail perspective. Our core idea is to propose a novel group-specialized Mixture-of-Experts architecture that scalably learns group-specific multi-modal fusion functions for arbitrary modality combinations, while simultaneously leveraging a group distributionally robust optimization strategy to upweight underrepresented modality combinations. Extensive experiments on real-world medical datasets show that our framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, and robustly generalizes across various medical multi-modal learning applications under high-modality missingness.		None
Multimodal Learning for Arcing Detection in Pantograph-Catenary Systems	2026-02-09	Show The pantograph-catenary interface is essential for ensuring uninterrupted and reliable power delivery in electrified rail systems. However, electrical arcing at this interface poses serious risks, including accelerated wear of contact components, degraded system performance, and potential service disruptions. Detecting arcing events at the pantograph-catenary interface is challenging due to their transient nature, noisy operating environment, data scarcity, and the difficulty of distinguishing arcs from other similar transient phenomena. To address these challenges, we propose a novel multimodal framework that combines high-resolution image data with force measurements to more accurately and robustly detect arcing events. First, we construct two arcing detection datasets comprising synchronized visual and force measurements. One dataset is built from data provided by the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB), and the other is derived from publicly available videos of arcing events in different railway systems and synthetic force data that mimic the characteristics observed in the real dataset. Leveraging these datasets, we propose MultiDeepSAD, an extension of the DeepSAD algorithm for multiple modalities with a new loss formulation. Additionally, we introduce tailored pseudo-anomaly generation techniques specific to each data type, such as synthetic arc-like artifacts in images and simulated force irregularities, to augment training data and improve the discriminative ability of the model. Through extensive experiments and ablation studies, we demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms baseline approaches, exhibiting enhanced sensitivity to real arcing events even under domain shifts and limited availability of real arcing observations.		None
Active Asymmetric Multi-Agent Multimodal Learning under Uncertainty	2026-02-04	Show Multi-agent systems are increasingly equipped with heterogeneous multimodal sensors, enabling richer perception but introducing modality-specific and agent-dependent uncertainty. Existing multi-agent collaboration frameworks typically reason at the agent level, assume homogeneous sensing, and handle uncertainty implicitly, limiting robustness under sensor corruption. We propose Active Asymmetric Multi-Agent Multimodal Learning under Uncertainty (A2MAML), a principled approach for uncertainty-aware, modality-level collaboration. A2MAML models each modality-specific feature as a stochastic estimate with uncertainty prediction, actively selects reliable agent-modality pairs, and aggregates information via Bayesian inverse-variance weighting. This formulation enables fine-grained, modality-level fusion, supports asymmetric modality availability, and provides a principled mechanism to suppress corrupted or noisy modalities. Extensive experiments on connected autonomous driving scenarios for collaborative accident detection demonstrate that A2MAML consistently outperforms both single-agent and collaborative baselines, achieving up to 18.7% higher accident detection rate.		None
CyIN: Cyclic Informative Latent Space for Bridging Complete and Incomplete Multimodal Learning	2026-02-04	Show Multimodal machine learning, mimicking the human brain's ability to integrate various modalities has seen rapid growth. Most previous multimodal models are trained on perfectly paired multimodal input to reach optimal performance. In real-world deployments, however, the presence of modality is highly variable and unpredictable, causing the pre-trained models in suffering significant performance drops and fail to remain robust with dynamic missing modalities circumstances. In this paper, we present a novel Cyclic INformative Learning framework (CyIN) to bridge the gap between complete and incomplete multimodal learning. Specifically, we firstly build an informative latent space by adopting token- and label-level Information Bottleneck (IB) cyclically among various modalities. Capturing task-related features with variational approximation, the informative bottleneck latents are purified for more efficient cross-modal interaction and multimodal fusion. Moreover, to supplement the missing information caused by incomplete multimodal input, we propose cross-modal cyclic translation by reconstruct the missing modalities with the remained ones through forward and reverse propagation process. With the help of the extracted and reconstructed informative latents, CyIN succeeds in jointly optimizing complete and incomplete multimodal learning in one unified model. Extensive experiments on 4 multimodal datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our method in both complete and diverse incomplete scenarios.	Accep... Accepted by NeurIPS 2025	None
LoVR: A Benchmark for Long Video Retrieval in Multimodal Contexts	2026-02-04	Show Long videos contain a vast amount of information, making video-text retrieval an essential and challenging task in multimodal learning. However, existing benchmarks suffer from limited video duration, low-quality captions, and coarse annotation granularity, which hinder the evaluation of advanced video-text retrieval methods. To address these limitations, we introduce LoVR, a benchmark specifically designed for long video-text retrieval. LoVR contains 467 long videos and over 40,804 fine-grained clips with high-quality captions. To overcome the issue of poor machine-generated annotations, we propose an efficient caption generation framework that integrates VLM automatic generation, caption quality scoring, and dynamic refinement. This pipeline improves annotation accuracy while maintaining scalability. Furthermore, we introduce a semantic fusion method to generate coherent full-video captions without losing important contextual information. Our benchmark introduces longer videos, more detailed captions, and a larger-scale dataset, presenting new challenges for video understanding and retrieval. Extensive experiments on various advanced embedding models demonstrate that LoVR is a challenging benchmark, revealing the limitations of current approaches and providing valuable insights for future research. We release the code and dataset link at https://lovrbench.github.io/		None
GeoLanG: Geometry-Aware Language-Guided Grasping with Unified RGB-D Multimodal Learning	2026-02-04	Show Language-guided grasping has emerged as a promising paradigm for enabling robots to identify and manipulate target objects through natural language instructions, yet it remains highly challenging in cluttered or occluded scenes. Existing methods often rely on multi-stage pipelines that separate object perception and grasping, which leads to limited cross-modal fusion, redundant computation, and poor generalization in cluttered, occluded, or low-texture scenes. To address these limitations, we propose GeoLanG, an end-to-end multi-task framework built upon the CLIP architecture that unifies visual and linguistic inputs into a shared representation space for robust semantic alignment and improved generalization. To enhance target discrimination under occlusion and low-texture conditions, we explore a more effective use of depth information through the Depth-guided Geometric Module (DGGM), which converts depth into explicit geometric priors and injects them into the attention mechanism without additional computational overhead. In addition, we propose Adaptive Dense Channel Integration, which adaptively balances the contributions of multi-layer features to produce more discriminative and generalizable visual representations. Extensive experiments on the OCID-VLG dataset, as well as in both simulation and real-world hardware, demonstrate that GeoLanG enables precise and robust language-guided grasping in complex, cluttered environments, paving the way toward more reliable multimodal robotic manipulation in real-world human-centric settings.	IEEE ICRA 2025	None
Deep Multimodal Learning with Missing Modality: A Survey	2026-02-04	Show During multimodal model training and testing, certain data modalities may be absent due to sensor limitations, cost constraints, privacy concerns, or data loss, negatively affecting performance. Multimodal learning techniques designed to handle missing modalities can mitigate this by ensuring model robustness even when some modalities are unavailable. This survey reviews recent progress in Multimodal Learning with Missing Modality (MLMM), focusing on deep learning methods. It provides the first comprehensive survey that covers the motivation and distinctions between MLMM and standard multimodal learning setups, followed by a detailed analysis of current methods, applications, and datasets, concluding with challenges and future directions.	Accep... Accepted by TMLR (Transactions on Machine Learning Research)	None
Diff4MMLiTS: Advanced Multimodal Liver Tumor Segmentation via Diffusion-Based Image Synthesis and Alignment	2026-02-02	Show Multimodal learning has been demonstrated to enhance performance across various clinical tasks, owing to the diverse perspectives offered by different modalities of data. However, existing multimodal segmentation methods rely on well-registered multimodal data, which is unrealistic for real-world clinical images, particularly for indistinct and diffuse regions such as liver tumors. In this paper, we introduce Diff4MMLiTS, a four-stage multimodal liver tumor segmentation pipeline: pre-registration of the target organs in multimodal CTs; dilation of the annotated modality's mask and followed by its use in inpainting to obtain multimodal normal CTs without tumors; synthesis of strictly aligned multimodal CTs with tumors using the latent diffusion model based on multimodal CT features and randomly generated tumor masks; and finally, training the segmentation model, thus eliminating the need for strictly aligned multimodal data. Extensive experiments on public and internal datasets demonstrate the superiority of Diff4MMLiTS over other state-of-the-art multimodal segmentation methods.	Inter... International Workshop on Machine Learning in Medical Imaging, 668-678	None
Uncertainty-Aware Multimodal Learning via Conformal Shapley Intervals	2026-01-30	Show Multimodal learning combines information from multiple data modalities to improve predictive performance. However, modalities often contribute unequally and in a data dependent way, making it unclear which data modalities are genuinely informative and to what extent their contributions can be trusted. Quantifying modality level importance together with uncertainty is therefore central to interpretable and reliable multimodal learning. We introduce conformal Shapley intervals, a framework that combines Shapley values with conformal inference to construct uncertainty-aware importance intervals for each modality. Building on these intervals, we propose a modality selection procedure with a provable optimality guarantee: conditional on the observed features, the selected subset of modalities achieves performance close to that of the optimal subset. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on multiple datasets, showing that it provides meaningful uncertainty quantification and strong predictive performance while relying on only a small number of informative modalities.		None
Metis-SPECS: Decoupling Multimodal Learning via Self-distilled Preference-based Cold Start	2026-01-30	Show Reinforcement learning (RL) with verifiable rewards has recently catalyzed a wave of "MLLM-r1" approaches that bring RL to vision language models. Most representative paradigms begin with a cold start, typically employing supervised fine-tuning (SFT), to initialize the policy before RL. However, SFT-based cold start adopts the reasoning paradigm intertwined with task solution and output format, which may induce instruction-style overfitting, weakens out-of-distribution generalization, and ultimately affects downstream RL. We revisit the cold start along two views, its training method and data construction, and introduce the Generalization Factor (GF) coefficient to quantify the generalization capability under different methods. Our empirical study finds that preference-based training methods (e.g. DPO) generalizes better than SFT-based methods in cold start. Motivated by this, we propose SPECS-a Self-distilled, Preference-based Cold Start framework that decouples multimodal learning: (1) generates introspective preference data pairs via self-distillation, avoiding reliance on larger teachers or manual annotation; (2) performs preference-based training to learn, focusing on shallow, transferable surface-form criteria (format, structure, style) rather than memorizing content; and (3) hands off to RL with verifiable rewards for deep reasoning results. Experimental results across multiple multimodal benchmarks show that our decoupling learning framework yields consistent performance gains over strong baselines, improving MEGA-Bench by 4.1% and MathVista by 12.2%. Additional experiments indicate that SPECS contributes to reducing in-distribution "stuckness," improving exploration, stabilizing training, and raising the performance ceiling. Project Page: https://kwen-chen.github.io/SPECS-VL/	Publi... Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2026!	Code Link
Neural Signals Generate Clinical Notes in the Wild	2026-01-29	Show Generating clinical reports that summarize abnormal patterns, diagnostic findings, and clinical interpretations from long-term EEG recordings remains labor-intensive. We curate a large-scale clinical EEG dataset with $9{,}922$ reports paired with approximately $11{,}000$ hours of EEG recordings from $9{,}048$ patients. We therefore develop CELM, the first clinical EEG-to-Language foundation model capable of summarizing long-duration, variable-length EEG recordings and performing end-to-end clinical report generation at multiple scales, including recording description, background activity, epileptiform abnormalities, events/seizures, and impressions. Experimental results show that, with patient history supervision, our method achieves $70%$--$95%$ average relative improvements in standard generation metrics (e.g., ROUGE-1 and METEOR) from $0.2$--$0.3$ to $0.4$--$0.6$. In the zero-shot setting without patient history, CELM attains generation scores in the range of $0.43$--$0.52$, compared to baselines of $0.17$--$0.26$. CELM integrates pretrained EEG foundation models with language models to enable scalable multimodal learning. We release our model and benchmark construction pipeline at [URL].		None
MEIDNet: Multimodal generative AI framework for inverse materials design	2026-01-29	Show In this work, we present Multimodal Equivariant Inverse Design Network (MEIDNet), a framework that jointly learns structural information and materials properties through contrastive learning, while encoding structures via an equivariant graph neural network (EGNN). By combining generative inverse design with multimodal learning, our approach accelerates the exploration of chemical-structural space and facilitates the discovery of materials that satisfy predefined property targets. MEIDNet exhibits strong latent-space alignment with cosine similarity 0.96 by fusion of three modalities through cross-modal learning. Through implementation of curriculum learning strategies, MEIDNet achieves ~60 times higher learning efficiency than conventional training techniques. The potential of our multimodal approach is demonstrated by generating low-bandgap perovskite structures at a stable, unique, and novel (SUN) rate of 13.6 %, which are further validated by ab initio methods. Our inverse design framework demonstrates both scalability and adaptability, paving the way for the universal learning of chemical space across diverse modalities.		None
Embracing Aleatoric Uncertainty in Medical Multimodal Learning with Missing Modalities	2026-01-29	Show Medical multimodal learning faces significant challenges with missing modalities prevalent in clinical practice. Existing approaches assume equal contribution of modality and random missing patterns, neglecting inherent uncertainty in medical data acquisition. In this regard, we propose the Aleatoric Uncertainty Modeling (AUM) that explicitly quantifies unimodal aleatoric uncertainty to address missing modalities. Specifically, AUM models each unimodal representation as a multivariate Gaussian distribution to capture aleatoric uncertainty and enable principled modality reliability quantification. To adaptively aggregate captured information, we develop a dynamic message-passing mechanism within a bipartite patient-modality graph using uncertainty-aware aggregation mechanism. Through this process, missing modalities are naturally accommodated, while more reliable information from available modalities is dynamically emphasized to guide representation generation. Our AUM framework achieves an improvement of 2.26% AUC-ROC on MIMIC-IV mortality prediction and 2.17% gain on eICU, outperforming existing state-of-the-art approaches.		None
Robust Multimodal Representation Learning in Healthcare	2026-01-29	Show Medical multimodal representation learning aims to integrate heterogeneous data into unified patient representations to support clinical outcome prediction. However, real-world medical datasets commonly contain systematic biases from multiple sources, which poses significant challenges for medical multimodal representation learning. Existing approaches typically focus on effective multimodal fusion, neglecting inherent biased features that affect the generalization ability. To address these challenges, we propose a Dual-Stream Feature Decorrelation Framework that identifies and handles the biases through structural causal analysis introduced by latent confounders. Our method employs a causal-biased decorrelation framework with dual-stream neural networks to disentangle causal features from spurious correlations, utilizing generalized cross-entropy loss and mutual information minimization for effective decorrelation. The framework is model-agnostic and can be integrated into existing medical multimodal learning methods. Comprehensive experiments on MIMIC-IV, eICU, and ADNI datasets demonstrate consistent performance improvements.		None
When Gradient Optimization Is Not Enough: $\dagger$ Dispersive and Anchoring Geometric Regularizer for Multimodal Learning	2026-01-29	Show Multimodal learning aims to integrate complementary information from heterogeneous modalities, yet strong optimization alone does not guaranty well-structured representations. Even under carefully balanced training schemes, multimodal models often exhibit geometric pathologies, including intra-modal representation collapse and sample-level cross-modal inconsistency, which degrade both unimodal robustness and multimodal fusion. We identify representation geometry as a missing control axis in multimodal learning and propose \regName, a lightweight geometry-aware regularization framework. \regName enforces two complementary constraints on intermediate embeddings: an intra-modal dispersive regularization that promotes representation diversity, and an inter-modal anchoring regularization that bounds sample-level cross-modal drift without rigid alignment. The proposed regularizer is plug-and-play, requires no architectural modifications, and is compatible with various training paradigms. Extensive experiments across multiple multimodal benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements in both multimodal and unimodal performance, showing that explicitly regulating representation geometry effectively mitigates modality trade-offs.		None
Rethinking Multimodal Learning from the Perspective of Mitigating Classification Ability Disproportion	2026-01-29	Show Multimodal learning (MML) is significantly constrained by modality imbalance, leading to suboptimal performance in practice. While existing approaches primarily focus on balancing the learning of different modalities to address this issue, they fundamentally overlook the inherent disproportion in model classification ability, which serves as the primary cause of this phenomenon. In this paper, we propose a novel multimodal learning approach to dynamically balance the classification ability of weak and strong modalities by incorporating the principle of boosting. Concretely, we first propose a sustained boosting algorithm in multimodal learning by simultaneously optimizing the classification and residual errors. Subsequently, we introduce an adaptive classifier assignment strategy to dynamically facilitate the classification performance of the weak modality. Furthermore, we theoretically analyze the convergence property of the cross-modal gap function, ensuring the effectiveness of the proposed boosting scheme. To this end, the classification ability of strong and weak modalities is expected to be balanced, thereby mitigating the imbalance issue. Empirical experiments on widely used datasets reveal the superiority of our method through comparison with various state-of-the-art (SOTA) multimodal learning baselines. The source code is available at https://github.com/njustkmg/NeurIPS25-AUG.	Accep... Accepted by NeurIPS 2025	Code Link
MultiModal Fine-tuning with Synthetic Captions	2026-01-29	Show In this paper, we address a fundamental gap between pre-training and fine-tuning of deep neural networks: while pre-training has shifted from unimodal to multimodal learning with enhanced visual understanding, fine-tuning predominantly remains unimodal, limiting the benefits of rich pre-trained representations. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel approach that transforms unimodal datasets into multimodal ones using Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to generate synthetic image captions for fine-tuning models with a multimodal objective. Our method employs carefully designed prompts incorporating class labels and domain context to produce high-quality captions tailored for classification tasks. Furthermore, we introduce a supervised contrastive loss function that explicitly encourages clustering of same-class representations during fine-tuning, along with a new inference technique that leverages class-averaged text embeddings from multiple synthetic captions per image. Extensive experiments across 13 image classification benchmarks demonstrate that our approach outperforms baseline methods, with particularly significant improvements in few-shot learning scenarios. Our work establishes a new paradigm for dataset enhancement that effectively bridges the gap between multimodal pre-training and fine-tuning. Our code is available at https://github.com/s-enmt/MMFT.		Code Link
Plain Transformers Can be Powerful Graph Learners	2026-01-29	Show Transformers have attained outstanding performance across various modalities, owing to their simple but powerful scaled-dot-product (SDP) attention mechanisms. Researchers have attempted to migrate Transformers to graph learning, but most advanced Graph Transformers (GTs) have strayed far from plain Transformers, exhibiting major architectural differences either by integrating message-passing or incorporating sophisticated attention mechanisms. These divergences hinder the easy adoption of training advances for Transformers developed in other domains. Contrary to previous GTs, this work demonstrates that the plain Transformer architecture can be a powerful graph learner. To achieve this, we propose to incorporate three simple, minimal, and easy-to-implement modifications to the plain Transformer architecture to construct our Powerful Plain Graph Transformers (PPGT): (1) simplified $L_2$ attention for measuring the magnitude closeness among tokens; (2) adaptive root-mean-square normalization to preserve token magnitude information; and (3) a simple MLP-based stem for graph positional encoding. Consistent with its theoretical expressivity, PPGT demonstrates noteworthy realized expressivity on the empirical graph expressivity benchmark, comparing favorably to more complicated alternatives such as subgraph GNNs and higher-order GNNs. Its empirical performance across various graph datasets also justifies the effectiveness of PPGT. This finding underscores the versatility of plain Transformer architectures and highlights their strong potential as a unified backbone for multimodal learning across language, vision, and graph domains.		None
Missing-Data-Induced Phase Transitions in Spectral PLS for Multimodal Learning	2026-01-29	Show Partial Least Squares (PLS) learns shared structure from paired data via the top singular vectors of the empirical cross-covariance (PLS-SVD), but multimodal datasets often have missing entries in both views. We study PLS-SVD under independent entry-wise missing-completely-at-random masking in a proportional high-dimensional spiked model. After appropriate normalization, the masked cross-covariance behaves like a spiked rectangular random matrix whose effective signal strength is attenuated by $\sqrtρ$, where $ρ$ is the joint entry retention probability. As a result, PLS-SVD exhibits a sharp BBP-type phase transition: below a critical signal-to-noise threshold the leading singular vectors are asymptotically uninformative, while above it they achieve nontrivial alignment with the latent shared directions, with closed-form asymptotic overlap formulas. Simulations and semi-synthetic multimodal experiments corroborate the predicted phase diagram and recovery curves across aspect ratios, signal strengths, and missingness levels.	Preprint	None
AutoGameUI: Constructing High-Fidelity GameUI via Multimodal Correspondence Matching	2026-01-27	Show Game UI development is essential to the game industry. However, the traditional workflow requires substantial manual effort to integrate pairwise UI and UX designs into a cohesive game user interface (GameUI). The inconsistency between the aesthetic UI design and the functional UX design typically results in mismatches and inefficiencies. To address the issue, we present an automatic system, AutoGameUI, for efficiently and accurately constructing GameUI. The system centers on a two-stage multimodal learning pipeline to obtain the optimal correspondences between UI and UX designs. The first stage learns the comprehensive representations of UI and UX designs from multimodal perspectives. The second stage incorporates grouped cross-attention modules with constrained integer programming to estimate the optimal correspondences through top-down hierarchical matching. The optimal correspondences enable the automatic GameUI construction. We create the GAMEUI dataset, comprising pairwise UI and UX designs from real-world games, to train and validate the proposed method. Besides, an interactive web tool is implemented to ensure high-fidelity effects and facilitate human-in-the-loop construction. Extensive experiments on the GAMEUI and RICO datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our system in maintaining consistency between the constructed GameUI and the original designs. When deployed in the workflow of several mobile games, AutoGameUI achieves a 3$\times$ improvement in time efficiency, conveying significant practical value for game UI development.	9 pages	None
AGSP-DSA: An Adaptive Graph Signal Processing Framework for Robust Multimodal Fusion with Dynamic Semantic Alignment	2026-01-26	Show In this paper, we introduce an Adaptive Graph Signal Processing with Dynamic Semantic Alignment (AGSP DSA) framework to perform robust multimodal data fusion over heterogeneous sources, including text, audio, and images. The requested approach uses a dual-graph construction to learn both intra-modal and inter-modal relations, spectral graph filtering to boost the informative signals, and effective node embedding with Multi-scale Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs). Semantic aware attention mechanism: each modality may dynamically contribute to the context with respect to contextual relevance. The experimental outcomes on three benchmark datasets, including CMU-MOSEI, AVE, and MM-IMDB, show that AGSP-DSA performs as the state of the art. More precisely, it achieves 95.3% accuracy, 0.936 F1-score, and 0.924 mAP on CMU-MOSEI, improving MM-GNN by 2.6 percent in accuracy. It gets 93.4% accuracy and 0.911 F1-score on AVE and 91.8% accuracy and 0.886 F1-score on MM-IMDB, which demonstrate good generalization and robustness in the missing modality setting. These findings verify the efficiency of AGSP-DSA in promoting multimodal learning in sentiment analysis, event recognition and multimedia classification.		None
Closing the Modality Gap Aligns Group-Wise Semantics	2026-01-26	Show In multimodal learning, CLIP has been recognized as the \textit{de facto} method for learning a shared latent space across multiple modalities, placing similar representations close to each other and moving them away from dissimilar ones. Although CLIP-based losses effectively align modalities at the semantic level, the resulting latent spaces often remain only partially shared, revealing a structural mismatch known as the modality gap. While the necessity of addressing this phenomenon remains debated, particularly given its limited impact on instance-wise tasks (e.g., retrieval), we prove that its influence is instead strongly pronounced in group-level tasks (e.g., clustering). To support this claim, we introduce a novel method designed to consistently reduce this discrepancy in two-modal settings, with a straightforward extension to the general $n$-modal case. Through our extensive evaluation, we demonstrate our novel insight: while reducing the gap provides only marginal or inconsistent improvements in traditional instance-wise tasks, it significantly enhances group-wise tasks. These findings may reshape our understanding of the modality gap, highlighting its key role in improving performance on tasks requiring semantic grouping.	ICLR 2026	None
Multimodal Machine Learning for Soft High-k Elastomers under Data Scarcity	2026-01-25	Show Dielectric materials are critical building blocks for modern electronics such as sensors, actuators, and transistors. With the rapid recent advance in soft and stretchable electronics for emerging human- and robot-interfacing applications, there is a surging need for high-performance dielectric elastomers. However, it remains a grand challenge to develop soft elastomers that simultaneously possess high dielectric constants (k, related to energy storage capacity) and low Young's moduli (E, related to mechanical flexibility). While some new elastomer designs have been reported in individual (mostly one-off) studies, almost no structured dataset is currently available for dielectric elastomers that systematically encompasses their molecular sequence, dielectric, and mechanical properties. Within this context, we curate a compact, high-quality dataset of acrylate-based dielectric elastomers, one of the most widely explored elastomer backbones due to its versatile chemistry and molecular design flexibility, by screening and aggregating experimental results from the literature over the past 10 years. Building on this dataset, we propose a multimodal learning framework that leverages large-scale pretrained polymer representations from graph- and sequence-based encoders. These pretrained embeddings transfer rich chemical and structural knowledge from vast polymer corpora, enabling accurate few-shot prediction of both dielectric and mechanical properties from molecular sequences. Our results represent a new paradigm for transferring knowledge from pretrained multimodal models to overcome severe data scarcity, which can be readily translated to other polymer backbones (e.g., silicones, urethanes) and thus accelerate data-efficient discovery of soft high-k dielectric elastomers. Our source code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/HySonLab/Polymers		Code Link
