Daily Papers

The paper presents C3T (Cross-modal Capabilities Conservation Test), a new benchmark for assessing the performance of speech-aware large language models. The benchmark utilizes textual tasks and a voice cloning text-to-speech model to quantify the extent to which language understanding capabilities are preserved when the model is accessed via speech input. C3T quantifies the fairness of the model for different categories of speakers and its robustness across text and speech modalities.

Omni-modal large language models (OLLMs) aim to unify audio, vision, and text understanding within a single framework. While existing benchmarks primarily evaluate general cross-modal question-answering ability, it remains unclear whether OLLMs achieve modality-invariant reasoning or exhibit modality-specific biases. We introduce XModBench, a large-scale tri-modal benchmark explicitly designed to measure cross-modal consistency. XModBench comprises 60,828 multiple-choice questions spanning five task families and systematically covers all six modality compositions in question-answer pairs, enabling fine-grained diagnosis of an OLLM's modality-invariant reasoning, modality disparity, and directional imbalance. Experiments show that even the strongest model, Gemini 2.5 Pro, (i) struggles with spatial and temporal reasoning, achieving less than 60% accuracy, (ii) reveals persistent modality disparities, with performance dropping substantially when the same semantic content is conveyed through audio rather than text, and (iii) shows systematic directional imbalance, exhibiting lower consistency when vision serves as context compared to text. These findings indicate that current OLLMs remain far from truly modality-invariant reasoning and position XModBench as a fundamental diagnostic tool for evaluating and improving cross-modal competence. All data and evaluation tools will be available at https://xingruiwang.github.io/projects/XModBench/.

The development and evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) have largely focused on individual capabilities. However, this overlooks the intersection of multiple abilities across different types of expertise that are often required for real-world tasks, which we term cross capabilities. To systematically explore this concept, we first define seven core individual capabilities and then pair them to form seven common cross capabilities, each supported by a manually constructed taxonomy. Building on these definitions, we introduce CrossEval, a benchmark comprising 1,400 human-annotated prompts, with 100 prompts for each individual and cross capability. To ensure reliable evaluation, we involve expert annotators to assess 4,200 model responses, gathering 8,400 human ratings with detailed explanations to serve as reference examples. Our findings reveal that, in both static evaluations and attempts to enhance specific abilities, current LLMs consistently exhibit the "Law of the Weakest Link," where cross-capability performance is significantly constrained by the weakest component. Specifically, across 58 cross-capability scores from 17 models, 38 scores are lower than all individual capabilities, while 20 fall between strong and weak, but closer to the weaker ability. These results highlight the under-performance of LLMs in cross-capability tasks, making the identification and improvement of the weakest capabilities a critical priority for future research to optimize performance in complex, multi-dimensional scenarios.

Multimodal Large Language Models have demonstrated impressive capabilities across tasks, yet they often exhibit difficulty in distinguishing task-relevant from irrelevant signals -- particularly in tasks like Visual Question Answering -- which can lead to susceptibility to misleading or spurious inputs. We refer to this broader limitation as the Cross-Modality Competency Problem -- the model's inability to fairly evaluate all modalities. This vulnerability becomes more evident in modality-specific tasks -- such as image classification or pure text question answering -- where models are expected to rely solely on one modality. In such tasks, spurious information from irrelevant modalities often leads to significant performance degradation. We refer to this failure as Modality Interference, which serves as a concrete and measurable instance of the cross-modality competency problem, and we further design a perturbation-based causal diagnostic experiment to verify and quantify this problem. To mitigate modality interference, we propose a novel framework to finetune MLLMs, including perturbation-based data augmentations with both heuristic perturbations and adversarial perturbations, and a consistency regularization strategy applying on model outputs with original and perturbed inputs. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets (image-heavy, text-heavy and multimodal tasks) and multiple model families with different scales demonstrate significant improvements in robustness and cross-modality competency, indicating our method's effectiveness in boosting unimodal reasoning ability while enhancing performance on multimodal tasks.

Existing omni-modal benchmarks attempt to measure modality-specific contributions, but their measurements are confounded: naturally co-occurring modalities carry correlated yet unequal information, making it unclear whether results reflect true modality reliance or information asymmetry. We introduce OMD-Bench, where all modalities are initially congruent - each presenting the same anchor, an object or event independently perceivable through video, audio, and text - which we then systematically corrupt to isolate each modality's contribution. We also evaluate calibrated abstention: whether models appropriately refrain from answering when evidence is conflicting. The benchmark comprises 4,080 instances spanning 27 anchors across eight corruption conditions. Evaluating ten omni-modal models under zero-shot and chain-of-thought prompting, we find that models over-abstain when two modalities are corrupted yet under-abstain severely when all three are, while maintaining high confidence (~60-100%) even under full corruption. Chain-of-thought prompting improves abstention alignment with human judgment but amplifies overconfidence rather than mitigating it. OMD-Bench provides a diagnostic benchmark for diagnosing modality reliance, robustness to cross-modal inconsistency, and uncertainty calibration in omni-modal systems.