Learning ORDER-Aware Multimodal Representations for Composite Materials Design	2026-01-23	Show Artificial intelligence (AI) has shown remarkable success in materials discovery and property prediction, particularly for crystalline and polymer systems where material properties and structures are dominated by discrete graph representations. Such graph-central paradigm breaks down on composite materials, which possess continuous and nonlinear design spaces that lack well-defined graph structures. General composite descriptors, e.g., fiber volume and misalignment angle, cannot fully capture the fiber distributions that fundamentally determine microstructural characteristics, necessitating the integration of heterogeneous data sources through multimodal learning. Existing alignment-oriented multimodal frameworks have proven effective on abundant crystal or polymer data under discrete, unique graph-property mapping assumptions, but fail to address the highly continuous composite design space under extreme data scarcity. In this work, we introduce ORDinal-aware imagE-tabulaR alignment (ORDER), a multimodal pretraining framework that establishes ordinality as a core principle for composite material representations. ORDER ensures that materials with similar target properties occupy nearby regions in the latent space, which effectively preserves the continuous nature of composite properties and enables meaningful interpolation between sparsely observed designs. We evaluate ORDER on a public Nanofiber-enforced composite dataset and an internally curated dataset that simulates the construction of carbon fiber T700 with diverse fiber distributions. ORDER achieves consistent improvements over state-of-the-art multimodal baselines across property prediction, cross-modal retrieval, and microstructure generation tasks.		None
Emotion-LLaMAv2 and MMEVerse: A New Framework and Benchmark for Multimodal Emotion Understanding	2026-01-23	Show Understanding human emotions from multimodal signals poses a significant challenge in affective computing and human-robot interaction. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have excelled in general vision-language tasks, their capabilities in emotional reasoning remain limited. The field currently suffers from a scarcity of large-scale datasets with high-quality, descriptive emotion annotations and lacks standardized benchmarks for evaluation. Our preliminary framework, Emotion-LLaMA, pioneered instruction-tuned multimodal learning for emotion reasoning but was restricted by explicit face detectors, implicit fusion strategies, and low-quality training data with limited scale. To address these limitations, we present Emotion-LLaMAv2 and the MMEVerse benchmark, establishing an end-to-end pipeline together with a standardized evaluation setting for emotion recognition and reasoning. Emotion-LLaMAv2 introduces three key advances. First, an end-to-end multiview encoder eliminates external face detection and captures nuanced emotional cues via richer spatial and temporal multiview tokens. Second, a Conv Attention pre-fusion module is designed to enable simultaneous local and global multimodal feature interactions external to the LLM backbone. Third, a perception-to-cognition curriculum instruction tuning scheme within the LLaMA2 backbone unifies emotion recognition and free-form emotion reasoning. To support large-scale training and reproducible evaluation, MMEVerse aggregates twelve publicly available emotion datasets, including IEMOCAP, MELD, DFEW, and MAFW, into a unified multimodal instruction format. The data are re-annotated via a multi-agent pipeline involving Qwen2 Audio, Qwen2.5 VL, and GPT 4o, producing 130k training clips and 36k testing clips across 18 evaluation benchmarks.		None
Advances in LLMs with Focus on Reasoning, Adaptability, Efficiency and Ethics	2026-01-22	Show This survey paper outlines the key developments in the field of Large Language Models (LLMs), including enhancements to their reasoning skills, adaptability to various tasks, increased computational efficiency, and the ability to make ethical decisions. The techniques that have been most effective in bridging the gap between human and machine communications include the Chain-of-Thought prompting, Instruction Tuning, and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback. The improvements in multimodal learning and few-shot or zero-shot techniques have further empowered LLMs to handle complex jobs with minor input. A significant focus is placed on efficiency, detailing scaling strategies, optimization techniques, and the influential Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, which strategically routes inputs to specialized subnetworks to boost predictive accuracy, while optimizing resource allocation. This survey also offers a broader perspective on recent advancements in LLMs, going beyond isolated aspects such as model architecture or ethical concerns. Additionally, it explores the role of LLMs in Agentic AI and their use as Autonomous Decision-Making Systems, and categorizes emerging methods that enhance LLM reasoning, efficiency, and ethical alignment. The survey also identifies underexplored areas such as interpretability, cross-modal integration, and sustainability. While significant advancements have been made in LLMs, challenges such as high computational costs, biases, and ethical risks remain. Overcoming these requires a focus on bias mitigation, transparent decision-making, and explicit ethical guidelines. Future research will generally focus on enhancing the model's ability to handle multiple inputs, thereby making it more intelligent, safe, and reliable.		None
Face-Voice Association with Inductive Bias for Maximum Class Separation	2026-01-20	Show Face-voice association is widely studied in multimodal learning and is approached representing faces and voices with embeddings that are close for a same person and well separated from those of others. Previous work achieved this with loss functions. Recent advancements in classification have shown that the discriminative ability of embeddings can be strengthened by imposing maximum class separation as inductive bias. This technique has never been used in the domain of face-voice association, and this work aims at filling this gap. More specifically, we develop a method for face-voice association that imposes maximum class separation among multimodal representations of different speakers as an inductive bias. Through quantitative experiments we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, showing that it achieves SOTA performance on two task formulation of face-voice association. Furthermore, we carry out an ablation study to show that imposing inductive bias is most effective when combined with losses for inter-class orthogonality. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first that applies and demonstrates the effectiveness of maximum class separation as an inductive bias in multimodal learning; it hence paves the way to establish a new paradigm.	Accep... Accepted at ICASSP 2026	None
DIS2: Disentanglement Meets Distillation with Classwise Attention for Robust Remote Sensing Segmentation under Missing Modalities	2026-01-20	Show The efficacy of multimodal learning in remote sensing (RS) is severely undermined by missing modalities. The challenge is exacerbated by the RS highly heterogeneous data and huge scale variation. Consequently, paradigms proven effective in other domains often fail when confronted with these unique data characteristics. Conventional disentanglement learning, which relies on significant feature overlap between modalities (modality-invariant), is insufficient for this heterogeneity. Similarly, knowledge distillation becomes an ill-posed mimicry task where a student fails to focus on the necessary compensatory knowledge, leaving the semantic gap unaddressed. Our work is therefore built upon three pillars uniquely designed for RS: (1) principled missing information compensation, (2) class-specific modality contribution, and (3) multi-resolution feature importance. We propose a novel method DIS2, a new paradigm shifting from modality-shared feature dependence and untargeted imitation to active, guided missing features compensation. Its core novelty lies in a reformulated synergy between disentanglement learning and knowledge distillation, termed DLKD. Compensatory features are explicitly captured which, when fused with the features of the available modality, approximate the ideal fused representation of the full-modality case. To address the class-specific challenge, our Classwise Feature Learning Module (CFLM) adaptively learn discriminative evidence for each target depending on signal availability. Both DLKD and CFLM are supported by a hierarchical hybrid fusion (HF) structure using features across resolutions to strengthen prediction. Extensive experiments validate that our proposed approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods across benchmarks.	Accep... Accepted to WACV 2026 - Computer Vision for Earth Observation Workshop	None
Model selection and real-time skill assessment for suturing in robotic surgery	2026-01-17	Show Automated feedback systems have the potential to provide objective skill assessment for training and evaluation in robot-assisted surgery. In this study, we examine methods to achieve real-time prediction of surgical skill level in real-time based on Objective Structured Assessment of Technical Skills (OSATS) scores. Using data acquired from the da Vinci Surgical System, we carry out three main analyses, focusing on model design, their real-time performance, and their skill-level-based cross-validation training. For the model design, we evaluate the effectiveness of multimodal deep learning models for predicting surgical skill levels using synchronized kinematic and vision data. Our models include separate unimodal baselines and fusion architectures that integrate features from both modalities and are evaluated using mean Spearman's correlation coefficients, demonstrating that the fusion model consistently outperforms unimodal models for real-time predictions. For the real-time performance, we observe the prediction's trend over time and highlight correlation with the surgeon's gestures. For the skill-level-based cross-validation, we separately trained models on surgeons with different skill levels, which showed that high-skill demonstrations allow for better performance than those trained on low-skilled ones and generalize well to similarly skilled participants. Our findings show that multimodal learning allows more stable fine-grained evaluation of surgical performance and highlights the value of expert-level training data for model generalization.		None
Digital FAST: An AI-Driven Multimodal Framework for Rapid and Early Stroke Screening	2026-01-17	Show Early identification of stroke symptoms is essential for enabling timely intervention and improving patient outcomes, particularly in prehospital settings. This study presents a fast, non-invasive multimodal deep learning framework for automatic binary stroke screening based on data collected during the F.A.S.T. assessment. The proposed approach integrates complementary information from facial expressions, speech signals, and upper-body movements to enhance diagnostic robustness. Facial dynamics are represented using landmark based features and modeled with a Transformer architecture to capture temporal dependencies. Speech signals are converted into mel spectrograms and processed using an Audio Spectrogram Transformer, while upper-body pose sequences are analyzed with an MLP-Mixer network to model spatiotemporal motion patterns. The extracted modality specific representations are combined through an attention-based fusion mechanism to effectively learn cross modal interactions. Experiments conducted on a self-collected dataset of 222 videos from 37 subjects demonstrate that the proposed multimodal model consistently outperforms unimodal baselines, achieving 95.83% accuracy and a 96.00% F1-score. The model attains a strong balance between sensitivity and specificity and successfully detects all stroke cases in the test set. These results highlight the potential of multimodal learning and transfer learning for early stroke screening, while emphasizing the need for larger, clinically representative datasets to support reliable real-world deployment.		None
Cross-Modal Attention Network with Dual Graph Learning in Multimodal Recommendation	2026-01-16	Show Multimedia recommendation systems leverage user-item interactions and multimodal information to capture user preferences, enabling more accurate and personalized recommendations. Despite notable advancements, existing approaches still face two critical limitations: first, shallow modality fusion often relies on simple concatenation, failing to exploit rich synergic intra- and inter-modal relationships; second, asymmetric feature treatment-where users are only characterized by interaction IDs while items benefit from rich multimodal content-hinders the learning of a shared semantic space. To address these issues, we propose a Cross-modal Recursive Attention Network with dual graph Embedding (CRANE). To tackle shallow fusion, we design a core Recursive Cross-Modal Attention (RCA) mechanism that iteratively refines modality features based on cross-correlations in a joint latent space, effectively capturing high-order intra- and inter-modal dependencies. For symmetric multimodal learning, we explicitly construct users' multimodal profiles by aggregating features of their interacted items. Furthermore, CRANE integrates a symmetric dual-graph framework-comprising a heterogeneous user-item interaction graph and a homogeneous item-item semantic graph-unified by a self-supervised contrastive learning objective to fuse behavioral and semantic signals. Despite these complex modeling capabilities, CRANE maintains high computational efficiency. Theoretical and empirical analyses confirm its scalability and high practical efficiency, achieving faster convergence on small datasets and superior performance ceilings on large-scale ones. Comprehensive experiments on four public real-world datasets validate an average 5% improvement in key metrics over state-of-the-art baselines.	Accep... Accepted to ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications (TOMM)	None
V-Zero: Self-Improving Multimodal Reasoning with Zero Annotation	2026-01-15	Show Recent advances in multimodal learning have significantly enhanced the reasoning capabilities of vision-language models (VLMs). However, state-of-the-art approaches rely heavily on large-scale human-annotated datasets, which are costly and time-consuming to acquire. To overcome this limitation, we introduce V-Zero, a general post-training framework that facilitates self-improvement using exclusively unlabeled images. V-Zero establishes a co-evolutionary loop by instantiating two distinct roles: a Questioner and a Solver. The Questioner learns to synthesize high-quality, challenging questions by leveraging a dual-track reasoning reward that contrasts intuitive guesses with reasoned results. The Solver is optimized using pseudo-labels derived from majority voting over its own sampled responses. Both roles are trained iteratively via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), driving a cycle of mutual enhancement. Remarkably, without a single human annotation, V-Zero achieves consistent performance gains on Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct, improving visual mathematical reasoning by +1.7 and general vision-centric by +2.6, demonstrating the potential of self-improvement in multimodal systems. Code is available at https://github.com/SatonoDia/V-Zero		Code Link
Edge-Optimized Multimodal Learning for UAV Video Understanding via BLIP-2	2026-01-13	Show The demand for real-time visual understanding and interaction in complex scenarios is increasingly critical for unmanned aerial vehicles. However, a significant challenge arises from the contradiction between the high computational cost of large Vision language models and the limited computing resources available on UAV edge devices. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a lightweight multimodal task platform based on BLIP-2, integrated with YOLO-World and YOLOv8-Seg models. This integration extends the multi-task capabilities of BLIP-2 for UAV applications with minimal adaptation and without requiring task-specific fine-tuning on drone data. Firstly, the deep integration of BLIP-2 with YOLO models enables it to leverage the precise perceptual results of YOLO for fundamental tasks like object detection and instance segmentation, thereby facilitating deeper visual-attention understanding and reasoning. Secondly, a content-aware key frame sampling mechanism based on K-Means clustering is designed, which incorporates intelligent frame selection and temporal feature concatenation. This equips the lightweight BLIP-2 architecture with the capability to handle video-level interactive tasks effectively. Thirdly, a unified prompt optimization scheme for multi-task adaptation is implemented. This scheme strategically injects structured event logs from the YOLO models as contextual information into BLIP-2's input. Combined with output constraints designed to filter out technical details, this approach effectively guides the model to generate accurate and contextually relevant outputs for various tasks.	The T... The Tenth International Conference on Data Mining and Big Data (DMBD'2025)	None
A Multimodal Dataset of Student Oral Presentations with Sensors and Evaluation Data	2026-01-12	Show Oral presentation skills are a critical component of higher education, yet comprehensive datasets capturing real-world student performance across multiple modalities remain scarce. To address this gap, we present SOPHIAS (Student Oral Presentation monitoring for Holistic Insights & Analytics using Sensors), a 12-hour multimodal dataset containing recordings of 50 oral presentations (10-15-minute presentation followed by 5-15-minute Q&A) delivered by 65 undergraduate and master's students at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid. SOPHIAS integrates eight synchronized sensor streams from high-definition webcams, ambient and webcam audio, eye-tracking glasses, smartwatch physiological sensors, and clicker, keyboard, and mouse interactions. In addition, the dataset includes slides and rubric-based evaluations from teachers, peers, and self-assessments, along with timestamped contextual annotations. The dataset captures presentations conducted in real classroom settings, preserving authentic student behaviors, interactions, and physiological responses. SOPHIAS enables the exploration of relationships between multimodal behavioral and physiological signals and presentation performance, supports the study of peer assessment, and provides a benchmark for developing automated feedback and Multimodal Learning Analytics tools. The dataset is publicly available for research through GitHub and Science Data Bank.	Artic... Article under review in the journal Scientific Data. GitHub repository of the dataset at: https://github.com/dataGHIA/SOPHIAS	Code Link
CLIP-GS: Unifying Vision-Language Representation with 3D Gaussian Splatting	2026-01-12	Show Recent works in 3D multimodal learning have made remarkable progress. However, typically 3D multimodal models are only capable of handling point clouds. Compared to the emerging 3D representation technique, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), the spatially sparse point cloud cannot depict the texture information of 3D objects, resulting in inferior reconstruction capabilities. This limitation constrains the potential of point cloud-based 3D multimodal representation learning. In this paper, we present CLIP-GS, a novel multimodal representation learning framework grounded in 3DGS. We introduce the GS Tokenizer to generate serialized gaussian tokens, which are then processed through transformer layers pre-initialized with weights from point cloud models, resulting in the 3DGS embeddings. CLIP-GS leverages contrastive loss between 3DGS and the visual-text embeddings of CLIP, and we introduce an image voting loss to guide the directionality and convergence of gradient optimization. Furthermore, we develop an efficient way to generate triplets of 3DGS, images, and text, facilitating CLIP-GS in learning unified multimodal representations. Leveraging the well-aligned multimodal representations, CLIP-GS demonstrates versatility and outperforms point cloud-based models on various 3D tasks, including multimodal retrieval, zero-shot, and few-shot classification.		None
Test-time Adaptive Hierarchical Co-enhanced Denoising Network for Reliable Multimodal Classification	2026-01-12	Show Reliable learning on low-quality multimodal data is a widely concerning issue, especially in safety-critical applications. However, multimodal noise poses a major challenge in this domain and leads existing methods to suffer from two key limitations. First, they struggle to reliably remove heterogeneous data noise, hindering robust multimodal representation learning. Second, they exhibit limited adaptability and generalization when encountering previously unseen noise. To address these issues, we propose Test-time Adaptive Hierarchical Co-enhanced Denoising Network (TAHCD). On one hand, TAHCD introduces the Adaptive Stable Subspace Alignment and Sample-Adaptive Confidence Alignment to reliably remove heterogeneous noise. They account for noise at both global and instance levels and enable jointly removal of modality-specific and cross-modality noise, achieving robust learning. On the other hand, TAHCD introduces test-time cooperative enhancement, which adaptively updates the model in response to input noise in a label-free manner, improving adaptability and generalization. This is achieved by collaboratively enhancing the joint removal process of modality-specific and cross-modality noise across global and instance levels according to sample noise. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior classification performance, robustness, and generalization compared with state-of-the-art reliable multimodal learning approaches.	14 pa... 14 pages,9 figures, 8 tables	None
Cross-Modal Computational Model of Brain-Heart Interactions via HRV and EEG Feature	2026-01-11	Show The electroencephalogram (EEG) has been the gold standard for quantifying mental workload; however, due to its complexity and non-portability, it can be constraining. ECG signals, which are feasible on wearable equipment pieces such as headbands, present a promising method for cognitive state monitoring. This research explores whether electrocardiogram (ECG) signals are able to indicate mental workload consistently and act as surrogates for EEG-based cognitive indicators. This study investigates whether ECG-derived features can serve as surrogate indicators of cognitive load, a concept traditionally quantified using EEG. Using a publicly available multimodal dataset (OpenNeuro) of EEG and ECG recorded during working-memory and listening tasks, features of HRV and Catch22 descriptors are extracted from ECG, and spectral band-power with Catch22 features from EEG. A cross-modal regression framework based on XGBoost was trained to map ECG-derived HRV representations to EEG-derived cognitive features. In order to address data sparsity and model brain-heart interactions, we integrated the PSV-SDG to produce EEG-conditioned synthetic HRV time series.This addresses the challenge of inferring cognitive load solely from ECG-derived features using a combination of multimodal learning, signal processing, and synthetic data generation. These outcomes form a basis for light, interpretable machine learning models that are implemented through wearable biosensors in non-lab environments. Synthetic HRV inclusion enhances robustness, particularly in sparse data situations. Overall, this work is an initiation for building low-cost, explainable, and real-time cognitive monitoring systems for mental health, education, and human-computer interaction, with a focus on ageing and clinical populations.	6 pag... 6 pages, 2 figures, Code available at: https://github.com/Malavika-pradeep/Computational-model-for-Brain-heart-Interaction-Analysis. Presented at AIHC (not published)	Code Link
Feature Entanglement-based Quantum Multimodal Fusion Neural Network	2026-01-09	Show Multimodal learning aims to enhance perceptual and decision-making capabilities by integrating information from diverse sources. However, classical deep learning approaches face a critical trade-off between the high accuracy of black-box feature-level fusion and the interpretability of less outstanding decision-level fusion, alongside the challenges of parameter explosion and complexity. This paper discusses the accuracy-interpretablity-complexity dilemma under the quantum computation framework and propose a feature entanglement-based quantum multimodal fusion neural network. The model is composed of three core components: a classical feed-forward module for unimodal processing, an interpretable quantum fusion block, and a quantum convolutional neural network (QCNN) for deep feature extraction. By leveraging the strong expressive power of quantum, we have reduced the complexity of multimodal fusion and post-processing to linear, and the fusion process also possesses the interpretability of decision-level fusion. The simulation results demonstrate that our model achieves classification accuracy comparable to classical networks with dozens of times of parameters, exhibiting notable stability and performance across multimodal image datasets.		None
Advanced Multimodal Learning for Seizure Detection and Prediction: Concept, Challenges, and Future Directions	2026-01-08	Show Epilepsy is a chronic neurological disorder characterized by recurrent unprovoked seizures, affects over 50 million people worldwide, and poses significant risks, including sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP). Conventional unimodal approaches, primarily reliant on electroencephalography (EEG), face several key challenges, including low SNR, nonstationarity, inter- and intrapatient heterogeneity, portability, and real-time applicability in clinical settings. To address these issues, a comprehensive survey highlights the concept of advanced multimodal learning for epileptic seizure detection and prediction (AMLSDP). The survey presents the evolution of epileptic seizure detection (ESD) and prediction (ESP) technologies across different eras. The survey also explores the core challenges of multimodal and non-EEG-based ESD and ESP. To overcome the key challenges of the multimodal system, the survey introduces the advanced processing strategies for efficient AMLSDP. Furthermore, this survey highlights future directions for researchers and practitioners. We believe this work will advance neurotechnology toward wearable and imaging-based solutions for epilepsy monitoring, serving as a valuable resource for future innovations in this domain.		None
MPM-LLM4DSE: Reaching the Pareto Frontier in HLS with Multimodal Learning and LLM-Driven Exploration	2026-01-08	Show High-Level Synthesis (HLS) design space exploration (DSE) seeks Pareto-optimal designs within expansive pragma configuration spaces. To accelerate HLS DSE, graph neural networks (GNNs) are commonly employed as surrogates for HLS tools to predict quality of results (QoR) metrics, while multi-objective optimization algorithms expedite the exploration. However, GNN-based prediction methods may not fully capture the rich semantic features inherent in behavioral descriptions, and conventional multi-objective optimization algorithms often do not explicitly account for the domain-specific knowledge regarding how pragma directives influence QoR. To address these limitations, this paper proposes the MPM-LLM4DSE framework, which incorporates a multimodal prediction model (MPM) that simultaneously fuses features from behavioral descriptions and control and data flow graphs. Furthermore, the framework employs a large language model (LLM) as an optimizer, accompanied by a tailored prompt engineering methodology. This methodology incorporates pragma impact analysis on QoR to guide the LLM in generating high-quality configurations (LLM4DSE). Experimental results demonstrate that our multimodal predictive model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art work ProgSG by up to 10.25$\times$. Furthermore, in DSE tasks, the proposed LLM4DSE achieves an average performance gain of 39.90% over prior methods, validating the effectiveness of our prompting methodology. Code and models are available at https://github.com/wslcccc/MPM-LLM4DSE.		Code Link
Attention mechanisms in neural networks	2026-01-06	Show Attention mechanisms represent a fundamental paradigm shift in neural network architectures, enabling models to selectively focus on relevant portions of input sequences through learned weighting functions. This monograph provides a comprehensive and rigorous mathematical treatment of attention mechanisms, encompassing their theoretical foundations, computational properties, and practical implementations in contemporary deep learning systems. Applications in natural language processing, computer vision, and multimodal learning demonstrate the versatility of attention mechanisms. We examine language modeling with autoregressive transformers, bidirectional encoders for representation learning, sequence-to-sequence translation, Vision Transformers for image classification, and cross-modal attention for vision-language tasks. Empirical analysis reveals training characteristics, scaling laws that relate performance to model size and computation, attention pattern visualizations, and performance benchmarks across standard datasets. We discuss the interpretability of learned attention patterns and their relationship to linguistic and visual structures. The monograph concludes with a critical examination of current limitations, including computational scalability, data efficiency, systematic generalization, and interpretability challenges.		None
Causal and Federated Multimodal Learning for Cardiovascular Risk Prediction under Heterogeneous Populations	2026-01-05	Show Cardiovascular disease (CVD) continues to be the major cause of death globally, calling for predictive models that not only handle diverse and high-dimensional biomedical signals but also maintain interpretability and privacy. We create a single multimodal learning framework that integrates cross modal transformers with graph neural networks and causal representation learning to measure personalized CVD risk. The model combines genomic variation, cardiac MRI, ECG waveforms, wearable streams, and structured EHR data to predict risk while also implementing causal invariance constraints across different clinical subpopulations. To maintain transparency, we employ SHAP based feature attribution, counterfactual explanations and causal latent alignment for understandable risk factors. Besides, we position the design in a federated, privacy, preserving optimization protocol and establish rules for convergence, calibration and uncertainty quantification under distributional shift. Experimental studies based on large-scale biobank and multi institutional datasets reveal state discrimination and robustness, exhibiting fair performance across demographic strata and clinically distinct cohorts. This study paves the way for a principled approach to clinically trustworthy, interpretable and privacy respecting CVD prediction at the population level.	9 pages, 5 figures	None
Massively Multimodal Foundation Models: A Framework for Capturing Dependencies with Specialized Mixture-of-Experts	2026-01-02	Show Modern applications increasingly involve dozens of heterogeneous input streams, such as clinical sensors, wearables, imaging, and text, each with distinct measurement models, sampling rates, and noise characteristics. This \textit{massively multimodal} setting, where each sensor constitutes a separate modality, fundamentally differs from conventional multimodal learning focused on two or three modalities. As modality count grows, capturing their complex, time-varying dependencies becomes essential yet challenging. Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures are naturally suited for this setting, their sparse routing mechanism enables efficient scaling across many modalities. Existing MoE architectures route tokens based on similarity alone, overlooking the rich temporal dependencies across modalities. We propose a framework that explicitly quantifies temporal dependencies between modality pairs across multiple time lags and uses these to guide MoE routing. A dependency-aware router dispatches tokens to specialized experts based on interaction type. This principled routing enables experts to learn generalizable dependency-processing skills. Experiments across healthcare, activity recognition, and affective computing benchmarks demonstrate substantial performance gains and interpretable routing patterns aligned with domain knowledge.	28 pa... 28 pages, 16 figures, 10 tables	None
S1-MMAlign: A Large-Scale, Multi-Disciplinary Dataset for Scientific Figure-Text Understanding	2026-01-01	Show Multimodal learning has revolutionized general domain tasks, yet its application in scientific discovery is hindered by the profound semantic gap between complex scientific imagery and sparse textual descriptions. We present S1-MMAlign, a large-scale, multi-disciplinary multimodal dataset comprising over 15.5 million high-quality image-text pairs derived from 2.5 million open-access scientific papers. Spanning disciplines from physics and biology to engineering, the dataset captures diverse visual modalities including experimental setups, heatmaps, and microscopic imagery. To address the pervasive issue of weak alignment in raw scientific captions, we introduce an AI-ready semantic enhancement pipeline that utilizes the Qwen-VL multimodal large model series to recaption images by synthesizing context from paper abstracts and citation contexts. Technical validation demonstrates that this enhancement significantly improves data quality: SciBERT-based pseudo-perplexity metrics show reduced semantic ambiguity, while CLIP scores indicate an 18.21% improvement in image-text alignment. S1-MMAlign provides a foundational resource for advancing scientific reasoning and cross-modal understanding in the era of AI for Science. The dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ScienceOne-AI/S1-MMAlign.	12 pa... 12 pages, 5 figures. Dataset available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ScienceOne-AI/S1-MMAlign	None
Towards Open-Vocabulary Industrial Defect Understanding with a Large-Scale Multimodal Dataset	2025-12-30	Show We present IMDD-1M, the first large-scale Industrial Multimodal Defect Dataset comprising 1,000,000 aligned image-text pairs, designed to advance multimodal learning for manufacturing and quality inspection. IMDD-1M contains high-resolution real-world defects spanning over 60 material categories and more than 400 defect types, each accompanied by expert-verified annotations and fine-grained textual descriptions detailing defect location, severity, and contextual attributes. This dataset enables a wide spectrum of applications, including classification, segmentation, retrieval, captioning, and generative modeling. Building upon IMDD-1M, we train a diffusion-based vision-language foundation model from scratch, specifically tailored for industrial scenarios. The model serves as a generalizable foundation that can be efficiently adapted to specialized domains through lightweight fine-tuning. With less than 5% of the task-specific data required by dedicated expert models, it achieves comparable performance, highlighting the potential of data-efficient foundation model adaptation for industrial inspection and generation, paving the way for scalable, domain-adaptive, and knowledge-grounded manufacturing intelligence.		None
Wireless Multimodal Foundation Model (WMFM): Integrating Vision and Communication Modalities for 6G ISAC Systems	2025-12-29	Show The emergence of multimodal foundation models has revolutionized learning paradigms by enabling joint understanding across diverse data types. In the context of next-generation wireless networks, integrating sensing and communication modalities presents a unique opportunity to develop generalizable and data-efficient models. In this work, we introduce the contrastive learning based Wireless Multimodal Foundation Model (WMFM), a large-scale framework that jointly learns from wireless channel coefficients and visual imagery. The WMFM is pretrained using contrastive learning, a self-supervised learning technique that aligns embeddings of camera and channel data without requiring explicit labels. The pretrained encoders are then frozen and employed as feature extractors, with lightweight task-specific heads, fine-tuned for downstream tasks, including user localization and LoS/nLoS classification. Extensive experiments on the DeepVerse6G dataset demonstrate that the proposed WMFM achieves a 17% improvement in balanced accuracy for LoS/nLoS classification and a 48.5% reduction in localization error compared to the end-to-end (E2E) benchmark, while reducing training time by up to 90-fold. Even when trained with as little as 20% of the data, the WMFM-based heads outperform the fully supervised E2E model, underscoring their robustness and data-efficient learning. The proposed approach establishes a foundation for scalable, multimodal learning in Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) systems, paving the way for intelligent and adaptive 6G networks.	Journ... Journal Paper, 13 pages, 11 figures, 4 tables	None
Multi-Track Multimodal Learning on iMiGUE: Micro-Gesture and Emotion Recognition	2025-12-29	Show Micro-gesture recognition and behavior-based emotion prediction are both highly challenging tasks that require modeling subtle, fine-grained human behaviors, primarily leveraging video and skeletal pose data. In this work, we present two multimodal frameworks designed to tackle both problems on the iMiGUE dataset. For micro-gesture classification, we explore the complementary strengths of RGB and 3D pose-based representations to capture nuanced spatio-temporal patterns. To comprehensively represent gestures, video, and skeletal embeddings are extracted using MViTv2-S and 2s-AGCN, respectively. Then, they are integrated through a Cross-Modal Token Fusion module to combine spatial and pose information. For emotion recognition, our framework extends to behavior-based emotion prediction, a binary classification task identifying emotional states based on visual cues. We leverage facial and contextual embeddings extracted using SwinFace and MViTv2-S models and fuse them through an InterFusion module designed to capture emotional expressions and body gestures. Experiments conducted on the iMiGUE dataset, within the scope of the MiGA 2025 Challenge, demonstrate the robust performance and accuracy of our method in the behavior-based emotion prediction task, where our approach secured 2nd place.		None
Fusion or Confusion? Multimodal Complexity Is Not All You Need	2025-12-28	Show Deep learning architectures for multimodal learning have increased in complexity, driven by the assumption that multimodal-specific methods improve performance. We challenge this assumption through a large-scale empirical study reimplementing 19 high-impact methods under standardized conditions, evaluating them across nine diverse datasets with up to 23 modalities, and testing their generalizability to new tasks beyond their original scope, including settings with missing modalities. We propose a Simple Baseline for Multimodal Learning (SimBaMM), a straightforward late-fusion Transformer architecture, and demonstrate that under standardized experimental conditions with rigorous hyperparameter tuning of all methods, more complex architectures do not reliably outperform SimBaMM. Statistical analysis indicates that more complex methods perform comparably to SimBaMM and frequently do not reliably outperform well-tuned unimodal baselines, especially in the small-data regime considered in many original studies. To support our findings, we include a case study of a recent multimodal learning method highlighting the methodological shortcomings in the literature. In addition, we provide a pragmatic reliability checklist to promote comparable, robust, and trustworthy future evaluations. In summary, we argue for a shift in focus: away from the pursuit of architectural novelty and toward methodological rigor.		None
Embodied Robot Manipulation in the Era of Foundation Models: Planning and Learning Perspectives	2025-12-28	Show Recent advances in vision, language, and multimodal learning have substantially accelerated progress in robotic foundation models, with robot manipulation remaining a central and challenging problem. This survey examines robot manipulation from an algorithmic perspective and organizes recent learning-based approaches within a unified abstraction of high-level planning and low-level control. At the high level, we extend the classical notion of task planning to include reasoning over language, code, motion, affordances, and 3D representations, emphasizing their role in structured and long-horizon decision making. At the low level, we propose a training-paradigm-oriented taxonomy for learning-based control, organizing existing methods along input modeling, latent representation learning, and policy learning. Finally, we identify open challenges and prospective research directions related to scalability, data efficiency, multimodal physical interaction, and safety. Together, these analyses aim to clarify the design space of modern foundation models for robotic manipulation.	This ... This work is a re-architected core derived from the full survey (arXiv:2510.10903) , refined to highlight the most central themes and representative studies	None
Dual-Encoder Transformer-Based Multimodal Learning for Ischemic Stroke Lesion Segmentation Using Diffusion MRI	2025-12-23	Show Accurate segmentation of ischemic stroke lesions from diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is essential for clinical decision-making and outcome assessment. Diffusion-Weighted Imaging (DWI) and Apparent Diffusion Coefficient (ADC) scans provide complementary information on acute and sub-acute ischemic changes; however, automated lesion delineation remains challenging due to variability in lesion appearance. In this work, we study ischemic stroke lesion segmentation using multimodal diffusion MRI from the ISLES 2022 dataset. Several state-of-the-art convolutional and transformer-based architectures, including U-Net variants, Swin-UNet, and TransUNet, are benchmarked. Based on performance, a dual-encoder TransUNet architecture is proposed to learn modality-specific representations from DWI and ADC inputs. To incorporate spatial context, adjacent slice information is integrated using a three-slice input configuration. All models are trained under a unified framework and evaluated using the Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC). Results show that transformer-based models outperform convolutional baselines, and the proposed dual-encoder TransUNet achieves the best performance, reaching a Dice score of 85.4% on the test set. The proposed framework offers a robust solution for automated ischemic stroke lesion segmentation from diffusion MRI.		None
Generative Digital Twins: Vision-Language Simulation Models for Executable Industrial Systems	2025-12-23	Show We propose a Vision-Language Simulation Model (VLSM) that unifies visual and textual understanding to synthesize executable FlexScript from layout sketches and natural-language prompts, enabling cross-modal reasoning for industrial simulation systems. To support this new paradigm, the study constructs the first large-scale dataset for generative digital twins, comprising over 120,000 prompt-sketch-code triplets that enable multimodal learning between textual descriptions, spatial structures, and simulation logic. In parallel, three novel evaluation metrics, Structural Validity Rate (SVR), Parameter Match Rate (PMR), and Execution Success Rate (ESR), are proposed specifically for this task to comprehensively evaluate structural integrity, parameter fidelity, and simulator executability. Through systematic ablation across vision encoders, connectors, and code-pretrained language backbones, the proposed models achieve near-perfect structural accuracy and high execution robustness. This work establishes a foundation for generative digital twins that integrate visual reasoning and language understanding into executable industrial simulation systems.	10 pages, 9 figures	None
Retrieval-augmented Prompt Learning for Pre-trained Foundation Models	2025-12-23	Show The pre-trained foundation models (PFMs) have become essential for facilitating large-scale multimodal learning. Researchers have effectively employed the ``pre-train, prompt, and predict'' paradigm through prompt learning to induce improved few-shot performance. However, prompt learning approaches for PFMs still follow a parametric learning paradigm. As such, the stability of generalization in memorization and rote learning can be compromised. More specifically, conventional prompt learning might face difficulties in fully utilizing atypical instances and avoiding overfitting to shallow patterns with limited data during the process of fully-supervised training. To overcome these constraints, we present our approach, named RetroPrompt, which aims to achieve a balance between memorization and generalization by decoupling knowledge from mere memorization. Unlike traditional prompting methods, RetroPrompt leverages a publicly accessible knowledge base generated from the training data and incorporates a retrieval mechanism throughout the input, training, and inference stages. This enables the model to actively retrieve relevant contextual information from the corpus, thereby enhancing the available cues. We conduct comprehensive experiments on a variety of datasets across natural language processing and computer vision tasks to demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed approach, RetroPrompt, in both zero-shot and few-shot scenarios. Through detailed analysis of memorization patterns, we observe that RetroPrompt effectively reduces the reliance on rote memorization, leading to enhanced generalization.	IEEE/... IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing	None
Non-Contrast CT Esophageal Varices Grading through Clinical Prior-Enhanced Multi-Organ Analysis	2025-12-22	Show Esophageal varices (EV) represent a critical complication of portal hypertension, affecting approximately 60% of cirrhosis patients with a significant bleeding risk of ~30%. While traditionally diagnosed through invasive endoscopy, non-contrast computed tomography (NCCT) presents a potential non-invasive alternative that has yet to be fully utilized in clinical practice. We present Multi-Organ-COhesion Network++ (MOON++), a novel multimodal framework that enhances EV assessment through comprehensive analysis of NCCT scans. Inspired by clinical evidence correlating organ volumetric relationships with liver disease severity, MOON++ synthesizes imaging characteristics of the esophagus, liver, and spleen through multimodal learning. We evaluated our approach using 1,631 patients, those with endoscopically confirmed EV were classified into four severity grades. Validation in 239 patient cases and independent testing in 289 cases demonstrate superior performance compared to conventional single organ methods, achieving an AUC of 0.894 versus 0.803 for the severe grade EV classification (G3 versus =G2 versus <G2). We conducted a reader study involving experienced radiologists to further validate the performance of MOON++. To our knowledge, MOON++ represents the first comprehensive multi-organ NCCT analysis framework incorporating clinical knowledge priors for EV assessment, potentially offering a promising non-invasive diagnostic alternative.	Medic... Medical Image Analysis	None
Vision-Language-Action Models for Autonomous Driving: Past, Present, and Future	2025-12-18	Show Autonomous driving has long relied on modular "Perception-Decision-Action" pipelines, where hand-crafted interfaces and rule-based components often break down in complex or long-tailed scenarios. Their cascaded design further propagates perception errors, degrading downstream planning and control. Vision-Action (VA) models address some limitations by learning direct mappings from visual inputs to actions, but they remain opaque, sensitive to distribution shifts, and lack structured reasoning or instruction-following capabilities. Recent progress in Large Language Models (LLMs) and multimodal learning has motivated the emergence of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) frameworks, which integrate perception with language-grounded decision making. By unifying visual understanding, linguistic reasoning, and actionable outputs, VLAs offer a pathway toward more interpretable, generalizable, and human-aligned driving policies. This work provides a structured characterization of the emerging VLA landscape for autonomous driving. We trace the evolution from early VA approaches to modern VLA frameworks and organize existing methods into two principal paradigms: End-to-End VLA, which integrates perception, reasoning, and planning within a single model, and Dual-System VLA, which separates slow deliberation (via VLMs) from fast, safety-critical execution (via planners). Within these paradigms, we further distinguish subclasses such as textual vs. numerical action generators and explicit vs. implicit guidance mechanisms. We also summarize representative datasets and benchmarks for evaluating VLA-based driving systems and highlight key challenges and open directions, including robustness, interpretability, and instruction fidelity. Overall, this work aims to establish a coherent foundation for advancing human-compatible autonomous driving systems.	Prepr... Preprint; 40 pages, 7 figures, 9 tables; GitHub at https://github.com/worldbench/awesome-vla-for-ad	Code Link
GateFusion: Hierarchical Gated Cross-Modal Fusion for Active Speaker Detection	2025-12-17	Show Active Speaker Detection (ASD) aims to identify who is currently speaking in each frame of a video. Most state-of-the-art approaches rely on late fusion to combine visual and audio features, but late fusion often fails to capture fine-grained cross-modal interactions, which can be critical for robust performance in unconstrained scenarios. In this paper, we introduce GateFusion, a novel architecture that combines strong pretrained unimodal encoders with a Hierarchical Gated Fusion Decoder (HiGate). HiGate enables progressive, multi-depth fusion by adaptively injecting contextual features from one modality into the other at multiple layers of the Transformer backbone, guided by learnable, bimodally-conditioned gates. To further strengthen multimodal learning, we propose two auxiliary objectives: Masked Alignment Loss (MAL) to align unimodal outputs with multimodal predictions, and Over-Positive Penalty (OPP) to suppress spurious video-only activations. GateFusion establishes new state-of-the-art results on several challenging ASD benchmarks, achieving 77.8% mAP (+9.4%), 86.1% mAP (+2.9%), and 96.1% mAP (+0.5%) on Ego4D-ASD, UniTalk, and WASD benchmarks, respectively, and delivering competitive performance on AVA-ActiveSpeaker. Out-of-domain experiments demonstrate the generalization of our model, while comprehensive ablations show the complementary benefits of each component.	accep... accepted by WACV 2026	None
Bidirectional predictive coding	2025-12-17	Show Predictive coding (PC) is an influential computational model of visual learning and inference in the brain. Classical PC was proposed as a top-down generative model, where the brain actively predicts upcoming visual inputs, and inference minimises the prediction errors. Recent studies have also shown that PC can be formulated as a discriminative model, where sensory inputs predict neural activities in a feedforward manner. However, experimental evidence suggests that the brain employs both generative and discriminative inference, while unidirectional PC models show degraded performance in tasks requiring bidirectional processing. In this work, we propose bidirectional PC (bPC), a PC model that incorporates both generative and discriminative inference while maintaining a biologically plausible circuit implementation. We show that bPC matches or outperforms unidirectional models in their specialised generative or discriminative tasks, by developing an energy landscape that simultaneously suits both tasks. We also demonstrate bPC's superior performance in two biologically relevant tasks including multimodal learning and inference with missing information, suggesting that bPC resembles biological visual inference more closely.		None
STAR: STacked AutoRegressive Scheme for Unified Multimodal Learning	2025-12-15	Show Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) play a pivotal role in advancing the quest for general artificial intelligence. However, achieving unified target for multimodal understanding and generation remains challenging due to optimization conflicts and performance trade-offs. To effectively enhance generative performance while preserving existing comprehension capabilities, we introduce STAR: a STacked AutoRegressive scheme for task-progressive unified multimodal learning. This approach decomposes multimodal learning into multiple stages: understanding, generation, and editing. By freezing the parameters of the fundamental autoregressive (AR) model and progressively stacking isomorphic AR modules, it avoids cross-task interference while expanding the model's capabilities. Concurrently, we introduce a high-capacity VQ to enhance the granularity of image representations and employ an implicit reasoning mechanism to improve generation quality under complex conditions. Experiments demonstrate that STAR achieves state-of-the-art performance on GenEval (0.91), DPG-Bench (87.44), and ImgEdit (4.34), validating its efficacy for unified multimodal learning.	18 pages, 7 figures	None
JoVA: Unified Multimodal Learning for Joint Video-Audio Generation	2025-12-15	Show In this paper, we present JoVA, a unified framework for joint video-audio generation. Despite recent encouraging advances, existing methods face two critical limitations. First, most existing approaches can only generate ambient sounds and lack the capability to produce human speech synchronized with lip movements. Second, recent attempts at unified human video-audio generation typically rely on explicit fusion or modality-specific alignment modules, which introduce additional architecture design and weaken the model simplicity of the original transformers. To address these issues, JoVA employs joint self-attention across video and audio tokens within each transformer layer, enabling direct and efficient cross-modal interaction without the need for additional alignment modules. Furthermore, to enable high-quality lip-speech synchronization, we introduce a simple yet effective mouth-area loss based on facial keypoint detection, which enhances supervision on the critical mouth region during training without compromising architectural simplicity. Extensive experiments on benchmarks demonstrate that JoVA outperforms or is competitive with both unified and audio-driven state-of-the-art methods in lip-sync accuracy, speech quality, and overall video-audio generation fidelity. Our results establish JoVA as an elegant framework for high-quality multimodal generation.	Proje... Project page: \url{https://visual-ai.github.io/jova}	Code Link
EchoVLM: Measurement-Grounded Multimodal Learning for Echocardiography	2025-12-13	Show Echocardiography is the most widely used imaging modality in cardiology, yet its interpretation remains labor-intensive and inherently multimodal, requiring view recognition, quantitative measurements, qualitative assessments, and guideline-based reasoning. While recent vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved broad success in natural images and certain medical domains, their potential in echocardiography has been limited by the lack of large-scale, clinically grounded image-text datasets and the absence of measurement-based reasoning central to echo interpretation. We introduce EchoGround-MIMIC, the first measurement-grounded multimodal echocardiography dataset, comprising 19,065 image-text pairs from 1,572 patients with standardized views, structured measurements, measurement-grounded captions, and guideline-derived disease labels. Building on this resource, we propose EchoVLM, a vision-language model that incorporates two novel pretraining objectives: (i) a view-informed contrastive loss that encodes the view-dependent structure of echocardiographic imaging, and (ii) a negation-aware contrastive loss that distinguishes clinically critical negative from positive findings. Across five types of clinical applications with 36 tasks spanning multimodal disease classification, image-text retrieval, view classification, chamber segmentation, and landmark detection, EchoVLM achieves state-of-the-art performance (86.5% AUC in zero-shot disease classification and 95.1% accuracy in view classification). We demonstrate that clinically grounded multimodal pretraining yields transferable visual representations and establish EchoVLM as a foundation model for end-to-end echocardiography interpretation. We will release EchoGround-MIMIC and the data curation code, enabling reproducibility and further research in multimodal echocardiography interpretation.		None
Multimodal Learning for Scalable Representation of High-Dimensional Medical Data	2025-12-12	Show Integrating artificial intelligence (AI) with healthcare data is rapidly transforming medical diagnostics and driving progress toward precision medicine. However, effectively leveraging multimodal data, particularly digital pathology whole slide images (WSIs) and genomic sequencing, remains a significant challenge due to the intrinsic heterogeneity of these modalities and the need for scalable and interpretable frameworks. Existing diagnostic models typically operate on unimodal data, overlooking critical cross-modal interactions that can yield richer clinical insights. We introduce MarbliX (Multimodal Association and Retrieval with Binary Latent Indexed matriX), a self-supervised framework that learns to embed WSIs and immunogenomic profiles into compact, scalable binary codes, termed ``monogram.'' By optimizing a triplet contrastive objective across modalities, MarbliX captures high-resolution patient similarity in a unified latent space, enabling efficient retrieval of clinically relevant cases and facilitating case-based reasoning. \textcolor{black}{In lung cancer, MarbliX achieves 85-89% across all evaluation metrics, outperforming histopathology (69-71%) and immunogenomics (73-76%). In kidney cancer, real-valued monograms yield the strongest performance (F1: 80-83%, Accuracy: 87-90%), with binary monograms slightly lower (F1: 78-82%).		None
Exploring MLLM-Diffusion Information Transfer with MetaCanvas	2025-12-12	Show Multimodal learning has rapidly advanced visual understanding, largely via multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that use powerful LLMs as cognitive cores. In visual generation, however, these powerful core models are typically reduced to global text encoders for diffusion models, leaving most of their reasoning and planning ability unused. This creates a gap: current multimodal LLMs can parse complex layouts, attributes, and knowledge-intensive scenes, yet struggle to generate images or videos with equally precise and structured control. We propose MetaCanvas, a lightweight framework that lets MLLMs reason and plan directly in spatial and spatiotemporal latent spaces and interface tightly with diffusion generators. We empirically implement MetaCanvas on three different diffusion backbones and evaluate it across six tasks, including text-to-image generation, text/image-to-video generation, image/video editing, and in-context video generation, each requiring precise layouts, robust attribute binding, and reasoning-intensive control. MetaCanvas consistently outperforms global-conditioning baselines, suggesting that treating MLLMs as latent-space planners is a promising direction for narrowing the gap between multimodal understanding and generation.	Proje... Project page: https://metacanvas.github.io	None
AMBER: An Adaptive Multimodal Mask Transformer for Beam Prediction with Missing Modalities	2025-12-12	Show With the widespread adoption of millimeter-wave (mmWave) massive multi-input-multi-output (MIMO) in vehicular networks, accurate beam prediction and alignment have become critical for high-speed data transmission and reliable access. While traditional beam prediction approaches primarily rely on in-band beam training, recent advances have started to explore multimodal sensing to extract environmental semantics for enhanced prediction. However, the performance of existing multimodal fusion methods degrades significantly in real-world settings because they are vulnerable to missing data caused by sensor blockage, poor lighting, or GPS dropouts. To address this challenge, we propose AMBER ({A}daptive multimodal {M}ask transformer for {BE}am p{R}ediction), a novel end-to-end framework that processes temporal sequences of image, LiDAR, radar, and GPS data, while adaptively handling arbitrary missing-modality cases. AMBER introduces learnable modality tokens and a missing-modality-aware mask to prevent cross-modal noise propagation, along with a learnable fusion token and multihead attention to achieve robust modality-specific information distillation and feature-level fusion. Furthermore, a class-former-aided modality alignment (CMA) module and temporal-aware positional embedding are incorporated to preserve temporal coherence and ensure semantic alignment across modalities, facilitating the learning of modality-invariant and temporally consistent representations for beam prediction. Extensive experiments on the real-world DeepSense6G dataset demonstrate that AMBER significantly outperforms existing multimodal learning baselines. In particular, it maintains high beam prediction accuracy and robustness even under severe missing-modality scenarios, validating its effectiveness and practical applicability.	12 pages, 9 figures	None
RoadBench: A Vision-Language Foundation Model and Benchmark for Road Damage Understanding	2025-12-09	Show Accurate road damage detection is crucial for timely infrastructure maintenance and public safety, but existing vision-only datasets and models lack the rich contextual understanding that textual information can provide. To address this limitation, we introduce RoadBench, the first multimodal benchmark for comprehensive road damage understanding. This dataset pairs high resolution images of road damages with detailed textual descriptions, providing a richer context for model training. We also present RoadCLIP, a novel vision language model that builds upon CLIP by integrating domain specific enhancements. It includes a disease aware positional encoding that captures spatial patterns of road defects and a mechanism for injecting road-condition priors to refine the model's understanding of road damages. We further employ a GPT driven data generation pipeline to expand the image to text pairs in RoadBench, greatly increasing data diversity without exhaustive manual annotation. Experiments demonstrate that RoadCLIP achieves state of the art performance on road damage recognition tasks, significantly outperforming existing vision-only models by 19.2%. These results highlight the advantages of integrating visual and textual information for enhanced road condition analysis, setting new benchmarks for the field and paving the way for more effective infrastructure monitoring through multimodal learning.	Accep... Accepted by WACV 2026	None
CAMO: Causality-Guided Adversarial Multimodal Domain Generalization for Crisis Classification	2025-12-08	Show Crisis classification in social media aims to extract actionable disaster-related information from multimodal posts, which is a crucial task for enhancing situational awareness and facilitating timely emergency responses. However, the wide variation in crisis types makes achieving generalizable performance across unseen disasters a persistent challenge. Existing approaches primarily leverage deep learning to fuse textual and visual cues for crisis classification, achieving numerically plausible results under in-domain settings. However, they exhibit poor generalization across unseen crisis types because they 1. do not disentangle spurious and causal features, resulting in performance degradation under domain shift, and 2. fail to align heterogeneous modality representations within a shared space, which hinders the direct adaptation of established single-modality domain generalization (DG) techniques to the multimodal setting. To address these issues, we introduce a causality-guided multimodal domain generalization (MMDG) framework that combines adversarial disentanglement with unified representation learning for crisis classification. The adversarial objective encourages the model to disentangle and focus on domain-invariant causal features, leading to more generalizable classifications grounded in stable causal mechanisms. The unified representation aligns features from different modalities within a shared latent space, enabling single-modality DG strategies to be seamlessly extended to multimodal learning. Experiments on the different datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves the best performance in unseen disaster scenarios.		None
Unison: A Fully Automatic, Task-Universal, and Low-Cost Framework for Unified Understanding and Generation	2025-12-08	Show Unified understanding and generation is a highly appealing research direction in multimodal learning. There exist two approaches: one trains a transformer via an auto-regressive paradigm, and the other adopts a two-stage scheme connecting pre-trained understanding and generative models for alignment fine-tuning. The former demands massive data and computing resources unaffordable for ordinary researchers. Though the latter requires a lower training cost, existing works often suffer from limited task coverage or poor generation quality. Both approaches lack the ability to parse input meta-information (such as task type, image resolution, video duration, etc.) and require manual parameter configuration that is tedious and non-intelligent. In this paper, we propose Unison which adopts the two-stage scheme while preserving the capabilities of the pre-trained models well. With an extremely low training cost, we cover a variety of multimodal understanding tasks, including text, image, and video understanding, as well as diverse generation tasks, such as text-to-visual content generation, editing, controllable generation, and IP-based reference generation. We also equip our model with the ability to automatically parse user intentions, determine the target task type, and accurately extract the meta-information required for the corresponding task. This enables full automation of various multimodal tasks without human intervention. Experiments demonstrate that, under a low-cost setting of only 500k training samples and 50 GPU hours, our model can accurately and automatically identify tasks and extract relevant parameters, and achieve superior performance across a variety of understanding and generation tasks.		None
MCMoE: Completing Missing Modalities with Mixture of Experts for Incomplete Multimodal Action Quality Assessment	2025-12-08	Show Multimodal Action Quality Assessment (AQA) has recently emerged as a promising paradigm. By leveraging complementary information across shared contextual cues, it enhances the discriminative evaluation of subtle intra-class variations in highly similar action sequences. However, partial modalities are frequently unavailable at the inference stage in reality. The absence of any modality often renders existing multimodal models inoperable. Furthermore, it triggers catastrophic performance degradation due to interruptions in cross-modal interactions. To address this issue, we propose a novel Missing Completion Framework with Mixture of Experts (MCMoE) that unifies unimodal and joint representation learning in single-stage training. Specifically, we propose an adaptive gated modality generator that dynamically fuses available information to reconstruct missing modalities. We then design modality experts to learn unimodal knowledge and dynamically mix the knowledge of all experts to extract cross-modal joint representations. With a mixture of experts, missing modalities are further refined and complemented. Finally, in the training phase, we mine the complete multimodal features and unimodal expert knowledge to guide modality generation and generation-based joint representation extraction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our MCMoE achieves state-of-the-art results in both complete and incomplete multimodal learning on three public AQA benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/XuHuangbiao/MCMoE.	AAAI 2026	Code Link
uCLIP: Parameter-Efficient Multilingual Extension of Vision-Language Models with Unpaired Data	2025-12-08	Show Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has demonstrated strong generalization across a wide range of visual tasks by leveraging large-scale English-image pairs. However, its extension to low-resource languages remains limited due to the scarcity of high-quality multilingual image-text data. Existing multilingual vision-language models exhibit consistently low retrieval performance in underrepresented languages including Czech, Finnish, Croatian, Hungarian, and Romanian on the Crossmodal-3600 (XM3600) benchmark. To address this, we propose a lightweight and data-efficient framework for multilingual vision-language alignment. Our approach requires no image-text pairs or text-text pairs and freezes both the pretrained image encoder and multilingual text encoder during training. Only a compact 1.7M-parameter projection module is trained, using a contrastive loss over English representations as semantic anchors. This minimal training setup enables robust multilingual alignment even for languages with limited supervision. Extensive evaluation across multiple multilingual retrieval benchmarks confirms the effectiveness of our method, showing significant gains in five underrepresented languages where existing models typically underperform. These findings highlight the effectiveness of our pivot-based, parameter-efficient alignment strategy for inclusive multimodal learning.	Our p... Our project page can be found at https://dinyudin203.github.io/uCLIP-project/	Code Link
A Novel Multimodal RUL Framework for Remaining Useful Life Estimation with Layer-wise Explanations	2025-12-07	Show Estimating the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of mechanical systems is pivotal in Prognostics and Health Management (PHM). Rolling-element bearings are among the most frequent causes of machinery failure, highlighting the need for robust RUL estimation methods. Existing approaches often suffer from poor generalization, lack of robustness, high data demands, and limited interpretability. This paper proposes a novel multimodal-RUL framework that jointly leverages image representations (ImR) and time-frequency representations (TFR) of multichannel, nonstationary vibration signals. The architecture comprises three branches: (1) an ImR branch and (2) a TFR branch, both employing multiple dilated convolutional blocks with residual connections to extract spatial degradation features; and (3) a fusion branch that concatenates these features and feeds them into an LSTM to model temporal degradation patterns. A multi-head attention mechanism subsequently emphasizes salient features, followed by linear layers for final RUL regression. To enable effective multimodal learning, vibration signals are converted into ImR via the Bresenham line algorithm and into TFR using Continuous Wavelet Transform. We also introduce multimodal Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (multimodal-LRP), a tailored explainability technique that significantly enhances model transparency. The approach is validated on the XJTU-SY and PRONOSTIA benchmark datasets. Results show that our method matches or surpasses state-of-the-art baselines under both seen and unseen operating conditions, while requiring ~28 % less training data on XJTU-SY and ~48 % less on PRONOSTIA. The model exhibits strong noise resilience, and multimodal-LRP visualizations confirm the interpretability and trustworthiness of predictions, making the framework highly suitable for real-world industrial deployment.		None
A Survey on Industrial Anomalies Synthesis	2025-12-06	Show This paper comprehensively reviews anomaly synthesis methodologies. Existing surveys focus on limited techniques, missing an overall field view and understanding method interconnections. In contrast, our study offers a unified review, covering about 40 representative methods across Hand-crafted, Distribution-hypothesis-based, Generative models (GM)-based, and Vision-language models (VLM)-based synthesis. We introduce the first industrial anomaly synthesis (IAS) taxonomy. Prior works lack formal classification or use simplistic taxonomies, hampering structured comparisons and trend identification. Our taxonomy provides a fine-grained framework reflecting methodological progress and practical implications, grounding future research. Furthermore, we explore cross-modality synthesis and large-scale VLM. Previous surveys overlooked multimodal data and VLM in anomaly synthesis, limiting insights into their advantages. Our survey analyzes their integration, benefits, challenges, and prospects, offering a roadmap to boost IAS with multimodal learning. More resources are available at https://github.com/M-3LAB/awesome-anomaly-synthesis.		Code Link
Impugan: Learning Conditional Generative Models for Robust Data Imputation	2025-12-05	Show Incomplete data are common in real-world applications. Sensors fail, records are inconsistent, and datasets collected from different sources often differ in scale, sampling rate, and quality. These differences create missing values that make it difficult to combine data and build reliable models. Standard imputation methods such as regression models, expectation-maximization, and multiple imputation rely on strong assumptions about linearity and independence. These assumptions rarely hold for complex or heterogeneous data, which can lead to biased or over-smoothed estimates. We propose Impugan, a conditional Generative Adversarial Network (cGAN) for imputing missing values and integrating heterogeneous datasets. The model is trained on complete samples to learn how missing variables depend on observed ones. During inference, the generator reconstructs missing entries from available features, and the discriminator enforces realism by distinguishing true from imputed data. This adversarial process allows Impugan to capture nonlinear and multimodal relationships that conventional methods cannot represent. In experiments on benchmark datasets and a multi-source integration task, Impugan achieves up to 82% lower Earth Mover's Distance (EMD) and 70% lower mutual-information deviation (MI) compared to leading baselines. These results show that adversarially trained generative models provide a scalable and principled approach for imputing and merging incomplete, heterogeneous data. Our model is available at: github.com/zalishmahmud/impuganBigData2025		Code Link
Open-PMC-18M: A High-Fidelity Large Scale Medical Dataset for Multimodal Representation Learning	2025-12-05	Show In biomedical vision-language modeling, datasets are typically mined from scientific literature, pairing compound figures with captions that are short, context-dependent, and oftern partially informative. Prior work on subfigure extraction has been limited in both dataset size and generalizability. In addition, no existing effort has incorporated rich medical context in image-text pairs. We revisit data curation as a foundational component of effective biomedical representation learning. Our data curation process integrates transformer-based subfigure detection, subcaption extraction, and contextual text enrichment derived from inline references. Our subfigure extraction model, trained on a corpus of 500,000 compound figures, achieves state-of-the-art performance on real and synthetic benchmarks. Using this process, we curate and release Open-PMC-18M, a large-scale high-fidelity biomedical dataset comprising 18 million image-text pairs, spanning radiology, microscopy, and visible light photography. We train vision-language models on our dataset and perform extensive evaluation on 6 retrieval and 19 zero-shot classification tasks across three major modalities. The models trained on our dataset set a new state-of-the-art results in medical representation learning. We release our dataset, models, and code to support reproducible benchmarks and further study into biomedical vision-language modeling and representation learning.	21 pages	None
MedTutor-R1: Socratic Personalized Medical Teaching with Multi-Agent Simulation	2025-12-05	Show The significant gap between rising demands for clinical training and the scarcity of expert instruction poses a major challenge to medical education. With powerful capabilities in personalized guidance, Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising solution to bridge this gap. However, current research focuses mainly on one-on-one knowledge instruction, overlooking collaborative reasoning, a key skill for students developed in teamwork like ward rounds. To this end, we develop ClinEdu, a multi-agent pedagogical simulator with personality-driven patients and diverse student cohorts, enabling controlled testing of complex pedagogical processes and scalable generation of teaching data. Based on ClinEdu, we construct ClinTeach, a large Socratic teaching dialogue dataset that captures the complexities of group instruction. We then train MedTutor-R1, the first multimodal Socratic tutor designed for one-to-many instruction in clinical medical education. MedTutor-R1 is first instruction-tuned on our ClinTeach dataset and then optimized with reinforcement learning, using rewards derived from a three-axis rubric, covering structural fidelity, analytical quality, and clinical safety, to refine its adaptive Socratic strategies. For authentic in-situ assessment, we use simulation-based interactive evaluation that redeploys the tutor back into ClinEdu. Experimental results demonstrate that our MedTutor-R1 outperforms the base model by over 20% in average pedagogical score and is comparable to o3, while also exhibiting high adaptability in handling a varying number of students. This promising performance underscores the effectiveness of our pedagogical simulator, ClinEdu.	Work In Progress	None
Language-Instructed Reasoning for Group Activity Detection via Multimodal Large Language Model	2025-12-05	Show Group activity detection (GAD) aims to simultaneously identify group members and categorize their collective activities within video sequences. Existing deep learning-based methods develop specialized architectures (e.g., transformer networks) to model the dynamics of individual roles and semantic dependencies between individuals and groups. However, they rely solely on implicit pattern recognition from visual features and struggle with contextual reasoning and explainability. In this work, we propose LIR-GAD, a novel framework of language-instructed reasoning for GAD via Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM). Our approach expand the original vocabulary of MLLM by introducing an activity-level token and multiple cluster-specific tokens. We process video frames alongside two specially designed tokens and language instructions, which are then integrated into the MLLM. The pretrained commonsense knowledge embedded in the MLLM enables the token and tokens to effectively capture the semantic information of collective activities and learn distinct representational features of different groups, respectively. Also, we introduce a multi-label classification loss to further enhance the token's ability to learn discriminative semantic representations. Then, we design a Multimodal Dual-Alignment Fusion (MDAF) module that integrates MLLM's hidden embeddings corresponding to the designed tokens with visual features, significantly enhancing the performance of GAD. Both quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method in GAD taks.	This ... This work is being incorporated into a larger study	None
REVISOR: Beyond Textual Reflection, Towards Multimodal Introspective Reasoning in Long-Form Video Understanding	2025-12-05	Show Self-reflection mechanisms that rely on purely text-based rethinking processes perform well in most multimodal tasks. However, when directly applied to long-form video understanding scenarios, they exhibit clear limitations. The fundamental reasons for this lie in two points: (1)long-form video understanding involves richer and more dynamic visual input, meaning rethinking only the text information is insufficient and necessitates a further rethinking process specifically targeting visual information; (2) purely text-based reflection mechanisms lack cross-modal interaction capabilities, preventing them from fully integrating visual information during reflection. Motivated by these insights, we propose REVISOR (REflective VIsual Segment Oriented Reasoning), a novel framework for tool-augmented multimodal reflection. REVISOR enables MLLMs to collaboratively construct introspective reflection processes across textual and visual modalities, significantly enhancing their reasoning capability for long-form video understanding. To ensure that REVISOR can learn to accurately review video segments highly relevant to the question during reinforcement learning, we designed the Dual Attribution Decoupled Reward (DADR) mechanism. Integrated into the GRPO training strategy, this mechanism enforces causal alignment between the model's reasoning and the selected video evidence. Notably, the REVISOR framework significantly enhances long-form video understanding capability of MLLMs without requiring supplementary supervised fine-tuning or external models, achieving impressive results on four benchmarks including VideoMME, LongVideoBench, MLVU, and LVBench.		None
MIND: Multi-rationale INtegrated Discriminative Reasoning Framework for Multi-modal Large Models	2025-12-05	Show Recently, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have been widely applied to reasoning tasks. However, they suffer from limited multi-rationale semantic modeling, insufficient logical robustness, and are susceptible to misleading interpretations in complex scenarios. Therefore, we propose a Multi-rationale INtegrated Discriminative (MIND) reasoning framework, which is designed to endow MLLMs with human-like cognitive abilities of "Understand -> Rethink -> Correct", and achieves a paradigm evolution from passive imitation-based reasoning to active discriminative reasoning. Specifically, we introduce a Rationale Augmentation and Discrimination (RAD) paradigm, which automatically and efficiently expands existing datasets by generating diverse rationales, providing a unified and extensible data foundation. Meanwhile, we design a Progressive Two-stage Correction Learning (P2CL) strategy. The first phase enhances multi-rationale positive learning, while the second phase enables active logic discrimination and correction. In addition, to mitigate representation entanglement in the multi-rationale semantic space, we propose a Multi-rationale Contrastive Alignment (MCA) optimization strategy, which achieves semantic aggregation of correct reasoning and boundary separation of incorrect reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed MIND reasoning framework achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on multiple public datasets covering scientific, commonsense, and mathematical scenarios. It provides a new perspective for advancing MLLMs towards higher levels of cognitive intelligence. Our code is available at https://github.com/YuChuang1205/MIND		Code Link
DashFusion: Dual-stream Alignment with Hierarchical Bottleneck Fusion for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis	2025-12-05	Show Multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA) integrates various modalities, such as text, image, and audio, to provide a more comprehensive understanding of sentiment. However, effective MSA is challenged by alignment and fusion issues. Alignment requires synchronizing both temporal and semantic information across modalities, while fusion involves integrating these aligned features into a unified representation. Existing methods often address alignment or fusion in isolation, leading to limitations in performance and efficiency. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel framework called Dual-stream Alignment with Hierarchical Bottleneck Fusion (DashFusion). Firstly, dual-stream alignment module synchronizes multimodal features through temporal and semantic alignment. Temporal alignment employs cross-modal attention to establish frame-level correspondences among multimodal sequences. Semantic alignment ensures consistency across the feature space through contrastive learning. Secondly, supervised contrastive learning leverages label information to refine the modality features. Finally, hierarchical bottleneck fusion progressively integrates multimodal information through compressed bottleneck tokens, which achieves a balance between performance and computational efficiency. We evaluate DashFusion on three datasets: CMU-MOSI, CMU-MOSEI, and CH-SIMS. Experimental results demonstrate that DashFusion achieves state-of-the-art performance across various metrics, and ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of our alignment and fusion techniques. The codes for our experiments are available at https://github.com/ultramarineX/DashFusion.	Accep... Accepted to IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS), 2025	Code Link
LymphAtlas- A Unified Multimodal Lymphoma Imaging Repository Delivering AI-Enhanced Diagnostic Insight	2025-12-05	Show This study integrates PET metabolic information with CT anatomical structures to establish a 3D multimodal segmentation dataset for lymphoma based on whole-body FDG PET/CT examinations, which bridges the gap of the lack of standardised multimodal segmentation datasets in the field of haematological malignancies. We retrospectively collected 483 examination datasets acquired between March 2011 and May 2024, involving 220 patients (106 non-Hodgkin lymphoma, 42 Hodgkin lymphoma); all data underwent ethical review and were rigorously de-identified. Complete 3D structural information was preserved during data acquisition, preprocessing and annotation, and a high-quality dataset was constructed based on the nnUNet format. By systematic technical validation and evaluation of the preprocessing process, annotation quality and automatic segmentation algorithm, the deep learning model trained based on this dataset is verified to achieve accurate segmentation of lymphoma lesions in PET/CT images with high accuracy, good robustness and reproducibility, which proves the applicability and stability of this dataset in accurate segmentation and quantitative analysis. The deep fusion of PET/CT images achieved with this dataset not only significantly improves the accurate portrayal of the morphology, location and metabolic features of tumour lesions, but also provides solid data support for early diagnosis, clinical staging and personalized treatment, and promotes the development of automated image segmentation and precision medicine based on deep learning. The dataset and related resources are available at https://github.com/SuperD0122/LymphAtlas-.	12 pages,3 figures	Code Link
ParaUni: Enhance Generation in Unified Multimodal Model with Reinforcement-driven Hierarchical Parallel Information Interaction	2025-12-05	Show Unified multimodal models significantly improve visual generation by combining vision-language models (VLMs) with diffusion models. However, existing methods struggle to fully balance sufficient interaction and flexible implementation due to vast representation difference. Considering abundant and hierarchical information in VLM's layers from low-level details to high-level semantics, we propose \textbf{ParaUni}. It extracts features from variants VLM's layers in a \textbf{Para}llel way for comprehensive information interaction and retains a flexible separation architecture to enhance generation in \textbf{Uni}fied multimodal model. Concretely, visual features from all VLM's layers are fed in parallel into a Layer Integration Module (LIM), which efficiently integrates fine-grained details and semantic abstractions and provides the fused representation as a condition to the diffusion model. To further enhance performance, we reveal that these hierarchical layers respond unequally to different rewards in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Crucially, we design a Layer-wise Dynamic Adjustment Mechanism (LDAM) to facilitate multiple reward improvements that aligns the hierarchical properties of these layers using RL. Extensive experiments show ParaUni leverages complementary multi-layer features to substantially improve generation quality and shows strong potential for multiple reward advances during RL stages. Code is available at https://github.com/JosephTiTan/ParaUni.		Code Link
A Strong View-Free Baseline Approach for Single-View Image Guided Point Cloud Completion	2025-12-05	Show The single-view image guided point cloud completion (SVIPC) task aims to reconstruct a complete point cloud from a partial input with the help of a single-view image. While previous works have demonstrated the effectiveness of this multimodal approach, the fundamental necessity of image guidance remains largely unexamined. To explore this, we propose a strong baseline approach for SVIPC based on an attention-based multi-branch encoder-decoder network that only takes partial point clouds as input, view-free. Our hierarchical self-fusion mechanism, driven by cross-attention and self-attention layers, effectively integrates information across multiple streams, enriching feature representations and strengthening the networks ability to capture geometric structures. Extensive experiments and ablation studies on the ShapeNet-ViPC dataset demonstrate that our view-free framework performs superiorly to state-of-the-art SVIPC methods. We hope our findings provide new insights into the development of multimodal learning in SVIPC. Our demo code will be available at https://github.com/Zhang-VISLab.	7 pages, 2 figures	None
FAST-CAD: A Fairness-Aware Framework for Non-Contact Stroke Diagnosis	2025-12-05	Show Stroke is an acute cerebrovascular disease, and timely diagnosis significantly improves patient survival. However, existing automated diagnosis methods suffer from fairness issues across demographic groups, potentially exacerbating healthcare disparities. In this work we propose FAST-CAD, a theoretically grounded framework that combines domain-adversarial training (DAT) with group distributionally robust optimization (Group-DRO) for fair and accurate non-contact stroke diagnosis. Our approach is built on domain adaptation and minimax fairness theory and provides convergence guarantees and fairness bounds. We curate a multimodal dataset covering 12 demographic subgroups defined by age, gender, and posture. FAST-CAD employs self-supervised encoders with adversarial domain discrimination to learn demographic-invariant representations, while Group-DRO optimizes worst-group risk to ensure robust performance across all subgroups. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves superior diagnostic performance while maintaining fairness across demographic groups, and our theoretical analysis supports the effectiveness of the unified DAT + Group-DRO framework. This work provides both practical advances and theoretical insights for fair medical AI systems.	This ... This paper has been withdrawn by the submitting author while the authorship and institutional ethics approval are being clarified and re-evaluated. A substantially revised version may be posted in the future	None
LoC-Path: Learning to Compress for Pathology Multimodal Large Language Models	2025-12-05	Show Whole Slide Image (WSI) understanding is fundamentally challenging due to its gigapixel scale and the extreme sparsity of diagnostically relevant regions. Unlike human experts who primarily rely on key areas to arrive at a diagnosis, existing slide-level multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for pathology rely on heavy slide-level encoders that process thousands of patch features in a brute-force manner, resulting in excessive computational cost. In this work, we revisit the WSI-language modeling paradigm and show that tile-level features exhibit strong global and local redundancy, whereas only a small subset of tiles are truly task-relevant. Motivated by this observation, we introduce an efficient MLLM framework, called LoC-Path, that replaces the expensive slide-level encoder with redundancy-reducing modules. We first design a Sparse Token Merger (STM) and an MAE-pretrained resampler to remove local redundancy and compress globally redundant tile tokens into a compact slide-level representation set. We then propose a Cross-Attention Routing Adapter (CARA) and a Token Importance Scorer (TIS) to integrate the compressed visual representation with the language model in a computation-efficient manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves performance comparable to existing state-of-the-art whole-slide MLLMs, while requiring significantly lower computation and memory.	20 pages	None
ARM-Thinker: Reinforcing Multimodal Generative Reward Models with Agentic Tool Use and Visual Reasoning	2025-12-04	Show Reward models are critical for aligning vision-language systems with human preferences, yet current approaches suffer from hallucination, weak visual grounding, and an inability to use tools for verification, limiting their reliability on complex multimodal reasoning tasks. We present ARM-Thinker, an A}gentic multimodal Reward Model that autonomously invokes external tools (e.g., image cropping, doc page retrieval) to ground judgments in verifiable evidence, replacing static, non-interactive reward scoring. This enables the model to verify fine-grained visual details, cross-reference multi-page evidence, and validate reasoning claims, which are capabilities absent in existing reward models. We train ARM-Thinker with multi-stage reinforcement learning, jointly optimizing tool-calling decisions and judgment accuracy. To evaluate agentic reward modeling, we introduce ARMBench-VL, comprising three benchmarks that assess fine-grained visual grounding (image-level tools), multi-page document understanding (retrieval tools), and instruction following (text-level verification). ARM-Thinker achieves +16.2% average improvement on reward modeling benchmarks, +9.6% on tool-use tasks, and outperforms baselines on multimodal math and logical reasoning benchmarks. Our results demonstrate that agentic capabilities significantly enhance both accuracy and interpretability of reward models.		None
BioAnalyst: A Foundation Model for Biodiversity	2025-12-04	Show Multimodal Foundation Models (FMs) offer a path to learn general-purpose representations from heterogeneous ecological data, easily transferable to downstream tasks. However, practical biodiversity modelling remains fragmented; separate pipelines and models are built for each dataset and objective, which limits reuse across regions and taxa. In response, we present BioAnalyst, to our knowledge the first multimodal Foundation Model tailored to biodiversity analysis and conservation planning in Europe at $0.25^{\circ}$ spatial resolution targeting regional to national-scale applications. BioAnalyst employs a transformer-based architecture, pre-trained on extensive multimodal datasets that align species occurrence records with remote sensing indicators, climate and environmental variables. Post pre-training, the model is adapted via lightweight roll-out fine-tuning to a range of downstream tasks, including joint species distribution modelling, biodiversity dynamics and population trend forecasting. The model is evaluated on two representative downstream use cases: (i) joint species distribution modelling and with 500 vascular plant species (ii) monthly climate linear probing with temperature and precipitation data. Our findings show that BioAnalyst can provide a strong baseline both for biotic and abiotic tasks, acting as a macroecological simulator with a yearly forecasting horizon and monthly resolution, offering the first application of this type of modelling in the biodiversity domain. We have open-sourced the model weights, training and fine-tuning pipelines to advance AI-driven ecological research.		None
MORPH: PDE Foundation Models with Arbitrary Data Modality	2025-12-04	Show We introduce MORPH, a modality-agnostic, autoregressive foundation model for partial differential equations (PDEs). MORPH is built on a convolutional vision transformer backbone that seamlessly handles heterogeneous spatiotemporal datasets of varying data modality (1D--3D) at different resolutions, and multiple fields with mixed scalar and vector components. The architecture combines (i) component-wise convolution, which jointly processes scalar and vector channels to capture local interactions, (ii) inter-field cross-attention, which models and selectively propagates information between different physical fields, (iii) axial attentions, which factorize full spatiotemporal self-attention along individual spatial and temporal axes to reduce computational burden while retaining expressivity. We pretrain multiple model variants on a diverse collection of heterogeneous PDE datasets and evaluate transfer to a range of downstream prediction tasks. Using both full-model fine-tuning and parameter-efficient low-rank adapters (LoRA), MORPH outperforms models trained from scratch. Across extensive evaluations, MORPH matches or surpasses strong baselines and recent state-of-the-art models. Collectively, these capabilities present a flexible and powerful backbone for learning from the heterogeneous and multimodal nature of scientific observations, charting a path toward scalable and data-efficient scientific machine learning. The source code, datasets, and models are publicly available at https://github.com/lanl/MORPH.		Code Link
RAMEN: Resolution-Adjustable Multimodal Encoder for Earth Observation	2025-12-04	Show Earth observation (EO) data spans a wide range of spatial, spectral, and temporal resolutions, from high-resolution optical imagery to low resolution multispectral products or radar time series. While recent foundation models have improved multimodal integration for learning meaningful representations, they often expect fixed input resolutions or are based on sensor-specific encoders limiting generalization across heterogeneous EO modalities. To overcome these limitations we introduce RAMEN, a resolution-adjustable multimodal encoder that learns a shared visual representation across EO data in a fully sensor-agnostic manner. RAMEN treats the modality and spatial and temporal resolutions as key input data features, enabling coherent analysis across modalities within a unified latent space. Its main methodological contribution is to define spatial resolution as a controllable output parameter, giving users direct control over the desired level of detail at inference and allowing explicit trade-offs between spatial precision and computational cost. We train a single, unified transformer encoder reconstructing masked multimodal EO data drawn from diverse sources, ensuring generalization across sensors and resolutions. Once pretrained, RAMEN transfers effectively to both known and unseen sensor configurations and outperforms larger state-of-the-art models on the community-standard PANGAEA benchmark, containing various multi-sensor and multi-resolution downstream tasks. Our code and pretrained model are available at https://github.com/nicolashoudre/RAMEN.		Code Link
Environment-Aware Channel Inference via Cross-Modal Flow: From Multimodal Sensing to Wireless Channels	2025-12-04	Show Accurate channel state information (CSI) underpins reliable and efficient wireless communication. However, acquiring CSI via pilot estimation incurs substantial overhead, especially in massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems operating in high-Doppler environments. By leveraging the growing availability of environmental sensing data, this treatise investigates pilot-free channel inference that estimates complete CSI directly from multimodal observations, including camera images, LiDAR point clouds, and GPS coordinates. In contrast to prior studies that rely on predefined channel models, we develop a data-driven framework that formulates the sensing-to-channel mapping as a cross-modal flow matching problem. The framework fuses multimodal features into a latent distribution within the channel domain, and learns a velocity field that continuously transforms the latent distribution toward the channel distribution. To make this formulation tractable and efficient, we reformulate the problem as an equivalent conditional flow matching objective and incorporate a modality alignment loss, while adopting low-latency inference mechanisms to enable real-time CSI estimation. In experiments, we build a procedural data generator based on Sionna and Blender to support realistic modeling of sensing scenes and wireless propagation. System-level evaluations demonstrate significant improvements over pilot- and sensing-based benchmarks in both channel estimation accuracy and spectral efficiency for the downstream beamforming task.	13 pa... 13 pages, 13 figures, 40 references, submitted to IEEE for possible publication	None
Towards Adaptive Fusion of Multimodal Deep Networks for Human Action Recognition	2025-12-04	Show This study introduces a pioneering methodology for human action recognition by harnessing deep neural network techniques and adaptive fusion strategies across multiple modalities, including RGB, optical flows, audio, and depth information. Employing gating mechanisms for multimodal fusion, we aim to surpass limitations inherent in traditional unimodal recognition methods while exploring novel possibilities for diverse applications. Through an exhaustive investigation of gating mechanisms and adaptive weighting-based fusion architectures, our methodology enables the selective integration of relevant information from various modalities, thereby bolstering both accuracy and robustness in action recognition tasks. We meticulously examine various gated fusion strategies to pinpoint the most effective approach for multimodal action recognition, showcasing its superiority over conventional unimodal methods. Gating mechanisms facilitate the extraction of pivotal features, resulting in a more holistic representation of actions and substantial enhancements in recognition performance. Our evaluations across human action recognition, violence action detection, and multiple self-supervised learning tasks on benchmark datasets demonstrate promising advancements in accuracy. The significance of this research lies in its potential to revolutionize action recognition systems across diverse fields. The fusion of multimodal information promises sophisticated applications in surveillance and human-computer interaction, especially in contexts related to active assisted living.		None
TongUI: Internet-Scale Trajectories from Multimodal Web Tutorials for Generalized GUI Agents	2025-12-04	Show Building Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents is a promising research direction, which simulates human interaction with computers or mobile phones to perform diverse GUI tasks. However, a major challenge in developing generalized GUI agents is the lack of sufficient trajectory data across various operating systems and applications, mainly due to the high cost of manual annotations. In this paper, we propose the TongUI framework that builds generalized GUI agents by learning from rich multimodal web tutorials. Concretely, we crawl and process online GUI tutorials (such as videos and articles) into GUI agent trajectory data, through which we produce the GUI-Net dataset containing 143K trajectory data across five operating systems and more than 200 applications. We develop the TongUI agent by fine-tuning Qwen2.5-VL-3B/7B models on GUI-Net, which show remarkable performance improvements on commonly used grounding and navigation benchmarks, outperforming baseline agents about 10% on multiple benchmarks, showing the effectiveness of the GUI-Net dataset and underscoring the significance of our TongUI framework. We will fully open-source the code, the GUI-Net dataset, and the trained models soon.	AAAI 2026	None
Adaptive Chain-of-Focus Reasoning via Dynamic Visual Search and Zooming for Efficient VLMs	2025-12-04	Show Vision language models (VLMs) have achieved impressive performance across a variety of computer vision tasks. However, the multimodal reasoning capability has not been fully explored in existing models. In this paper, we propose a Chain-of-Focus (CoF) method that allows VLMs to perform adaptive focusing and zooming in on key image regions based on obtained visual cues and the given questions, achieving efficient multimodal reasoning. To enable this CoF capability, we present a two-stage training pipeline, including supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL). In the SFT stage, we construct the MM-CoF dataset, comprising 3K samples derived from a visual agent designed to adaptively identify key regions to solve visual tasks with different image resolutions and questions. We use MM-CoF to fine-tune the Qwen2.5-VL model for cold start. In the RL stage, we leverage the outcome accuracies and formats as rewards to update the Qwen2.5-VL model, enabling further refining the search and reasoning strategy of models without human priors. Our model achieves significant improvements on multiple benchmarks. On the V* benchmark that requires strong visual reasoning capability, our model outperforms existing VLMs by 5% among 8 image resolutions ranging from 224 to 4K, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed CoF method and facilitating the more efficient deployment of VLMs in practical applications.	https... https://github.com/xtong-zhang/Chain-of-Focus	Code Link
COOPER: A Unified Model for Cooperative Perception and Reasoning in Spatial Intelligence	2025-12-04	Show Visual Spatial Reasoning is crucial for enabling Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to understand object properties and spatial relationships, yet current models still struggle with 3D-aware reasoning. Existing approaches typically enhance either perception, by augmenting RGB inputs with auxiliary modalities such as depth and segmentation, or reasoning, by training on spatial VQA datasets and applying reinforcement learning, and thus treat these two aspects in isolation. In this work, we investigate whether a unified MLLM can develop an intrinsic ability to enhance spatial perception and, through adaptive interleaved reasoning, achieve stronger spatial intelligence. We propose \textbf{COOPER}, a unified MLLM that leverages depth and segmentation as auxiliary modalities and is trained in two stages to acquire auxiliary modality generation and adaptive, interleaved reasoning capabilities. COOPER achieves an average \textbf{6.91%} improvement in spatial reasoning while maintaining general performance. Moreover, even a variant trained only for auxiliary modality generation attains a \textbf{7.92%} gain on distance and size estimation, suggesting that learning to generate auxiliary modalities helps internalize spatial knowledge and strengthen spatial understanding.		None
ViRectify: A Challenging Benchmark for Video Reasoning Correction with Multimodal Large Language Models	2025-12-04	Show As multimodal large language models (MLLMs) frequently exhibit errors in complex video reasoning scenarios, correcting these errors is critical for uncovering their weaknesses and improving performance. However, existing benchmarks lack systematic evaluation of MLLMs' ability to identify and correct these video reasoning errors. To bridge this gap, we propose ViRectify, a comprehensive benchmark to evaluate their fine-grained correction capability. Through an AI-assisted annotation pipeline with human verification, we construct a dataset of over 30K instances spanning dynamic perception, scientific reasoning, and embodied decision-making domains. In ViRectify, we challenge MLLMs to perform step-wise error identification and generate rationales with key video evidence grounding. In addition, we further propose the trajectory evidence-driven correction framework, comprising step-wise error trajectory and reward modeling on visual evidence-grounded correction. It encourages the model to explicitly concentrate on error propagation and key timestamps for correction. Extensive evaluation across 16 advanced MLLMs demonstrates that our ViRectify serves as a challenging testbed, where GPT-5 achieves only 31.94% correction accuracy. Our framework enables a Qwen2.5-VL-7B to consistently outperform the variants of 72B on ViRectify, showing the effectiveness of our approach. Further analysis uncovers systematic asymmetries in error correction across models, and our dataset is also a valuable data resource to perform reflection learning. We believe ViRectify provides a new direction for comprehensively evaluating the advanced MLLMs in video reasoning.	22 pages, 11 figures	None
BiTAgent: A Task-Aware Modular Framework for Bidirectional Coupling between Multimodal Large Language Models and World Models	2025-12-04	Show Building generalist embodied agents requires a unified system that can interpret multimodal goals, model environment dynamics, and execute reliable actions across diverse real-world tasks. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) offer strong semantic priors and cross-modal generalization, while world models (WMs) provide actionable latent dynamics for prediction and control. Their combination holds promise for open-ended embodied intelligence, yet introduces two key challenges: (1) establishing a tight coupling between the semantic intent from MLLMs and the dynamic state representations within the WM's latent space, and (2) achieving task-aware adaptability that supports multi-task learning and cross-environment generalization. To address these limitations, we propose BiTAgent, a task-aware dynamic joint framework that enables bidirectional coupling between MLLMs and WMs. BiTAgent establishes two complementary pathways: a forward path that injects MLLM representations into the WM's latent space for semantically guided imagination, and a backward path where WM-generated feedback refines the MLLM's semantic space via dense text-conditioned rewards. This bidirectional interaction is realized through three synergistic components: Task-Aware Dynamic Joint Learning, Task-Aware Behavior Learning, and MLLM-WM Joint Optimization, which together harmonize semantic reasoning and dynamic prediction. Extensive experiments across multi-task and cross-environment settings demonstrate superior stability and generalization over state-of-the-art baselines, marking a step toward open-ended embodied learning.		None
MILR: Improving Multimodal Image Generation via Test-Time Latent Reasoning	2025-12-04	Show Reasoning-augmented machine learning systems have shown improved performance in various domains, including image generation. However, existing reasoning-based methods for image generation either restrict reasoning to a single modality (image or text) or rely on high-quality reasoning data for fine-tuning. To tackle these limitations, we propose MILR, a test-time method that jointly reasons over image and text in a unified latent vector space. Reasoning in MILR is performed by searching through vector representations of discrete image and text tokens. Practically, this is implemented via the policy gradient method, guided by an image quality critic. We instantiate MILR within the unified multimodal understanding and generation (MUG) framework that natively supports language reasoning before image synthesis and thus facilitates cross-modal reasoning. The intermediate model outputs, which are to be optimized, serve as the unified latent space, enabling MILR to operate entirely at test time. We evaluate MILR on GenEval, T2I-CompBench, and WISE, achieving state-of-the-art results on all benchmarks. Notably, on knowledge-intensive WISE, MILR attains an overall score of 0.63, improving over the baseline by 80%. Our further analysis indicates that joint reasoning in the unified latent space is the key to its strong performance. Moreover, our qualitative studies reveal MILR's non-trivial ability in temporal and cultural reasoning, highlighting the efficacy of our reasoning method.	21 pa... 21 pages,13 figures,9 tables	None
Explainable Parkinsons Disease Gait Recognition Using Multimodal RGB-D Fusion and Large Language Models	2025-12-04	Show Accurate and interpretable gait analysis plays a crucial role in the early detection of Parkinsons disease (PD),yet most existing approaches remain limited by single-modality inputs, low robustness, and a lack of clinical transparency. This paper presents an explainable multimodal framework that integrates RGB and Depth (RGB-D) data to recognize Parkinsonian gait patterns under realistic conditions. The proposed system employs dual YOLOv11-based encoders for modality-specific feature extraction, followed by a Multi-Scale Local-Global Extraction (MLGE) module and a Cross-Spatial Neck Fusion mechanism to enhance spatial-temporal representation. This design captures both fine-grained limb motion (e.g., reduced arm swing) and overall gait dynamics (e.g., short stride or turning difficulty), even in challenging scenarios such as low lighting or occlusion caused by clothing. To ensure interpretability, a frozen Large Language Model (LLM) is incorporated to translate fused visual embeddings and structured metadata into clinically meaningful textual explanations. Experimental evaluations on multimodal gait datasets demonstrate that the proposed RGB-D fusion framework achieves higher recognition accuracy, improved robustness to environmental variations, and clear visual-linguistic reasoning compared with single-input baselines. By combining multimodal feature learning with language-based interpretability, this study bridges the gap between visual recognition and clinical understanding, offering a novel vision-language paradigm for reliable and explainable Parkinsons disease gait analysis. Code:https://github.com/manaralnaasan/RGB-D_parkinson-LLM		Code Link
Dual-branch Prompting for Multimodal Machine Translation	2025-12-04	Show Multimodal Machine Translation (MMT) typically enhances text-only translation by incorporating aligned visual features. Despite the remarkable progress, state-of-the-art MMT approaches often rely on paired image-text inputs at inference and are sensitive to irrelevant visual noise, which limits their robustness and practical applicability. To address these issues, we propose D2P-MMT, a diffusion-based dual-branch prompting framework for robust vision-guided translation. Specifically, D2P-MMT requires only the source text and a reconstructed image generated by a pre-trained diffusion model, which naturally filters out distracting visual details while preserving semantic cues. During training, the model jointly learns from both authentic and reconstructed images using a dual-branch prompting strategy, encouraging rich cross-modal interactions. To bridge the modality gap and mitigate training-inference discrepancies, we introduce a distributional alignment loss that enforces consistency between the output distributions of the two branches. Extensive experiments on the Multi30K dataset demonstrate that D2P-MMT achieves superior translation performance compared to existing state-of-the-art approaches.	This ... This manuscript is currently under review at the ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications	None
Efficient Transferable Optimal Transport via Min-Sliced Transport Plans	2025-12-03	Show Optimal Transport (OT) offers a powerful framework for finding correspondences between distributions and addressing matching and alignment problems in various areas of computer vision, including shape analysis, image generation, and multimodal tasks. The computation cost of OT, however, hinders its scalability. Slice-based transport plans have recently shown promise for reducing the computational cost by leveraging the closed-form solutions of 1D OT problems. These methods optimize a one-dimensional projection (slice) to obtain a conditional transport plan that minimizes the transport cost in the ambient space. While efficient, these methods leave open the question of whether learned optimal slicers can transfer to new distribution pairs under distributional shift. Understanding this transferability is crucial in settings with evolving data or repeated OT computations across closely related distributions. In this paper, we study the min-Sliced Transport Plan (min-STP) framework and investigate the transferability of optimized slicers: can a slicer trained on one distribution pair yield effective transport plans for new, unseen pairs? Theoretically, we show that optimized slicers remain close under slight perturbations of the data distributions, enabling efficient transfer across related tasks. To further improve scalability, we introduce a minibatch formulation of min-STP and provide statistical guarantees on its accuracy. Empirically, we demonstrate that the transferable min-STP achieves strong one-shot matching performance and facilitates amortized training for point cloud alignment and flow-based generative modeling.		None
ResponsibleRobotBench: Benchmarking Responsible Robot Manipulation using Multi-modal Large Language Models	2025-12-03	Show Recent advances in large multimodal models have enabled new opportunities in embodied AI, particularly in robotic manipulation. These models have shown strong potential in generalization and reasoning, but achieving reliable and responsible robotic behavior in real-world settings remains an open challenge. In high-stakes environments, robotic agents must go beyond basic task execution to perform risk-aware reasoning, moral decision-making, and physically grounded planning. We introduce ResponsibleRobotBench, a systematic benchmark designed to evaluate and accelerate progress in responsible robotic manipulation from simulation to real world. This benchmark consists of 23 multi-stage tasks spanning diverse risk types, including electrical, chemical, and human-related hazards, and varying levels of physical and planning complexity. These tasks require agents to detect and mitigate risks, reason about safety, plan sequences of actions, and engage human assistance when necessary. Our benchmark includes a general-purpose evaluation framework that supports multimodal model-based agents with various action representation modalities. The framework integrates visual perception, context learning, prompt construction, hazard detection, reasoning and planning, and physical execution. It also provides a rich multimodal dataset, supports reproducible experiments, and includes standardized metrics such as success rate, safety rate, and safe success rate. Through extensive experimental setups, ResponsibleRobotBench enables analysis across risk categories, task types, and agent configurations. By emphasizing physical reliability, generalization, and safety in decision-making, this benchmark provides a foundation for advancing the development of trustworthy, real-world responsible dexterous robotic systems. https://sites.google.com/view/responsible-robotbench	https... https://sites.google.com/view/responsible-robotbench	None
6 Fingers, 1 Kidney: Natural Adversarial Medical Images Reveal Critical Weaknesses of Vision-Language Models	2025-12-03	Show Vision-language models are increasingly integrated into clinical workflows. However, existing benchmarks primarily assess performance on common anatomical presentations and fail to capture the challenges posed by rare variants. To address this gap, we introduce AdversarialAnatomyBench, the first benchmark comprising naturally occurring rare anatomical variants across diverse imaging modalities and anatomical regions. We call such variants that violate learned priors about "typical" human anatomy natural adversarial anatomy. Benchmarking 22 state-of-the-art VLMs with AdversarialAnatomyBench yielded three key insights. First, when queried with basic medical perception tasks, mean accuracy dropped from 74% on typical to 29% on atypical anatomy. Even the best-performing models, GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and Llama 4 Maverick, showed performance drops of 41-51%. Second, model errors closely mirrored expected anatomical biases. Third, neither model scaling nor interventions, including bias-aware prompting and test-time reasoning, resolved these issues. These findings highlight a critical and previously unquantified limitation in current VLM: their poor generalization to rare anatomical presentations. AdversarialAnatomyBench provides a foundation for systematically measuring and mitigating anatomical bias in multimodal medical AI systems.		None
PosterCopilot: Toward Layout Reasoning and Controllable Editing for Professional Graphic Design	2025-12-03	Show Graphic design forms the cornerstone of modern visual communication, serving as a vital medium for promoting cultural and commercial events. Recent advances have explored automating this process using Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), yet existing methods often produce geometrically inaccurate layouts and lack the iterative, layer-specific editing required in professional workflows. To address these limitations, we present PosterCopilot, a framework that advances layout reasoning and controllable editing for professional graphic design. Specifically, we introduce a progressive three-stage training strategy that equips LMMs with geometric understanding and aesthetic reasoning for layout design, consisting of Perturbed Supervised Fine-Tuning, Reinforcement Learning for Visual-Reality Alignment, and Reinforcement Learning from Aesthetic Feedback. Furthermore, we develop a complete workflow that couples the trained LMM-based design model with generative models, enabling layer-controllable, iterative editing for precise element refinement while maintaining global visual consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PosterCopilot achieves geometrically accurate and aesthetically superior layouts, offering unprecedented controllability for professional iterative design.	Proje... Project page: https://postercopilot.github.io/	None
TempR1: Improving Temporal Understanding of MLLMs via Temporal-Aware Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning	2025-12-03	Show Enhancing the temporal understanding of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) is essential for advancing long-form video analysis, enabling tasks such as temporal localization, action detection, and time-sensitive question answering. While reinforcement learning (RL) has recently been explored for improving temporal reasoning, existing approaches are often confined to limited task types and data, restricting their generalization across diverse temporal understanding scenarios. To address this challenge, we present TempR1, a temporal-aware multi-task reinforcement learning framework that systematically strengthens MLLMs' temporal comprehension. We curate a multi-task corpus that exposes the model to diverse temporal structures and semantics, and build upon the Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) algorithm to achieve stable and effective cross-task optimization. Specifically, we categorize temporal tasks into three correspondence types between predicted intervals and ground-truth instances, and design tailored localization rewards for each, enabling TempR1 to capture fine-grained temporal dependencies and adapt to different temporal patterns. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TempR1 attains state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks. Moreover, its joint optimization over complementary tasks yields a strong synergistic effect, enhancing both generalization and single-task performance, establishing a scalable and principled paradigm for temporal reasoning in MLLMs.		None
Training and Evaluation of Guideline-Based Medical Reasoning in LLMs	2025-12-03	Show Machine learning for early prediction in medicine has recently shown breakthrough performance, however, the focus on improving prediction accuracy has led to a neglect of faithful explanations that are required to gain the trust of medical practitioners. The goal of this paper is to teach LLMs to follow medical consensus guidelines step-by-step in their reasoning and prediction process. Since consensus guidelines are ubiquitous in medicine, instantiations of verbalized medical inference rules to electronic health records provide data for fine-tuning LLMs to learn consensus rules and possible exceptions thereof for many medical areas. Consensus rules also enable an automatic evaluation of the model's inference process regarding its derivation correctness (evaluating correct and faithful deduction of a conclusion from given premises) and value correctness (comparing predicted values against real-world measurements). We exemplify our work using the complex Sepsis-3 consensus definition. Our experiments show that small fine-tuned models outperform one-shot learning of considerably larger LLMs that are prompted with the explicit definition and models that are trained on medical texts including consensus definitions. Since fine-tuning on verbalized rule instantiations of a specific medical area yields nearly perfect derivation correctness for rules (and exceptions) on unseen patient data in that area, the bottleneck for early prediction is not out-of-distribution generalization, but the orthogonal problem of generalization into the future by forecasting sparsely and irregularly sampled clinical variables. We show that the latter results can be improved by integrating the output representations of a time series forecasting model with the LLM in a multimodal setup.		None
Heatmap Pooling Network for Action Recognition from RGB Videos	2025-12-03	Show Human action recognition (HAR) in videos has garnered widespread attention due to the rich information in RGB videos. Nevertheless, existing methods for extracting deep features from RGB videos face challenges such as information redundancy, susceptibility to noise and high storage costs. To address these issues and fully harness the useful information in videos, we propose a novel heatmap pooling network (HP-Net) for action recognition from videos, which extracts information-rich, robust and concise pooled features of the human body in videos through a feedback pooling module. The extracted pooled features demonstrate obvious performance advantages over the previously obtained pose data and heatmap features from videos. In addition, we design a spatial-motion co-learning module and a text refinement modulation module to integrate the extracted pooled features with other multimodal data, enabling more robust action recognition. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks namely NTU RGB+D 60, NTU RGB+D 120, Toyota-Smarthome and UAV-Human consistently verify the effectiveness of our HP-Net, which outperforms the existing human action recognition methods. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/liujf69/HPNet-Action.	Final... Final Version of IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence	Code Link
DGFusion: Depth-Guided Sensor Fusion for Robust Semantic Perception	2025-12-03	Show Robust semantic perception for autonomous vehicles relies on effectively combining multiple sensors with complementary strengths and weaknesses. State-of-the-art sensor fusion approaches to semantic perception often treat sensor data uniformly across the spatial extent of the input, which hinders performance when faced with challenging conditions. By contrast, we propose a novel depth-guided multimodal fusion method that upgrades condition-aware fusion by integrating depth information. Our network, DGFusion, poses multimodal segmentation as a multi-task problem, utilizing the lidar measurements, which are typically available in outdoor sensor suites, both as one of the model's inputs and as ground truth for learning depth. Our corresponding auxiliary depth head helps to learn depth-aware features, which are encoded into spatially varying local depth tokens that condition our attentive cross-modal fusion. Together with a global condition token, these local depth tokens dynamically adapt sensor fusion to the spatially varying reliability of each sensor across the scene, which largely depends on depth. In addition, we propose a robust loss for our depth, which is essential for learning from lidar inputs that are typically sparse and noisy in adverse conditions. Our method achieves state-of-the-art panoptic and semantic segmentation performance on the challenging MUSES and DeLiVER datasets. Code and models will be available at https://github.com/timbroed/DGFusion	Code ... Code and models will be available at https://github.com/timbroed/DGFusion	Code Link
OpenMMReasoner: Pushing the Frontiers for Multimodal Reasoning with an Open and General Recipe	2025-12-03	Show Recent advancements in large reasoning models have fueled growing interest in extending such capabilities to multimodal domains. However, despite notable progress in visual reasoning, the lack of transparent and reproducible data curation and training strategies remains a major barrier to scalable research. In this work, we introduce OpenMMReasoner, a fully transparent two-stage recipe for multimodal reasoning spanning supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL). In the SFT stage, we construct an 874K-sample cold-start dataset with rigorous step-by-step validation, providing a strong foundation for reasoning capabilities. The subsequent RL stage leverages a 74K-sample dataset across diverse domains to further sharpen and stabilize these abilities, resulting in a more robust and efficient learning process. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our training recipe not only surpasses strong baselines but also highlights the critical role of data quality and training design in shaping multimodal reasoning performance. Notably, our method achieves a 11.6% improvement over the Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct baseline across nine multimodal reasoning benchmarks, establishing a solid empirical foundation for future large-scale multimodal reasoning research. We open-sourced all our codes, pipeline, and data at https://github.com/EvolvingLMMs-Lab/OpenMMReasoner.		Code Link
Omni-AutoThink: Adaptive Multimodal Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning	2025-12-03	Show Recent advances in Omni models have enabled unified multimodal perception and generation. However, most existing systems still exhibit rigid reasoning behaviors, either overthinking simple problems or failing to reason when necessary. To address this limitation, we propose Omni-AutoThink, a novel adaptive reasoning framework that dynamically adjusts the model's reasoning depth according to task difficulty. Our framework comprises two stages: (1) an Adaptive Supervised Fine-Tuning (Adaptive SFT) stage, which endows the Omni model with fundamental reasoning capability using large-scale reasoning-augmented data, and (2) an Adaptive Reinforcement Learning (Adaptive GRPO) stage, which optimizes reasoning behaviors based on task complexity and reward feedback. We further construct a comprehensive adaptive reasoning benchmark that spans text-only, text-audio, text-visual, and text-audio-visual modalities, providing both training and evaluation splits for multimodal reasoning assessment. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed framework significantly improves adaptive reasoning performance compared to previous baselines. All benchmark data and code will be publicly released.		None
Thinking with Programming Vision: Towards a Unified View for Thinking with Images	2025-12-03	Show Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that think with images can interactively use tools to reason about visual inputs, but current approaches often rely on a narrow set of tools with limited real-world necessity and scalability. In this work, we first reveal a critical and previously overlooked weakness: even state-of-the-art MLLMs are surprisingly brittle, showing significant performance degradation on images with simple orientation changes or natural corruptions, underscoring the need for more robust tool-based reasoning. To address this, we propose CodeVision, a flexible and scalable code-as-tool framework where the model generates code as a universal interface to invoke any image operation, moving beyond fixed tool registries. We train our model using a two-stage methodology, beginning with Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on a high-quality dataset curated for complex, multi-turn tool composition and error recovery, followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL) with a novel and dense process reward function to encourage strategic and efficient tool use. To facilitate this research, we construct new SFT and RL datasets and introduce a challenging new benchmark suite designed to rigorously evaluate robustness to orientation changes and multi-tool reasoning. Experiments on Qwen2.5-VL and Qwen3-VL series show that our approach significantly improves model performance and fosters emergent capabilities such as flexible tool composition, efficient chained execution, and robust error recovery from runtime feedback. Code is available at https://github.com/ByteDance-BandAI/CodeVision.		Code Link
Game-RL: Synthesizing Multimodal Verifiable Game Data to Boost VLMs' General Reasoning	2025-12-03	Show Vision-language reinforcement learning (RL) has primarily focused on narrow domains (e.g. geometry or chart reasoning). This leaves broader training scenarios and resources underexplored, limiting the exploration and learning of Vision Language Models (VLMs) through RL. We find video games inherently provide rich visual elements and mechanics that are easy to verify. To fully use the multimodal and verifiable reward in video games, we propose Game-RL, constructing diverse game tasks for RL training to boost VLMs general reasoning ability. To obtain training data, we propose Code2Logic, a novel approach that adapts game code to synthesize game reasoning task data, thus obtaining the GameQA dataset of 30 games and 158 tasks with controllable difficulty gradation. Unexpectedly, RL training solely on GameQA enables multiple VLMs to achieve performance improvements across 7 diverse vision-language benchmarks, demonstrating the value of Game-RL for enhancing VLMs' general reasoning. Furthermore, this suggests that video games may serve as valuable scenarios and resources to boost general reasoning abilities. Our code, dataset and models are available at the GitHub repository.	Our c... Our compliance team has determined that the submission contains technical details that have not been fully reviewed through internal audit nor authorized for public disclosure	None
MemVerse: Multimodal Memory for Lifelong Learning Agents	2025-12-03	Show Despite rapid progress in large-scale language and vision models, AI agents still suffer from a fundamental limitation: they cannot remember. Without reliable memory, agents catastrophically forget past experiences, struggle with long-horizon reasoning, and fail to operate coherently in multimodal or interactive environments. We introduce MemVerse, a model-agnostic, plug-and-play memory framework that bridges fast parametric recall with hierarchical retrieval-based memory, enabling scalable and adaptive multimodal intelligence. MemVerse maintains short-term memory for recent context while transforming raw multimodal experiences into structured long-term memories organized as hierarchical knowledge graphs. This design supports continual consolidation, adaptive forgetting, and bounded memory growth. To handle real-time demands, MemVerse introduces a periodic distillation mechanism that compresses essential knowledge from long-term memory into the parametric model, allowing fast, differentiable recall while preserving interpretability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MemVerse significantly improves multimodal reasoning and continual learning efficiency, empowering agents to remember, adapt, and reason coherently across extended interactions.	11 pa... 11 pages, 2 figures, 2 tables	None
LargeAD: Large-Scale Cross-Sensor Data Pretraining for Autonomous Driving	2025-12-03	Show Recent advancements in vision foundation models (VFMs) have revolutionized visual perception in 2D, yet their potential for 3D scene understanding, particularly in autonomous driving applications, remains underexplored. In this paper, we introduce LargeAD, a versatile and scalable framework designed for large-scale 3D pretraining across diverse real-world driving datasets. Our framework leverages VFMs to extract semantically rich superpixels from 2D images, which are aligned with LiDAR point clouds to generate high-quality contrastive samples. This alignment facilitates cross-modal representation learning, enhancing the semantic consistency between 2D and 3D data. We introduce several key innovations: (i) VFM-driven superpixel generation for detailed semantic representation, (ii) a VFM-assisted contrastive learning strategy to align multimodal features, (iii) superpoint temporal consistency to maintain stable representations across time, and (iv) multi-source data pretraining to generalize across various LiDAR configurations. Our approach achieves substantial gains over state-of-the-art methods in linear probing and fine-tuning for LiDAR-based segmentation and object detection. Extensive experiments on 11 large-scale multi-sensor datasets highlight our superior performance, demonstrating adaptability, efficiency, and robustness in real-world autonomous driving scenarios.	IEEE ... IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI)	None
M3DR: Towards Universal Multilingual Multimodal Document Retrieval	2025-12-03	Show Multimodal document retrieval systems have shown strong progress in aligning visual and textual content for semantic search. However, most existing approaches remain heavily English-centric, limiting their effectiveness in multilingual contexts. In this work, we present M3DR (Multilingual Multimodal Document Retrieval), a framework designed to bridge this gap across languages, enabling applicability across diverse linguistic and cultural contexts. M3DR leverages synthetic multilingual document data and generalizes across different vision-language architectures and model sizes, enabling robust cross-lingual and cross-modal alignment. Using contrastive training, our models learn unified representations for text and document images that transfer effectively across languages. We validate this capability on 22 typologically diverse languages, demonstrating consistent performance and adaptability across linguistic and script variations. We further introduce a comprehensive benchmark that captures real-world multilingual scenarios, evaluating models under monolingual, multilingual, and mixed-language settings. M3DR generalizes across both single dense vector and ColBERT-style token-level multi-vector retrieval paradigms. Our models, NetraEmbed and ColNetraEmbed achieve state-of-the-art performance with ~150% relative improvements on cross-lingual retrieval.		None
SATORI-R1: Incentivizing Multimodal Reasoning through Explicit Visual Anchoring	2025-12-03	Show DeepSeek-R1 has demonstrated powerful reasoning capabilities in the text domain through stable reinforcement learning (RL). Recently, in the multimodal domain, works have begun to directly apply RL to generate R1-like free-form reasoning for Visual Question Answering (VQA) tasks. However, multimodal tasks share an intrinsically different nature from textual tasks, which heavily rely on the understanding of the input image to solve the problem. Therefore, such free-form reasoning faces two critical limitations in the VQA task: (1) Extended reasoning chains diffuse visual focus away from task-critical regions, degrading answer accuracy. (2) Unverifiable intermediate steps amplify policy-gradient variance and computational costs overhead. To address these issues, in this paper, we introduce SATORI ($\textbf{S}patially$ $\textbf{A}nchored$ $\textbf{T}ask$ $\textbf{O}ptimization$ with $\textbf{R}e\textbf{I}nforcement$ Learning), which decomposes VQA into three verifiable stages, including global image captioning, region localization, and answer prediction, each supplying explicit reward signals. Furthermore, we also introduce VQA-Verify, a 12k dataset annotated with answer-aligned captions and bounding-boxes to facilitate training. Experiments demonstrate consistent performance improvements across seven VQA benchmarks, achieving up to $15.7%$ improvement in accuracy in accuracy compared to the R1-like baseline. Our analysis of the attention map confirms enhanced focus on critical regions, which brings improvements in accuracy. Our code is available at https://github.com/justairr/SATORI-R1.	21 pages, 8 figures	Code Link
Guard Me If You Know Me: Protecting Specific Face-Identity from Deepfakes	2025-12-03	Show Securing personal identity against deepfake attacks is increasingly critical in the digital age, especially for celebrities and political figures whose faces are easily accessible and frequently targeted. Most existing deepfake detection methods focus on general-purpose scenarios and often ignore the valuable prior knowledge of known facial identities, e.g., "VIP individuals" whose authentic facial data are already available. In this paper, we propose \textbf{VIPGuard}, a unified multimodal framework designed to capture fine-grained and comprehensive facial representations of a given identity, compare them against potentially fake or similar-looking faces, and reason over these comparisons to make accurate and explainable predictions. Specifically, our framework consists of three main stages. First, fine-tune a multimodal large language model (MLLM) to learn detailed and structural facial attributes. Second, we perform identity-level discriminative learning to enable the model to distinguish subtle differences between highly similar faces, including real and fake variations. Finally, we introduce user-specific customization, where we model the unique characteristics of the target face identity and perform semantic reasoning via MLLM to enable personalized and explainable deepfake detection. Our framework shows clear advantages over previous detection works, where traditional detectors mainly rely on low-level visual cues and provide no human-understandable explanations, while other MLLM-based models often lack a detailed understanding of specific face identities. To facilitate the evaluation of our method, we built a comprehensive identity-aware benchmark called \textbf{VIPBench} for personalized deepfake detection, involving the latest 7 face-swapping and 7 entire face synthesis techniques for generation. The code is available at https://github.com/KQL11/VIPGuard .		Code Link
Multi-Modal Opinion Integration for Financial Sentiment Analysis using Cross-Modal Attention	2025-12-03	Show In recent years, financial sentiment analysis of public opinion has become increasingly important for market forecasting and risk assessment. However, existing methods often struggle to effectively integrate diverse opinion modalities and capture fine-grained interactions across them. This paper proposes an end-to-end deep learning framework that integrates two distinct modalities of financial opinions: recency modality (timely opinions) and popularity modality (trending opinions), through a novel cross-modal attention mechanism specifically designed for financial sentiment analysis. While both modalities consist of textual data, they represent fundamentally different information channels: recency-driven market updates versus popularity-driven collective sentiment. Our model first uses BERT (Chinese-wwm-ext) for feature embedding and then employs our proposed Financial Multi-Head Cross-Attention (FMHCA) structure to facilitate information exchange between these distinct opinion modalities. The processed features are optimized through a transformer layer and fused using multimodal factored bilinear pooling for classification into negative, neutral, and positive sentiment. Extensive experiments on a comprehensive dataset covering 837 companies demonstrate that our approach achieves an accuracy of 83.5%, significantly outperforming baselines including BERT+Transformer by 21 percent. These results highlight the potential of our framework to support more accurate financial decision-making and risk management.		None
Think Before You Drive: World Model-Inspired Multimodal Grounding for Autonomous Vehicles	2025-12-03	Show Interpreting natural-language commands to localize target objects is critical for autonomous driving (AD). Existing visual grounding (VG) methods for autonomous vehicles (AVs) typically struggle with ambiguous, context-dependent instructions, as they lack reasoning over 3D spatial relations and anticipated scene evolution. Grounded in the principles of world models, we propose ThinkDeeper, a framework that reasons about future spatial states before making grounding decisions. At its core is a Spatial-Aware World Model (SA-WM) that learns to reason ahead by distilling the current scene into a command-aware latent state and rolling out a sequence of future latent states, providing forward-looking cues for disambiguation. Complementing this, a hypergraph-guided decoder then hierarchically fuses these states with the multimodal input, capturing higher-order spatial dependencies for robust localization. In addition, we present DrivePilot, a multi-source VG dataset in AD, featuring semantic annotations generated by a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Chain-of-Thought (CoT)-prompted LLM pipeline. Extensive evaluations on six benchmarks, ThinkDeeper ranks #1 on the Talk2Car leaderboard and surpasses state-of-the-art baselines on DrivePilot, MoCAD, and RefCOCO/+/g benchmarks. Notably, it shows strong robustness and efficiency in challenging scenes (long-text, multi-agent, ambiguity) and retains superior performance even when trained on 50% of the data.		None
Multimodal Reinforcement Learning with Agentic Verifier for AI Agents	2025-12-03	Show Agentic reasoning models trained with multimodal reinforcement learning (MMRL) have become increasingly capable, yet they are almost universally optimized using sparse, outcome-based rewards computed based on the final answers. Richer rewards computed from the reasoning tokens can improve learning significantly by providing more fine-grained guidance. However, it is challenging to compute more informative rewards in MMRL beyond those based on outcomes since different samples may require different scoring functions and teacher models may provide noisy reward signals too. In this paper, we introduce the Argos (Agentic Reward for Grounded & Objective Scoring), a principled reward agent to train multimodal reasoning models for agentic tasks. For each sample, Argos selects from a pool of teacher-model derived and rule-based scoring functions to simultaneously evaluate: (i) final response accuracy, (ii) spatiotemporal localization of referred entities and actions, and (iii) the quality of the reasoning process. We find that by leveraging our agentic verifier across both SFT data curation and RL training, our model achieves state-of-the-art results across multiple agentic tasks such as spatial reasoning, visual hallucination as well as robotics and embodied AI benchmarks. Critically, we demonstrate that just relying on SFT post-training on highly curated reasoning data is insufficient, as agents invariably collapse to ungrounded solutions during RL without our online verification. We also show that our agentic verifier can help to reduce reward-hacking in MMRL. Finally, we also provide a theoretical justification for the effectiveness of Argos through the concept of pareto-optimality.		None
Label-Efficient Hyperspectral Image Classification via Spectral FiLM Modulation of Low-Level Pretrained Diffusion Features	2025-12-03	Show Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) enables detailed land cover classification, yet low spatial resolution and sparse annotations pose significant challenges. We present a label-efficient framework that leverages spatial features from a frozen diffusion model pretrained on natural images. Our approach extracts low-level representations from high-resolution decoder layers at early denoising timesteps, which transfer effectively to the low-texture structure of HSI. To integrate spectral and spatial information, we introduce a lightweight FiLM-based fusion module that adaptively modulates frozen spatial features using spectral cues, enabling robust multimodal learning under sparse supervision. Experiments on two recent hyperspectral datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches using only the provided sparse training labels. Ablation studies further highlight the benefits of diffusion-derived features and spectral-aware fusion. Overall, our results indicate that pretrained diffusion models can support domain-agnostic, label-efficient representation learning for remote sensing and broader scientific imaging tasks.	Accep... Accepted to the ICML 2025 TerraBytes Workshop (June 9, 2025)	None
GOMP: Grasped Object Manifold Projection for Multimodal Imitation Learning of Manipulation	2025-12-03	Show Imitation Learning (IL) holds great potential for learning repetitive manipulation tasks, such as those in industrial assembly. However, its effectiveness is often limited by insufficient trajectory precision due to compounding errors. In this paper, we introduce Grasped Object Manifold Projection (GOMP), an interactive method that mitigates these errors by constraining a non-rigidly grasped object to a lower-dimensional manifold. GOMP assumes a precise task in which a manipulator holds an object that may shift within the grasp in an observable manner and must be mated with a grounded part. Crucially, all GOMP enhancements are learned from the same expert dataset used to train the base IL policy, and are adjusted with an n-arm bandit-based interactive component. We propose a theoretical basis for GOMP's improvement upon the well-known compounding error bound in IL literature. We demonstrate the framework on four precise assembly tasks using tactile feedback, and note that the approach remains modality-agnostic. Data and videos are available at williamvdb.github.io/GOMPsite.	8 pag... 8 pages, 8 figures, 2 tables	None
Scaling Multimodal Search and Recommendation with Small Language Models via Upside-Down Reinforcement Learning	2025-12-03	Show In this work, we investigate how small language models (SLMs) can be scaled to support multimodal search and recommendation use cases while remaining efficient enough for real-time, resource-constrained deployments. We present a framework that combines upside-down reinforcement learning with synthetic data distillation from a large language model (Llama-3) to train a 100M-parameter GPT-2 model for multitask prompt generation. Despite being up to 80 times smaller than state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs), our SLM achieves relevance and diversity scores within 6% of competitive baselines such as Llama-3 8B, Qwen3 8B, and Ministral 8B. These results demonstrate that SLMs can effectively handle multimodal search and recommendation tasks, while dramatically reducing inference latency and memory overhead. Our study highlights the potential of lightweight models as practical engines for scalable multimodal discovery, bridging the gap between cutting-edge research and real-world multimodal applications such as media recommendations and creative content generation.	Accep... Accepted by ICDM 2025 MMSR	None
Multimodal Continual Learning with MLLMs from Multi-scenario Perspectives	2025-12-02	Show Continual learning in visual understanding aims to deal with catastrophic forgetting in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). MLLMs deployed on devices have to continuously adapt to dynamic scenarios in downstream tasks, such as variations in background and perspective, to effectively perform complex visual tasks. To this end, we construct a multimodal visual understanding dataset (MSVQA) encompassing four different scenarios and perspectives including high altitude, underwater, low altitude and indoor, to investigate the catastrophic forgetting in MLLMs under the dynamics of scenario shifts in real-world data streams. Furthermore, we propose mUltimodal coNtInual learning with MLLMs From multi-scenarIo pERspectives (UNIFIER) to address visual discrepancies while learning different scenarios. Specifically, it decouples the visual information from different scenarios into distinct branches within each vision block and projects them into the same feature space. A consistency constraint is imposed on the features of each branch to maintain the stability of visual representations across scenarios. Extensive experiments on the MSVQA dataset demonstrate that UNIFIER effectively alleviates forgetting of cross-scenario tasks and achieves knowledge accumulation within the same scenario.	18 pa... 18 pages, 16 figures. This is a preprint version of a paper submitted to CVPR 2026	None
Mitigating Intra- and Inter-modal Forgetting in Continual Learning of Unified Multimodal Models	2025-12-02	Show Unified Multimodal Generative Models (UMGMs) unify visual understanding and image generation within a single autoregressive framework. However, their ability to continually learn new tasks is severely hindered by catastrophic forgetting, both within a modality (intra-modal) and across modalities (inter-modal). While intra-modal forgetting has been studied in prior continual learning (CL) work, inter-modal forgetting remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we identify and empirically validate this phenomenon in UMGMs and provide a theoretical explanation rooted in gradient conflict between modalities. To address both intra- and inter-modal forgetting, we propose Modality-Decoupled Experts (MoDE), a lightweight and scalable architecture that isolates modality-specific updates to mitigate the gradient conflict and leverages knowledge distillation to prevent catastrophic forgetting and preserve pre-trained capabilities. Unlike previous CL methods that remain modality-coupled and suffer from modality gradient conflict, MoDE explicitly decouples modalities to prevent interference. Experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that MoDE significantly mitigates both inter- and intra-modal forgetting, outperforming prior CL baselines in unified multimodal generation settings. Codes will be publicly available: https://github.com/Christina200/MoDE-official.git	NeurIPS 2025	Code Link
OneThinker: All-in-one Reasoning Model for Image and Video	2025-12-02	Show Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently achieved remarkable success in eliciting visual reasoning within Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, existing approaches typically train separate models for different tasks and treat image and video reasoning as disjoint domains. This results in limited scalability toward a multimodal reasoning generalist, which restricts practical versatility and hinders potential knowledge sharing across tasks and modalities. To this end, we propose OneThinker, an all-in-one reasoning model that unifies image and video understanding across diverse fundamental visual tasks, including question answering, captioning, spatial and temporal grounding, tracking, and segmentation. To achieve this, we construct the OneThinker-600k training corpus covering all these tasks and employ commercial models for CoT annotation, resulting in OneThinker-SFT-340k for SFT cold start. Furthermore, we propose EMA-GRPO to handle reward heterogeneity in multi-task RL by tracking task-wise moving averages of reward standard deviations for balanced optimization. Extensive experiments on diverse visual benchmarks show that OneThinker delivers strong performance on 31 benchmarks, across 10 fundamental visual understanding tasks. Moreover, it exhibits effective knowledge transfer between certain tasks and preliminary zero-shot generalization ability, marking a step toward a unified multimodal reasoning generalist. All code, model, and data are released.	Proje... Project page: https://github.com/tulerfeng/OneThinker	Code Link
Learning Multimodal Embeddings for Traffic Accident Prediction and Causal Estimation	2025-12-02	Show We consider analyzing traffic accident patterns using both road network data and satellite images aligned to road graph nodes. Previous work for predicting accident occurrences relies primarily on road network structural features while overlooking physical and environmental information from the road surface and its surroundings. In this work, we construct a large multimodal dataset across six U.S. states, containing nine million traffic accident records from official sources, and one million high-resolution satellite images for each node of the road network. Additionally, every node is annotated with features such as the region's weather statistics and road type (e.g., residential vs. motorway), and each edge is annotated with traffic volume information (i.e., Average Annual Daily Traffic). Utilizing this dataset, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of multimodal learning methods that integrate both visual and network embeddings. Our findings show that integrating both data modalities improves prediction accuracy, achieving an average AUROC of $90.1%$, which is a $3.7%$ gain over graph neural network models that only utilize graph structures. With the improved embeddings, we conduct a causal analysis based on a matching estimator to estimate the key contributing factors influencing traffic accidents. We find that accident rates rise by $24%$ under higher precipitation, by $22%$ on higher-speed roads such as motorways, and by $29%$ due to seasonal patterns, after adjusting for other confounding factors. Ablation studies confirm that satellite imagery features are essential for achieving accurate prediction.	17 pa... 17 pages. To appear in KDD'26 Datasets	None
MindGPT-4ov: An Enhanced MLLM via a Multi-Stage Post-Training Paradigm	2025-12-02	Show We present MindGPT-4ov, a multimodal large language model (MLLM) that introduces a general post-training paradigm spanning data production, model training, and efficient deployment. It achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks at low cost, effectively enhancing the foundational capabilities of MLLMs and the generalization ability. Focusing on data construction, supervised fine-tuning strategies, and multimodal reinforcement learning methods, this work proposes three key innovations: (1) An information density-based data generation scheme, integrated with a dual-dimensional tree-structured label system, enabling automated generation of high-quality cross-domain data. (2) A collaborative curriculum supervised fine-tuning approach that balances the injection of domain-specific knowledge with the preservation of general capabilities. (3) A hybrid reinforcement learning paradigm that enhances reasoning ability while simultaneously addressing multi-objective optimization such as diversity exploration, maintenance of multimodal perception, and response conciseness. Moreover, we implement a series of infrastructure optimizations, such as 5D parallel training, operator optimization, and inference quantization to enhance training and inference efficiency while reducing the cost of domain adaptation. Experimental results demonstrate that the MindGPT-4ov model outperforms state-of-the-art models on benchmarks such as MMBench, MMStar, MathVision, and MathVista. In addition, MindGPT-4ov also demonstrates superior user experience in vertical domain tasks, enabling a seamless transition from academic research to industrial deployment. MindGPT-4ov provides a general post-training paradigm applicable to a wide range of MLLMs. The model weights, datasets, and code for the Qwen3-VL-based variants will be recently open-sourced to support the community's development of MLLMs.	33 pages, 14 figures	None
BOOM: Beyond Only One Modality KIT's Multimodal Multilingual Lecture Companion	2025-12-02	Show The globalization of education and rapid growth of online learning have made localizing educational content a critical challenge. Lecture materials are inherently multimodal, combining spoken audio with visual slides, which requires systems capable of processing multiple input modalities. To provide an accessible and complete learning experience, translations must preserve all modalities: text for reading, slides for visual understanding, and speech for auditory learning. We present \textbf{BOOM}, a multimodal multilingual lecture companion that jointly translates lecture audio and slides to produce synchronized outputs across three modalities: translated text, localized slides with preserved visual elements, and synthesized speech. This end-to-end approach enables students to access lectures in their native language while aiming to preserve the original content in its entirety. Our experiments demonstrate that slide-aware transcripts also yield cascading benefits for downstream tasks such as summarization and question answering. We release our Slide Translation code at https://github.com/saikoneru/image-translator and integrate it in Lecture Translator at https://gitlab.kit.edu/kit/isl-ai4lt/lt-middleware/ltpipeline}\footnote{All released code and models are licensed under the MIT License.	Under review	Code Link
CogDrive: Cognition-Driven Multimodal Prediction-Planning Fusion for Safe Autonomy	2025-12-02	Show Safe autonomous driving in mixed traffic requires a unified understanding of multimodal interactions and dynamic planning under uncertainty. Existing learning based approaches struggle to capture rare but safety critical behaviors, while rule based systems often lack adaptability in complex interactions. To address these limitations, CogDrive introduces a cognition driven multimodal prediction and planning framework that integrates explicit modal reasoning with safety aware trajectory optimization. The prediction module adopts cognitive representations of interaction modes based on topological motion semantics and nearest neighbor relational encoding. With a differentiable modal loss and multimodal Gaussian decoding, CogDrive learns sparse and unbalanced interaction behaviors and improves long horizon trajectory prediction. The planning module incorporates an emergency response concept and optimizes safety stabilized trajectories, where short term consistent branches ensure safety during replanning cycles and long term branches support smooth and collision free motion under low probability switching modes. Experiments on Argoverse2 and INTERACTION datasets show that CogDrive achieves strong performance in trajectory accuracy and miss rate, while closed loop simulations confirm adaptive behavior in merge and intersection scenarios. By combining cognitive multimodal prediction with safety oriented planning, CogDrive offers an interpretable and reliable paradigm for safe autonomy in complex traffic.	25 pages, 6 figures	None
RoboWheel: A Data Engine from Real-World Human Demonstrations for Cross-Embodiment Robotic Learning	2025-12-02	Show We introduce Robowheel, a data engine that converts human hand object interaction (HOI) videos into training-ready supervision for cross morphology robotic learning. From monocular RGB or RGB-D inputs, we perform high precision HOI reconstruction and enforce physical plausibility via a reinforcement learning (RL) optimizer that refines hand object relative poses under contact and penetration constraints. The reconstructed, contact rich trajectories are then retargeted to cross-embodiments, robot arms with simple end effectors, dexterous hands, and humanoids, yielding executable actions and rollouts. To scale coverage, we build a simulation-augmented framework on Isaac Sim with diverse domain randomization (embodiments, trajectories, object retrieval, background textures, hand motion mirroring), which enriches the distributions of trajectories and observations while preserving spatial relationships and physical plausibility. The entire data pipeline forms an end to end pipeline from video,reconstruction,retargeting,augmentation data acquisition. We validate the data on mainstream vision language action (VLA) and imitation learning architectures, demonstrating that trajectories produced by our pipeline are as stable as those from teleoperation and yield comparable continual performance gains. To our knowledge, this provides the first quantitative evidence that HOI modalities can serve as effective supervision for robotic learning. Compared with teleoperation, Robowheel is lightweight, a single monocular RGB(D) camera is sufficient to extract a universal, embodiment agnostic motion representation that could be flexibly retargeted across embodiments. We further assemble a large scale multimodal dataset combining multi-camera captures, monocular videos, and public HOI corpora for training and evaluating embodied models.	27 Pages, 21 figures	None
Learning What to Attend First: Modality-Importance-Guided Reasoning for Reliable Multimodal Emotion Understanding	2025-12-02	Show In this paper, we present Modality-Importance-Guided Reasoning (MIGR), a framework designed to improve the reliability of reasoning-based multimodal emotion understanding in multimodal large language models. Although existing methods have advanced emotion understanding, they often suffer from reasoning drift: models gradually rely on their own generated text instead of multimodal evidence, and their explanations are overly shaped by visually initiated reasoning paths. To address these issues, we introduce Modality Importance (MI), a simple yet effective mechanism for identifying the emotion-dominant modality. Using MI, MIGR reorganizes reasoning sequences so that explanations begin from the modality most critical to the target emotion, preventing early reasoning from being misled by less informative cues. Our two-stage framework-comprising modality-aligned supervised fine-tuning and modality-aware reward optimization-encourages models to generate emotionally grounded, causally relevant, and coherence-preserving explanations. Experimental results on the DFEW benchmark show that MIGR substantially improves reasoning reliability, decreasing instances of correct predictions accompanied by emotionally inconsistent explanations from 18.10% to 7.37%. These results confirm the benefit of initiating reasoning from the emotion-dominant modality.	16 pages, 8 figures	None
Real-Time Multimodal Data Collection Using Smartwatches and Its Visualization in Education	2025-12-02	Show Wearable sensors, such as smartwatches, have become increasingly prevalent across domains like healthcare, sports, and education, enabling continuous monitoring of physiological and behavioral data. In the context of education, these technologies offer new opportunities to study cognitive and affective processes such as engagement, attention, and performance. However, the lack of scalable, synchronized, and high-resolution tools for multimodal data acquisition continues to be a significant barrier to the widespread adoption of Multimodal Learning Analytics in real-world educational settings. This paper presents two complementary tools developed to address these challenges: Watch-DMLT, a data acquisition application for Fitbit Sense 2 smartwatches that enables real-time, multi-user monitoring of physiological and motion signals; and ViSeDOPS, a dashboard-based visualization system for analyzing synchronized multimodal data collected during oral presentations. We report on a classroom deployment involving 65 students and up to 16 smartwatches, where data streams including heart rate, motion, gaze, video, and contextual annotations were captured and analyzed. Results demonstrate the feasibility and utility of the proposed system for supporting fine-grained, scalable, and interpretable Multimodal Learning Analytics in real learning environments.	Accep... Accepted in Technological Ecosystems for Enhancing Multiculturality (TEEM) 2025	None
SAM2Grasp: Resolve Multi-modal Grasping via Prompt-conditioned Temporal Action Prediction	2025-12-02	Show Imitation learning for robotic grasping is often plagued by the multimodal problem: when a scene contains multiple valid targets, demonstrations of grasping different objects create conflicting training signals. Standard imitation learning policies fail by averaging these distinct actions into a single, invalid action. In this paper, we introduce SAM2Grasp, a novel framework that resolves this issue by reformulating the task as a uni-modal, prompt-conditioned prediction problem. Our method leverages the frozen SAM2 model to use its powerful visual temporal tracking capability and introduces a lightweight, trainable action head that operates in parallel with its native segmentation head. This design allows for training only the small action head on pre-computed temporal-visual features from SAM2. During inference, an initial prompt, such as a bounding box provided by an upstream object detection model, designates the specific object to be grasped. This prompt conditions the action head to predict a unique, unambiguous grasp trajectory for that object alone. In all subsequent video frames, SAM2's built-in temporal tracking capability automatically maintains stable tracking of the selected object, enabling our model to continuously predict the grasp trajectory from the video stream without further external guidance. This temporal-prompted approach effectively eliminates ambiguity from the visuomotor policy. We demonstrate through extensive experiments that SAM2Grasp achieves state-of-the-art performance in cluttered, multi-object grasping tasks.		None
GoRL: An Algorithm-Agnostic Framework for Online Reinforcement Learning with Generative Policies	2025-12-02	Show Reinforcement learning (RL) faces a persistent tension: policies that are stable to optimize are often too simple to represent the multimodal action distributions needed for complex control. Gaussian policies provide tractable likelihoods and smooth gradients, but their unimodal form limits expressiveness. Conversely, generative policies based on diffusion or flow matching can model rich multimodal behaviors; however, in online RL, they are frequently unstable due to intractable likelihoods and noisy gradients propagating through deep sampling chains. We address this tension with a key structural principle: decoupling optimization from generation. Building on this insight, we introduce GoRL (Generative Online Reinforcement Learning), a framework that optimizes a tractable latent policy while utilizing a conditional generative decoder to synthesize actions. A two-timescale update schedule enables the latent policy to learn stably while the decoder steadily increases expressiveness, without requiring tractable action likelihoods. Across a range of continuous-control tasks, GoRL consistently outperforms both Gaussian policies and recent generative-policy baselines. Notably, on the HopperStand task, it reaches a normalized return above 870, more than 3 times that of the strongest baseline. These results demonstrate that separating optimization from generation provides a practical path to policies that are both stable and highly expressive.	27 pages	None
From Imitation to Discrimination: Toward A Generalized Curriculum Advantage Mechanism Enhancing Cross-Domain Reasoning Tasks	2025-12-02	Show Reinforcement learning has emerged as a paradigm for post-training large language models, boosting their reasoning capabilities. Such approaches compute an advantage value for each sample, reflecting better or worse performance than expected, thereby yielding both positive and negative signals for training. However, the indiscriminate mixing of the two signals in existing methods, especially from the early stages, may lead to ambiguous guidance and limited gains. To address this issue, we propose CAPO (Curriculum Advantage Policy Optimization), an adaptive curriculum mechanism based on advantage signals. The proposed mechanism bootstraps imitation learning with positive-only advantage samples to establish robust foundations, and subsequently introduces negative signals to cultivate discriminative capabilities, thereby improving generalization across complex scenarios. Compatible with diverse optimization methods including GRPO, PPO, RLOO, and Reinforce++, our method consistently achieves stable and significant improvements in mathematical reasoning tasks, and further generalizes effectively to multimodal Graphical User Interface (GUI) reasoning scenarios, establishing itself as a versatile and robust optimization framework.	Accep... Accepted by AAAI 2026	None
WeMMU: Enhanced Bridging of Vision-Language Models and Diffusion Models via Noisy Query Tokens	2025-12-02	Show Recent progress in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has highlighted the challenge of efficiently bridging pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) with Diffusion Models. While methods using a fixed number of learnable query tokens offer computational efficiency, they suffer from task generalization collapse, failing to adapt to new tasks that are distant from their pre-training tasks. To overcome this, we propose Noisy Query Tokens, which learn a distributed representation space between the VLM and Diffusion Model via end-to-end optimization, enhancing continual learning. Additionally, we introduce a VAE branch with linear projection to recover fine-grained image details. Experimental results confirm our approach mitigates generalization collapse and enables stable continual learning across diverse tasks.		None
Artificial Intelligence Virtual Cells: From Measurements to Decisions across Modality, Scale, Dynamics, and Evaluation	2025-12-02	Show Artificial Intelligence Virtual Cells (AIVCs) aim to learn executable, decision-relevant models of cell state from multimodal, multiscale measurements. Recent studies have introduced single-cell and spatial foundation models, improved cross-modality alignment, scaled perturbation atlases, and explored pathway-level readouts. Nevertheless, although held-out validation is standard practice, evaluations remain predominantly within single datasets and settings; evidence indicates that transport across laboratories and platforms is often limited, that some data splits are vulnerable to leakage and coverage bias, and that dose, time and combination effects are not yet systematically handled. Cross-scale coupling also remains constrained, as anchors linking molecular, cellular and tissue levels are sparse, and alignment to scientific or clinical readouts varies across studies. We propose a model-agnostic Cell-State Latent (CSL) perspective that organizes learning via an operator grammar: measurement, lift/project for cross-scale coupling, and intervention for dosing and scheduling. This view motivates a decision-aligned evaluation blueprint across modality, scale, context and intervention, and emphasizes function-space readouts such as pathway activity, spatial neighborhoods and clinically relevant endpoints. We recommend operator-aware data design, leakage-resistant partitions, and transparent calibration and reporting to enable reproducible, like-for-like comparisons.		None
CT-GLIP: 3D Grounded Language-Image Pretraining with CT Scans and Radiology Reports for Full-Body Scenarios	2025-12-02	Show 3D medical vision-language (VL) pretraining has shown potential in radiology by leveraging large-scale multimodal datasets with CT-report pairs. However, existing methods primarily rely on a global VL alignment directly adapted from 2D scenarios. The entire 3D image is transformed into one global embedding, resulting in a loss of sparse but critical semantics essential for accurately aligning with the corresponding diagnosis. To address this limitation, we propose CT-GLIP, a 3D Grounded Language-Image Pretrained model that constructs fine-grained CT-report pairs to enhance \textit{grounded} cross-modal contrastive learning, effectively aligning grounded visual features with precise textual descriptions. Leveraging the grounded cross-modal alignment, CT-GLIP improves performance across diverse downstream tasks and can even identify organs and abnormalities in a zero-shot manner using natural language. CT-GLIP is trained on a multimodal CT dataset comprising 44,011 organ-level CT-report pairs from 17,702 patients, covering 104 organs. Evaluation is conducted on four downstream tasks: zero-shot organ recognition (OR), zero-shot abnormality detection (AD), tumor detection (TD), and tumor segmentation (TS). Empirical results show that it outperforms its counterparts with global VL alignment. Compared to vanilla CLIP, CT-GLIP achieves average performance improvements of 15.1% of F1 score, 1.9% of AUC, and 3.2% of DSC for zero-shot AD, TD, and TS tasks, respectively. This study highlights the significance of grounded VL alignment in enabling 3D medical VL foundation models to understand sparse representations within CT scans.		None
MegaSR: Mining Customized Semantics and Expressive Guidance for Real-World Image Super-Resolution	2025-12-02	Show Text-to-image (T2I) models have ushered in a new era of real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR) due to their rich internal implicit knowledge for multimodal learning. Although bringing high-level semantic priors and dense pixel guidance have led to advances in reconstruction, we identified several critical phenomena by analyzing the behavior of existing T2I-based Real-ISR methods: (1) Fine detail deficiency, which ultimately leads to incorrect reconstruction in local regions. (2) Block-wise semantic inconsistency, which results in distracted semantic interpretations across U-Net blocks. (3) Edge ambiguity, which causes noticeable structural degradation. Building upon these observations, we first introduce MegaSR, which enhances the T2I-based Real-ISR models with fine-grained customized semantics and expressive guidance to unlock semantically rich and structurally consistent reconstruction. Then, we propose the Customized Semantics Module (CSM) to supplement fine-grained semantics from the image modality and regulate the semantic fusion between multi-level knowledge to realize customization for different U-Net blocks. Besides the semantic adaptation, we identify expressive multimodal signals through pair-wise comparisons and introduce the Multimodal Signal Fusion Module (MSFM) to aggregate them for structurally consistent reconstruction. Extensive experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate the superiority of the method. Notably, it not only achieves state-of-the-art performance on quality-driven metrics but also remains competitive on fidelity-focused metrics, striking a balance between perceptual realism and faithful content reconstruction.		None
SkyMoE: A Vision-Language Foundation Model for Enhancing Geospatial Interpretation with Mixture of Experts	2025-12-02	Show The emergence of large vision-language models (VLMs) has significantly enhanced the efficiency and flexibility of geospatial interpretation. However, general-purpose VLMs remain suboptimal for remote sensing (RS) tasks. Existing geospatial VLMs typically adopt a unified modeling strategy and struggle to differentiate between task types and interpretation granularities, limiting their ability to balance local detail perception and global contextual understanding. In this paper, we present SkyMoE, a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) vision-language model tailored for multimodal, multi-task RS interpretation. SkyMoE employs an adaptive router that generates task- and granularity-aware routing instructions, enabling specialized large language model experts to handle diverse sub-tasks. To further promote expert decoupling and granularity sensitivity, we introduce a context-disentangled augmentation strategy that creates contrastive pairs between local and global features, guiding experts toward level-specific representation learning. We also construct MGRS-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark covering multiple RS interpretation tasks and granularity levels, to evaluate generalization in complex scenarios. Extensive experiments on 21 public datasets demonstrate that SkyMoE achieves state-of-the-art performance across tasks, validating its adaptability, scalability, and superior multi-granularity understanding in remote sensing.		None
Q-BERT4Rec: Quantized Semantic-ID Representation Learning for Multimodal Recommendation	2025-12-02	Show Sequential recommendation plays a critical role in modern online platforms such as e-commerce, advertising, and content streaming, where accurately predicting users' next interactions is essential for personalization. Recent Transformer-based methods like BERT4Rec have shown strong modeling capability, yet they still rely on discrete item IDs that lack semantic meaning and ignore rich multimodal information (e.g., text and image). This leads to weak generalization and limited interpretability. To address these challenges, we propose Q-Bert4Rec, a multimodal sequential recommendation framework that unifies semantic representation and quantized modeling. Specifically, Q-Bert4Rec consists of three stages: (1) cross-modal semantic injection, which enriches randomly initialized ID embeddings through a dynamic transformer that fuses textual, visual, and structural features; (2) semantic quantization, which discretizes fused representations into meaningful tokens via residual vector quantization; and (3) multi-mask pretraining and fine-tuning, which leverage diverse masking strategies -- span, tail, and multi-region -- to improve sequential understanding. We validate our model on public Amazon benchmarks and demonstrate that Q-Bert4Rec significantly outperforms many strong existing methods, confirming the effectiveness of semantic tokenization for multimodal sequential recommendation. Our source code will be publicly available on GitHub after publishing.	Submitted to KDD2026	None
See, Think, Learn: A Self-Taught Multimodal Reasoner	2025-12-02	Show Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in integrating visual perception with language understanding. However, effective multimodal reasoning requires both accurate perception and robust reasoning, and weakness in either limits the performance of VLMs. Prior efforts to enhance reasoning often depend on high-quality chain-of-thought (CoT) data, obtained via labor-intensive human annotations, costly proprietary models, or self-training methods that overlook perception. To address these limitations, we propose a simple yet effective self-training framework called See-Think-Learn (STL). At its core, STL introduces a structured reasoning template that encourages the model to see before thinking, first extracting visual attributes in textual form, then using them to guide reasoning. The framework jointly improves perception and reasoning by having the model generate and learn from its own structured rationales in a self-training loop. Furthermore, we augment the training data with negative rationales, i.e. explanations that justify why certain answer choices are incorrect, to enhance the model's ability to distinguish between correct and misleading responses. This fosters more discriminative and robust learning. Experiments across diverse domains show that STL consistently outperforms baselines trained directly only on answers or self-generated reasoning, while qualitative analysis confirms the high quality of its rationales. STL thus provides a cost-effective solution to enhance multimodal reasoning ability of VLMs.	Winte... Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision 2026	None
Boosting Medical Vision-Language Pretraining via Momentum Self-Distillation under Limited Computing Resources	2025-12-02	Show In medical healthcare, obtaining detailed annotations is challenging, highlighting the need for robust Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Pretrained VLMs enable fine-tuning on small datasets or zero-shot inference, achieving performance comparable to task-specific models. Contrastive learning (CL) is a key paradigm for training VLMs but inherently requires large batch sizes for effective learning, making it computationally demanding and often limited to well-resourced institutions. Moreover, with limited data in healthcare, it is important to prioritize knowledge extraction from both data and models during training to improve performance. Therefore, we focus on leveraging the momentum method combined with distillation to simultaneously address computational efficiency and knowledge exploitation. Our contributions can be summarized as follows: (1) leveraging momentum self-distillation to enhance multimodal learning, and (2) integrating momentum mechanisms with gradient accumulation to enlarge the effective batch size without increasing resource consumption. Our method attains competitive performance with state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches in zero-shot classification, while providing a substantial boost in the few-shot adaption, achieving over 90% AUC-ROC and improving retrieval tasks by 2-3%. Importantly, our method achieves high training efficiency with a single GPU while maintaining reasonable training time. Our approach aims to advance efficient multimodal learning by reducing resource requirements while improving performance over SOTA methods. The implementation of our method is available at https://github.com/phphuc612/MSD .	WACV 2026	Code Link
AtomGraph: Tackling Atomicity Violation in Smart Contracts using Multimodal GCNs	2025-12-02	Show Smart contracts are a core component of blockchain technology and are widely deployed across various scenarios. However, atomicity violations have become a potential security risk. Existing analysis tools often lack the precision required to detect these issues effectively. To address this challenge, we introduce AtomGraph, an automated framework designed for detecting atomicity violations. This framework leverages Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) to identify atomicity violations through multimodal feature learning and fusion. Specifically, driven by a collaborative learning mechanism, the model simultaneously learns from two heterogeneous modalities: extracting structural topological features from the contract's Control Flow Graph (CFG) and uncovering deep semantics from its opcode sequence. We designed an adaptive weighted fusion mechanism to dynamically adjust the weights of features from each modality to achieve optimal feature fusion. Finally, GCN detects graph-level atomicity violation on the contract. Comprehensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that AtomGraph achieves 96.88% accuracy and 96.97% F1 score, outperforming existing tools. Furthermore, compared to the concatenation fusion model, AtomGraph improves the F1 score by 6.4%, proving its potential in smart contract security detection.		None
Skywork-R1V4: Toward Agentic Multimodal Intelligence through Interleaved Thinking with Images and DeepResearch	2025-12-02	Show Despite recent progress in multimodal agentic systems, existing approaches often treat image manipulation and web search as disjoint capabilities, rely heavily on costly reinforcement learning, and lack planning grounded in real tool-execution traces. To address these limitations, we present Skywork-R1V4, a 30B (A3B) parameter multimodal agentic model that unifies multimodal planning, active image manipulation ("thinking with images"), deep multimodal search, and, most critically, interleaved reasoning that dynamically alternates between visual operations and external knowledge retrieval. Trained solely via supervised fine-tuning on fewer than 30,000 high-quality, planning-execution-consistent trajectories and validated through stepwise consistency filtering, Skywork-R1V4 achieves state-of-the-art results across perception and multimodal search benchmarks: it scores 66.1 on MMSearch and 67.2 on FVQA, surpassing Gemini 2.5 Flash on all 11 metrics. Skywork-R1V4 exhibits emergent long-horizon reasoning at inference time, successfully orchestrating more than 10 tool calls to solve complex, multi-step tasks. Our results demonstrate that sophisticated agentic multimodal intelligence can be achieved through carefully curated supervised learning alone, without any reliance on reinforcement learning.	21 pages, 7 figures	None
Bridging the Gap: Toward Cognitive Autonomy in Artificial Intelligence	2025-12-01	Show Artificial intelligence has advanced rapidly across perception, language, reasoning, and multimodal domains. Yet despite these achievements, modern AI systems remain fundamentally limited in their ability to self-monitor, self-correct, and regulate their behavior autonomously in dynamic contexts. This paper identifies and analyzes seven core deficiencies that constrain contemporary AI models: the absence of intrinsic self-monitoring, lack of meta-cognitive awareness, fixed and non-adaptive learning mechanisms, inability to restructure goals, lack of representational maintenance, insufficient embodied feedback, and the absence of intrinsic agency. Alongside identifying these limitations, we also outline a forward-looking perspective on how AI may evolve beyond them through architectures that mirror neurocognitive principles. We argue that these structural limitations prevent current architectures, including deep learning and transformer-based systems, from achieving robust generalization, lifelong adaptability, and real-world autonomy. Drawing on a comparative analysis of artificial systems and biological cognition [7], and integrating insights from AI research, cognitive science, and neuroscience, we outline how these capabilities are absent in current models and why scaling alone cannot resolve them. We conclude by advocating for a paradigmatic shift toward cognitively grounded AI (cognitive autonomy) capable of self-directed adaptation, dynamic representation management, and intentional, goal-oriented behavior, paired with reformative oversight mechanisms [8] that ensure autonomous systems remain interpretable, governable, and aligned with human values.		None
WARPD: World model Assisted Reactive Policy Diffusion	2025-12-01	Show With the increasing availability of open-source robotic data, imitation learning has become a promising approach for both manipulation and locomotion. Diffusion models are now widely used to train large, generalized policies that predict controls or trajectories, leveraging their ability to model multimodal action distributions. However, this generality comes at the cost of larger model sizes and slower inference, an acute limitation for robotic tasks requiring high control frequencies. Moreover, Diffusion Policy (DP), a popular trajectory-generation approach, suffers from a trade-off between performance and action horizon: fewer diffusion queries lead to larger trajectory chunks, which in turn accumulate tracking errors. To overcome these challenges, we introduce WARPD (World model Assisted Reactive Policy Diffusion), a method that generates closed-loop policies (weights for neural policies) directly, instead of open-loop trajectories. By learning behavioral distributions in parameter space rather than trajectory space, WARPD offers two major advantages: (1) extended action horizons with robustness to perturbations, while maintaining high task performance, and (2) significantly reduced inference costs. Empirically, WARPD outperforms DP in long-horizon and perturbed environments, and achieves multitask performance on par with DP while requiring only ~ 1/45th of the inference-time FLOPs per step.		None
Cohort-Based Active Modality Acquisition	2025-12-01	Show Real-world machine learning applications often involve data from multiple modalities that must be integrated effectively to make robust predictions. However, in many practical settings, not all modalities are available for every sample, and acquiring additional modalities can be costly. This raises the question: which samples should be prioritized for additional modality acquisition when resources are limited? While prior work has explored individual-level acquisition strategies and training-time active learning paradigms, test-time and cohort-based acquisition remain underexplored. We introduce Cohort-based Active Modality Acquisition (CAMA), a novel test-time setting to formalize the challenge of selecting which samples should receive additional modalities. We derive acquisition strategies that leverage a combination of generative imputation and discriminative modeling to estimate the expected benefit of acquiring missing modalities based on common evaluation metrics. We also introduce upper-bound heuristics that provide performance ceilings to benchmark acquisition strategies. Experiments on multimodal datasets with up to 15 modalities demonstrate that our proposed imputation-based strategies can more effectively guide the acquisition of additional modalities for selected samples compared with methods relying solely on unimodal information, entropy-based guidance, or random selection. We showcase the real-world relevance and scalability of our method by demonstrating its ability to effectively guide the costly acquisition of proteomics data for disease prediction in a large prospective cohort, the UK Biobank (UKBB). Our work provides an effective approach for optimizing modality acquisition at the cohort level, enabling more effective use of resources in constrained settings.		None
B-repLer: Language-guided Editing of CAD Models	2025-12-01	Show Computer-Aided Design (CAD) models, given their compactness and precision, remain the industry standard for designing and fabricating engineering objects. However, language-guided CAD editing is still in its infancy, largely due to missing semantic connection between user commands and underlying shape geometry, a problem exacerbated by the shortage of paired text-and-edit CAD datasets. While recent Multimodal Large Language Models (mLLMs) have attempted to bridge this gap, their reliance on CAD construction history -- often an expensive and hard to obtain input -- severely limits their expressiveness and restricts their usage. We present B-repLer, a novel framework that directly connects natural language with editing CAD models by operating in a learned latent space. Importantly, our approach bypasses the need for construction history, enabling semantic edits on a wide range of geometries, from simple prismatic parts to complex freeform shapes defined by B-Spline surfaces. To facilitate this research, we introduce BrepEDIT-240K, the first large-scale dataset for this task. We demonstrate how this paired dataset can be automatically generated, (user) validated, and scaled by leveraging existing CAD tools, in conjunction with mLLMs, to create the required paired data without relying on any external annotations. Our results demonstrate that B-repLer can accurately perform complex edits on complex CAD shapes, even when the input edit specifications are high-level and ambiguous to interpret, consistently producing valid, high-quality CAD outputs enabling a class of text-guided edits not previously possible.	Proje... Project page: https://yilinliu77.github.io/brepler.github.io/	Code Link
NeuroRVQ: Multi-Scale EEG Tokenization for Generative Large Brainwave Models	2025-12-01	Show Electroencephalography (EEG) captures neural activity across multiple temporal and spectral scales, yielding signals that are rich but complex for representation learning. Recently, EEG foundation models trained to predict masked signal-tokens have shown promise for learning generalizable representations. However, their performance is hindered by their signal tokenization modules. Existing neural tokenizers fail to preserve high-frequency dynamics, limiting their ability to reconstruct EEG signals with high fidelity. We introduce NeuroRVQ, a scalable Large Brainwave Model (LBM) centered on a codebook-based tokenizer. Our tokenizer integrates: (i) multi-scale feature extraction modules that capture the full frequency neural spectrum; (ii) hierarchical residual vector quantization (RVQ) codebooks for high-resolution encoding; and, (iii) an EEG signal phase- and amplitude-aware loss function for efficient training. This design enables efficient EEG compression while supporting accurate reconstruction across all frequency bands, leading to robust generative masked modeling. Our empirical results demonstrate that NeuroRVQ achieves lower reconstruction error and outperforms existing LBMs on a variety of downstream tasks. More broadly, NeuroRVQ tokenizer establishes a strong prior for codebook-based general-purpose brainwave models, enabling advances in neural decoding, generative modeling and multimodal biosignal integration.		None
Seeing through Imagination: Learning Scene Geometry via Implicit Spatial World Modeling	2025-12-01	Show Spatial reasoning, the ability to understand and interpret the 3D structure of the world, is a critical yet underdeveloped capability in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Current methods predominantly rely on verbal descriptive tuning, which suffers from visual illiteracy, i.e., they learn spatial concepts through textual symbols alone, devoid of connection to their visual manifestations. To bridge this gap, this paper introduces MILO, an Implicit spatIaL wOrld modeling paradigm that simulates human-like spatial imagination. MILO integrates a visual generator to provide geometry-aware feedback, thereby implicitly grounding the MLLM's symbolic reasoning in perceptual experience. Complementing this paradigm, we propose RePE (Relative Positional Encoding), a novel encoding scheme that captures relative camera-pose transformations, offering superior performance over absolute coordinate systems. To support the training, we construct GeoGen, a large-scale Geometry-aware Generative dataset with approximately 2,241 videos and 67,827 observation-action-outcome triplets. Experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances spatial reasoning capabilities across multiple baselines and benchmarks, offering a more holistic understanding of 3D space.		None
PRIMT: Preference-based Reinforcement Learning with Multimodal Feedback and Trajectory Synthesis from Foundation Models	2025-12-01	Show Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for teaching robots complex behaviors without reward engineering. However, its effectiveness is often limited by two critical challenges: the reliance on extensive human input and the inherent difficulties in resolving query ambiguity and credit assignment during reward learning. In this paper, we introduce PRIMT, a PbRL framework designed to overcome these challenges by leveraging foundation models (FMs) for multimodal synthetic feedback and trajectory synthesis. Unlike prior approaches that rely on single-modality FM evaluations, PRIMT employs a hierarchical neuro-symbolic fusion strategy, integrating the complementary strengths of large language models and vision-language models in evaluating robot behaviors for more reliable and comprehensive feedback. PRIMT also incorporates foresight trajectory generation, which reduces early-stage query ambiguity by warm-starting the trajectory buffer with bootstrapped samples, and hindsight trajectory augmentation, which enables counterfactual reasoning with a causal auxiliary loss to improve credit assignment. We evaluate PRIMT on 2 locomotion and 6 manipulation tasks on various benchmarks, demonstrating superior performance over FM-based and scripted baselines.		None
Generative Action Tell-Tales: Assessing Human Motion in Synthesized Videos	2025-12-01	Show Despite rapid advances in video generative models, robust metrics for evaluating visual and temporal correctness of complex human actions remain elusive. Critically, existing pure-vision encoders and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are strongly appearance-biased, lack temporal understanding, and thus struggle to discern intricate motion dynamics and anatomical implausibilities in generated videos. We tackle this gap by introducing a novel evaluation metric derived from a learned latent space of real-world human actions. Our method first captures the nuances, constraints, and temporal smoothness of real-world motion by fusing appearance-agnostic human skeletal geometry features with appearance-based features. We posit that this combined feature space provides a robust representation of action plausibility. Given a generated video, our metric quantifies its action quality by measuring the distance between its underlying representations and this learned real-world action distribution. For rigorous validation, we develop a new multi-faceted benchmark specifically designed to probe temporally challenging aspects of human action fidelity. Through extensive experiments, we show that our metric achieves substantial improvement of more than 68% compared to existing state-of-the-art methods on our benchmark, performs competitively on established external benchmarks, and has a stronger correlation with human perception. Our in-depth analysis reveals critical limitations in current video generative models and establishes a new standard for advanced research in video generation.		None
Multimodal Mixture-of-Experts for ISAC in Low-Altitude Wireless Networks	2025-12-01	Show Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) is a key enabler for low-altitude wireless networks (LAWNs), providing simultaneous environmental perception and data transmission in complex aerial scenarios. By combining heterogeneous sensing modalities such as visual, radar, lidar, and positional information, multimodal ISAC can improve both situational awareness and robustness of LAWNs. However, most existing multimodal fusion approaches use static fusion strategies that treat all modalities equally and cannot adapt to channel heterogeneity or time-varying modality reliability in dynamic low-altitude environments. To address this fundamental limitation, we propose a mixture-of-experts (MoE) framework for multimodal ISAC in LAWNs. Each modality is processed by a dedicated expert network, and a lightweight gating module adaptively assigns fusion weights according to the instantaneous informativeness and reliability of each modality. To improve scalability under the stringent energy constraints of aerial platforms, we further develop a sparse MoE variant that selectively activates only a subset of experts, thereby reducing computation overhead while preserving the benefits of adaptive fusion. Comprehensive simulations on three typical ISAC tasks in LAWNs demonstrate that the proposed frameworks consistently outperform conventional multimodal fusion baselines in terms of learning performance and training sample efficiency.		None
Prediction of Distant Metastasis in Head and Neck Cancer Patients Using Tumor and Peritumoral Multi-Modal Deep Learning	2025-12-01	Show Although the combined treatment of surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy, and emerging target therapy has significantly improved the outcomes of patients with head and neck cancer, distant metastasis remains the leading cause of treatment failure. In this study, we propose a deep learning-based multimodal framework integrating CT imaging, radiomics, and clinical data to predict metastasis risk in HNSCC. A total of 1497 patients were retrospectively analyzed. Tumor and organ masks were generated from pretreatment CT scans, from which a 3D Swin Transformer extracted deep imaging features, while 1562 radiomics features were reduced to 36 via correlation filtering and random forest selection. Clinical data (age, sex, smoking, and alcohol status) were encoded and fused with imaging features, and the multimodal representation was fed into a fully connected network for prediction. Five-fold cross-validation was used to assess performance via AUC, accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity. The multimodal model outperformed all single-modality baselines. The deep learning module alone achieved an AUC of 0.715, whereas multimodal fusion significantly improved performance (AUC = 0.803, ACC = 0.752, SEN = 0.730, SPE = 0.758). Stratified analyses confirmed good generalizability across tumor subtypes. Ablation experiments demonstrated complementary contributions from each modality, and the 3D Swin Transformer provided more robust representations than conventional architectures. This multimodal deep learning model enables accurate, non-invasive metastasis prediction in HNSCC and shows strong potential for individualized treatment planning.	23 pa... 23 pages, 6 figures, 7 tables. Nuo Tong and Changhao Liu contributed equally. Corresponding Authors: Shuiping Gou and Mei Shi	None
Resource-Efficient Beam Prediction in mmWave Communications with Multimodal Realistic Simulation Framework	2025-12-01	Show Beamforming is a key technology in millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications that improves signal transmission by optimizing directionality and intensity. However, conventional channel estimation methods, such as pilot signals or beam sweeping, often fail to adapt to rapidly changing communication environments. To address this limitation, multimodal sensing-aided beam prediction has gained significant attention, using various sensing data from devices such as LiDAR, radar, GPS, and RGB images to predict user locations or network conditions. Despite its promising potential, the adoption of multimodal sensing-aided beam prediction is hindered by high computational complexity, high costs, and limited datasets. Thus, in this paper, a novel resource-efficient learning framework is introduced for beam prediction, which leverages a custom-designed cross-modal relational knowledge distillation (CRKD) algorithm specifically tailored for beam prediction tasks, to transfer knowledge from a multimodal network to a radar-only student model, achieving high accuracy with reduced computational cost. To enable multimodal learning with realistic data, a novel multimodal simulation framework is developed while integrating sensor data generated from the autonomous driving simulator CARLA with MATLAB-based mmWave channel modeling, and reflecting real-world conditions. The proposed CRKD achieves its objective by distilling relational information across different feature spaces, which enhances beam prediction performance without relying on expensive sensor data. Simulation results demonstrate that CRKD efficiently distills multimodal knowledge, allowing a radar-only model to achieve $94.62%$ of the teacher performance. In particular, this is achieved with just $10%$ of the teacher network's parameters, thereby significantly reducing computational complexity and dependence on multimodal sensor data.	13 pa... 13 pages, 9 figures, Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing on Dec. 01, 2025	None
Optimizing Product Deduplication in E-Commerce with Multimodal Embeddings	2025-12-01	Show In large scale e-commerce marketplaces, duplicate product listings frequently cause consumer confusion and operational inefficiencies, degrading trust on the platform and increasing costs. Traditional keyword-based search methodologies falter in accurately identifying duplicates due to their reliance on exact textual matches, neglecting semantic similarities inherent in product titles. To address these challenges, we introduce a scalable, multimodal product deduplication designed specifically for the e-commerce domain. Our approach employs a domain-specific text model grounded in BERT architecture in conjunction with MaskedAutoEncoders for image representations. Both of these architectures are augmented with dimensionality reduction techniques to produce compact 128-dimensional embeddings without significant information loss. Complementing this, we also developed a novel decider model that leverages both text and image vectors. By integrating these feature extraction mechanisms with Milvus, an optimized vector database, our system can facilitate efficient and high-precision similarity searches across extensive product catalogs exceeding 200 million items with just 100GB of system RAM consumption. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that our matching system achieves a macro-average F1 score of 0.90, outperforming third-party solutions which attain an F1 score of 0.83. Our findings show the potential of combining domain-specific adaptations with state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to mitigate duplicate listings in large-scale e-commerce environments.	8 pag... 8 pages, accepted to 2025 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Industrial and Goverment Track	None
CCFQA: A Benchmark for Cross-Lingual and Cross-Modal Speech and Text Factuality Evaluation	2025-12-01	Show As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly popularized in the multilingual world, ensuring hallucination-free factuality becomes markedly crucial. However, existing benchmarks for evaluating the reliability of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) predominantly focus on textual or visual modalities with a primary emphasis on English, which creates a gap in evaluation when processing multilingual input, especially in speech. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel Cross-lingual and Cross-modal Factuality benchmark (CCFQA). Specifically, the CCFQA benchmark contains parallel speech-text factual questions across 8 languages, designed to systematically evaluate MLLMs' cross-lingual and cross-modal factuality capabilities. Our experimental results demonstrate that current MLLMs still face substantial challenges on the CCFQA benchmark. Furthermore, we propose a few-shot transfer learning strategy that effectively transfers the Question Answering (QA) capabilities of LLMs in English to multilingual Spoken Question Answering (SQA) tasks, achieving competitive performance with GPT-4o-mini-Audio using just 5-shot training. We release CCFQA as a foundational research resource to promote the development of MLLMs with more robust and reliable speech understanding capabilities. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/yxduir/ccfqa.	Accep... Accepted in AAAI 2026	Code Link
QuantumCanvas: A Multimodal Benchmark for Visual Learning of Atomic Interactions	2025-12-01	Show Despite rapid advances in molecular and materials machine learning, most models still lack physical transferability: they fit correlations across whole molecules or crystals rather than learning the quantum interactions between atomic pairs. Yet bonding, charge redistribution, orbital hybridization, and electronic coupling all emerge from these two-body interactions that define local quantum fields in many-body systems. We introduce QuantumCanvas, a large-scale multimodal benchmark that treats two-body quantum systems as foundational units of matter. The dataset spans 2,850 element-element pairs, each annotated with 18 electronic, thermodynamic, and geometric properties and paired with ten-channel image representations derived from l- and m-resolved orbital densities, angular field transforms, co-occupancy maps, and charge-density projections. These physically grounded images encode spatial, angular, and electrostatic symmetries without explicit coordinates, providing an interpretable visual modality for quantum learning. Benchmarking eight architectures across 18 targets, we report mean absolute errors of 0.201 eV on energy gap using GATv2, 0.265 eV on HOMO and 0.274 eV on LUMO using EGNN. For energy-related quantities, DimeNet attains 2.27 eV total-energy MAE and 0.132 eV repulsive-energy MAE, while a multimodal fusion model achieves a 2.15 eV Mermin free-energy MAE. Pretraining on QuantumCanvas further improves convergence stability and generalization when fine-tuned on larger datasets such as QM9, MD17, and CrysMTM. By unifying orbital physics with vision-based representation learning, QuantumCanvas provides a principled and interpretable basis for learning transferable quantum interactions through coupled visual and numerical modalities. Dataset and model implementations are available at https://github.com/KurbanIntelligenceLab/QuantumCanvas.		Code Link
MCAT: Scaling Many-to-Many Speech-to-Text Translation with MLLMs to 70 Languages	2025-12-01	Show Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved great success in Speech-to-Text Translation (S2TT) tasks. However, current research is constrained by two key challenges: language coverage and efficiency. Most of the popular S2TT datasets are substantially English-centric, which restricts the scaling-up of MLLMs' many-to-many translation capabilities. Moreover, the inference speed of MLLMs degrades dramatically when the speech is converted into long sequences (e.g., 750 tokens). To address these limitations, we propose a Multilingual Cost-effective Accelerated Speech-to-Text Translator (MCAT) framework, which includes two innovations. First, a language scaling method that leverages curriculum learning and a data balancing strategy is introduced to extend the language coverage supported by MLLMs to 70 languages and achieve mutual translation among these languages. Second, an optimized speech adapter module is designed to reduce the length of the speech sequence to only 30 tokens. Extensive experiments were conducted on MLLMs of different scales (9B and 27B). The experimental results demonstrate that MCAT not only surpasses state-of-the-art end-to-end models on the FLEURS dataset across 70x69 directions but also enhances batch inference efficiency. This is achieved with only ~100M trainable parameters and by using only 10 hours of S2TT data per language. Furthermore, we have released MCAT as open-source to promote the development of MLLMs for robust S2TT capabilities. The code and models are released at https://github.com/yxduir/m2m-70.		Code Link
Video Anomaly Detection with Semantics-Aware Information Bottleneck	2025-12-01	Show Semi-supervised video anomaly detection methods face two critical challenges: (1) Strong generalization blurs the boundary between normal and abnormal patterns. Although existing approaches attempt to alleviate this issue using memory modules, their rigid prototype-matching process limits adaptability to diverse scenarios; (2) Relying solely on low-level appearance and motion cues makes it difficult to perceive high-level semantic anomalies in complex scenes. To address these limitations, we propose SIB-VAD, a novel framework based on adaptive information bottleneck filtering and semantic-aware enhancement. We propose the Sparse Feature Filtering Module (SFFM) to replace traditional memory modules. It compresses normal features directly into a low-dimensional manifold based on the information bottleneck principle and uses an adaptive routing mechanism to dynamically select the most suitable normal bottleneck subspace. Trained only on normal data, SFFMs only learn normal low-dimensional manifolds, while abnormal features deviate and are effectively filtered. Unlike memory modules, SFFM directly removes abnormal information and adaptively handles scene variations. To improve semantic awareness, we further design a multimodal prediction framework that jointly models appearance, motion, and semantics. Through multimodal consistency constraints and joint error computation, it achieves more robust VAD performance. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of our feature filtering paradigm based on semantics-aware information bottleneck. Project page at https://qzfm.github.io/sib_vad_project_page/		Code Link
MMIF-AMIN: Adaptive Loss-Driven Multi-Scale Invertible Dense Network for Multimodal Medical Image Fusion	2025-12-01	Show Multimodal medical image fusion (MMIF) aims to integrate images from different modalities to produce a comprehensive image that enhances medical diagnosis by accurately depicting organ structures, tissue textures, and metabolic information. Capturing both the unique and complementary information across multiple modalities simultaneously is a key research challenge in MMIF. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a novel image fusion method, MMIF-AMIN, which features a new architecture that can effectively extract these unique and complementary features. Specifically, an Invertible Dense Network (IDN) is employed for lossless feature extraction from individual modalities. To extract complementary information between modalities, a Multi-scale Complementary Feature Extraction Module (MCFEM) is designed, which incorporates a hybrid attention mechanism, convolutional layers of varying sizes, and Transformers. An adaptive loss function is introduced to guide model learning, addressing the limitations of traditional manually-designed loss functions and enhancing the depth of data mining. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MMIF-AMIN outperforms nine state-of-the-art MMIF methods, delivering superior results in both quantitative and qualitative analyses. Ablation experiments confirm the effectiveness of each component of the proposed method. Additionally, extending MMIF-AMIN to other image fusion tasks also achieves promising performance.	This ... This manuscript is withdrawn to allow for substantial expansion and restructuring. Based on recent research progress, we plan to add Generalization experiment and reorganize the manuscript structure to improve readability and logical flow. Thank you for your understanding and support	None
\textit{ViRectify}: A Challenging Benchmark for Video Reasoning Correction with Multimodal Large Language Models	2025-12-01	Show As multimodal large language models (MLLMs) frequently exhibit errors in complex video reasoning scenarios, correcting these errors is critical for uncovering their weaknesses and improving performance. However, existing benchmarks lack systematic evaluation of MLLMs' ability to identify and correct these video reasoning errors. To bridge this gap, we propose \textit{ViRectify}, a comprehensive benchmark to evaluate their fine-grained correction capability. Through an AI-assisted annotation pipeline with human verification, we construct a dataset of over 30\textit{K} instances spanning dynamic perception, scientific reasoning, and embodied decision-making domains. In \textit{ViRectify}, we challenge MLLMs to perform step-wise error identification and generate rationales with key video evidence grounding. In addition, we further propose the trajectory evidence-driven correction framework, comprising step-wise error trajectory and reward modeling on visual evidence-grounded correction. It encourages the model to explicitly concentrate on error propagation and key timestamps for correction. Extensive evaluation across 16 advanced MLLMs demonstrates that our \textit{ViRectify} serves as a challenging testbed, where GPT-5 achieves only 31.94% correction accuracy. Our framework enables a Qwen2.5-VL-7B to consistently outperform the variants of 72B on \textit{ViRectify}, showing the effectiveness of our approach. Further analysis uncovers systematic asymmetries in error correction across models, and our dataset is also a valuable data resource to perform reflection learning. We believe \textit{ViRectify} provides a new direction for comprehensively evaluating the advanced MLLMs in video reasoning.	22 pages, 11 figures	None
DyFuLM: An Advanced Multimodal Framework for Sentiment Analysis	2025-12-01	Show Understanding sentiment in complex textual expressions remains a fundamental challenge in affective computing. To address this, we propose a Dynamic Fusion Learning Model (DyFuLM), a multimodal framework designed to capture both hierarchical semantic representations and fine-grained emotional nuances. DyFuLM introduces two key moodules: a Hierarchical Dynamic Fusion module that adaptively integrates multi-level features, and a Gated Feature Aggregation module that regulates cross-layer information ffow to achieve balanced representation learning. Comprehensive experiments on multi-task sentiment datasets demonstrate that DyFuLM achieves 82.64% coarse-grained and 68.48% fine-grained accuracy, yielding the lowest regression errors (MAE = 0.0674, MSE = 0.0082) and the highest R^2 coefficient of determination (R^2= 0.6903). Furthermore, the ablation study validates the effectiveness of each module in DyFuLM. When all modules are removed, the accuracy drops by 0.91% for coarse-grained and 0.68% for fine-grained tasks. Keeping only the gated fusion module causes decreases of 0.75% and 0.55%, while removing the dynamic loss mechanism results in drops of 0.78% and 0.26% for coarse-grained and fine-grained sentiment classification, respectively. These results demonstrate that each module contributes significantly to feature interaction and task balance. Overall, the experimental findings further validate that DyFuLM enhances sentiment representation and overall performance through effective hierarchical feature fusion.	8 pag... 8 pages, 6 figures, preprint. Under review for a suitable AI conference	None
Rethinking Efficient Mixture-of-Experts for Remote Sensing Modality-Missing Classification	2025-12-01	Show Multimodal classification in remote sensing often suffers from missing modalities caused by environmental interference, sensor failures, or atmospheric effects, which severely degrade classification performance. Existing two-stage adaptation methods are computationally expensive and assume complete multimodal data during training, limiting their generalization to real-world incompleteness. To overcome these issues, we propose a Missing-aware Mixture-of-Loras (MaMOL) framework that reformulates modality missing as a multi-task learning problem. MaMOL introduces a dual-routing mechanism: a task-oriented dynamic router that adaptively activates experts for different missing patterns, and a modality-specific-shared static router that maintains stable cross-modal knowledge sharing. Unlike prior methods that train separate networks for each missing configuration, MaMOL achieves parameter-efficient adaptation via lightweight expert updates and shared expert reuse. Experiments on multiple remote sensing benchmarks demonstrate superior robustness and generalization under varying missing rates, with minimal computational overhead. Moreover, transfer experiments on natural image datasets validate its scalability and cross-domain applicability, highlighting MaMOL as a general and efficient solution for incomplete multimodal learning.	11 pages, 4 figures	None
An Interdisciplinary and Cross-Task Review on Missing Data Imputation	2025-12-01	Show Missing data is a fundamental challenge in data science, significantly hindering analysis and decision-making across a wide range of disciplines, including healthcare, bioinformatics, social science, e-commerce, and industrial monitoring. Despite decades of research and numerous imputation methods, the literature remains fragmented across fields, creating a critical need for a comprehensive synthesis that connects statistical foundations with modern machine learning advances. This work systematically reviews core concepts-including missingness mechanisms, single versus multiple imputation, and different imputation goals-and examines problem characteristics across various domains. It provides a thorough categorization of imputation methods, spanning classical techniques (e.g., regression, the EM algorithm) to modern approaches like low-rank and high-rank matrix completion, deep learning models (autoencoders, GANs, diffusion models, graph neural networks), and large language models. Special attention is given to methods for complex data types, such as tensors, time series, streaming data, graph-structured data, categorical data, and multimodal data. Beyond methodology, we investigate the crucial integration of imputation with downstream tasks like classification, clustering, and anomaly detection, examining both sequential pipelines and joint optimization frameworks. The review also assesses theoretical guarantees, benchmarking resources, and evaluation metrics. Finally, we identify critical challenges and future directions, emphasizing model selection and hyperparameter optimization, the growing importance of privacy-preserving imputation via federated learning, and the pursuit of generalizable models that can adapt across domains and data types, thereby outlining a roadmap for future research.		None
AutoDrive-R$^2$: Incentivizing Reasoning and Self-Reflection Capacity for VLA Model in Autonomous Driving	2025-12-01	Show Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models in autonomous driving systems have recently demonstrated transformative potential by integrating multimodal perception with decision-making capabilities. However, the interpretability and coherence of the decision process and the plausibility of action sequences remain largely underexplored. To address these issues, we propose AutoDrive-R$^2$, a novel VLA framework that enhances both reasoning and self-reflection capabilities of autonomous driving systems through chain-of-thought (CoT) processing and reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, we first propose an innovative CoT dataset named nuScenesR$^2$-6K for supervised fine-tuning, which effectively builds cognitive bridges between input information and output trajectories through a four-step logical chain with self-reflection for validation. Moreover, to maximize both reasoning and self-reflection during the RL stage, we further employ the Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) algorithm within a physics-grounded reward framework that incorporates spatial alignment, vehicle dynamic, and temporal smoothness criteria to ensure reliable and realistic trajectory planning. Extensive evaluation results across both nuScenes and Waymo datasets demonstrates the state-of-the-art performance and robust generalization capacity of our proposed method.		None
Gentle Object Retraction in Dense Clutter Using Multimodal Force Sensing and Imitation Learning	2025-11-30	Show Dense collections of movable objects are common in everyday spaces-from cabinets in a home to shelves in a warehouse. Safely retracting objects from such collections is difficult for robots, yet people do it frequently, leveraging learned experience in tandem with vision and non-prehensile tactile sensing on the sides and backs of their hands and arms. We investigate the role of contact force sensing for training robots to gently reach into constrained clutter and extract objects. The available sensing modalities are (1) "eye-in-hand" vision, (2) proprioception, (3) non-prehensile triaxial tactile sensing, (4) contact wrenches estimated from joint torques, and (5) a measure of object acquisition obtained by monitoring the vacuum line of a suction cup. We use imitation learning to train policies from a set of demonstrations on randomly generated scenes, then conduct an ablation study of wrench and tactile information. We evaluate each policy's performance across 40 unseen environment configurations. Policies employing any force sensing show fewer excessive force failures, an increased overall success rate, and faster completion times. The best performance is achieved using both tactile and wrench information, producing an 80% improvement above the baseline without force information.	Accep... Accepted in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L)	None
DynaStride: Dynamic Stride Windowing with MMCoT for Instructional Multi-Scene Captioning	2025-11-30	Show Scene-level captioning in instructional videos can enhance learning by requiring an understanding of both visual cues and temporal structure. By aligning visual cues with textual guidance, this understanding supports procedural learning and multimodal reasoning, providing a richer context for skill acquisition. However, captions that fail to capture this structure may lack coherence and quality, which can create confusion and undermine the video's educational intent. To address this gap, we introduce DynaStride, a pipeline to generate coherent, scene-level captions without requiring manual scene segmentation. Using the YouCookII dataset's scene annotations, DynaStride performs adaptive frame sampling and multimodal windowing to capture key transitions within each scene. It then employs a multimodal chain-of-thought process to produce multiple action-object pairs, which are refined and fused using a dynamic stride window selection algorithm that adaptively balances temporal context and redundancy. The final scene-level caption integrates visual semantics and temporal reasoning in a single instructional caption. Empirical evaluations against strong baselines, including VLLaMA3 and GPT-4o, demonstrate consistent gains on both N-gram-based metrics (BLEU, METEOR) and semantic similarity measures (BERTScore, CLIPScore). Qualitative analyses further show that DynaStride produces captions that are more temporally coherent and informative, suggesting a promising direction for improving AI-powered instructional content generation.	16 pa... 16 pages, 15 figures, 5 Tables, Accepted at NeurIPS 7HVU Workshop, Accepted at AAAI AI4ED Workshop	None