The inherent challenge of multimodal fusion is to precisely capture the cross-modal correlation and flexibly conduct cross-modal interaction. To fully release the value of each modality and mitigate the influence of low-quality multimodal data, dynamic multimodal fusion emerges as a promising learning paradigm. Despite its widespread use, theoretical justifications in this field are still notably lacking. Can we design a provably robust multimodal fusion method? This paper provides theoretical understandings to answer this question under a most popular multimodal fusion framework from the generalization perspective. We proceed to reveal that several uncertainty estimation solutions are naturally available to achieve robust multimodal fusion. Then a novel multimodal fusion framework termed Quality-aware Multimodal Fusion (QMF) is proposed, which can improve the performance in terms of classification accuracy and model robustness. Extensive experimental results on multiple benchmarks can support our findings.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently emerged as general architectures capable of reasoning over diverse modalities. Benchmarks for MLLMs should measure their ability for cross-modal integration. However, current benchmarks are filled with shortcut questions, which can be solved using only a single modality, thereby yielding unreliable rankings. For example, in vision-language cases, we can find the correct answer without either the image or the text. These low-quality questions unnecessarily increase the size and computational requirements of benchmarks. We introduce a multi-modal and multidimensional item response theory framework (M3IRT) that extends classical IRT by decomposing both model ability and item difficulty into image-only, text-only, and cross-modal components. M3IRT estimates cross-modal ability of MLLMs and each question's cross-modal difficulty, enabling compact, high-quality subsets that better reflect multimodal reasoning. Across 24 VLMs on three benchmarks, M3IRT prioritizes genuinely cross-modal questions over shortcuts and preserves ranking fidelity even when 50% of items are artificially generated low-quality questions, thereby reducing evaluation cost while improving reliability. M3IRT thus offers a practical tool for assessing cross-modal reasoning and refining multimodal benchmarks.

The robustness of multimodal deep learning models to realistic changes in the input text is critical for their applicability to important tasks such as text-to-image retrieval and cross-modal entailment. To measure robustness, several existing approaches edit the text data, but do so without leveraging the cross-modal information present in multimodal data. Information from the visual modality, such as color, size, and shape, provide additional attributes that users can include in their inputs. Thus, we propose cross-modal attribute insertions as a realistic perturbation strategy for vision-and-language data that inserts visual attributes of the objects in the image into the corresponding text (e.g., "girl on a chair" to "little girl on a wooden chair"). Our proposed approach for cross-modal attribute insertions is modular, controllable, and task-agnostic. We find that augmenting input text using cross-modal insertions causes state-of-the-art approaches for text-to-image retrieval and cross-modal entailment to perform poorly, resulting in relative drops of 15% in MRR and 20% in F_1 score, respectively. Crowd-sourced annotations demonstrate that cross-modal insertions lead to higher quality augmentations for multimodal data than augmentations using text-only data, and are equivalent in quality to original examples. We release the code to encourage robustness evaluations of deep vision-and-language models: https://github.com/claws-lab/multimodal-robustness-xmai.

Multimodal Large Languages models have been progressing from uni-modal understanding toward unifying visual, audio and language modalities, collectively termed omni models. However, the correlation between uni-modal and omni-modal remains unclear, which requires comprehensive evaluation to drive omni model's intelligence evolution. In this work, we propose a novel, high quality and UNified Omni model benchmark, UNO-Bench, which effectively assesses both UNi-modal and Omni-modal capabilities. The benchmark consists of 3730 human curated samples, with 98% cross-modality solvability, across 44 task types, and an innovative multi-step open-ended question type for assessing complex reasoning. Besides, a general scoring model supporting 6 question types is proposed for automated evaluation with 95% accuracy. Experimental result shows the Compositional Law between omni-modal and uni-modal performance and the omni-modal capability manifests as a bottleneck effect on weak models, while exhibiting synergistic promotion on strong models. The code and data are available at https://github.com/meituan-longcat/UNO-Bench

While generalist foundation models like Gemini and GPT-4o demonstrate impressive multi-modal competence, existing evaluations fail to test their intelligence in dynamic, interactive worlds. Static benchmarks lack agency, while interactive benchmarks suffer from a severe modal bottleneck, typically ignoring crucial auditory and temporal cues. To bridge this evaluation chasm, we introduce OmniPlay, a diagnostic benchmark designed not just to evaluate, but to probe the fusion and reasoning capabilities of agentic models across the full sensory spectrum. Built on a core philosophy of modality interdependence, OmniPlay comprises a suite of five game environments that systematically create scenarios of both synergy and conflict, forcing agents to perform genuine cross-modal reasoning. Our comprehensive evaluation of six leading omni-modal models reveals a critical dichotomy: they exhibit superhuman performance on high-fidelity memory tasks but suffer from systemic failures in challenges requiring robust reasoning and strategic planning. We demonstrate that this fragility stems from brittle fusion mechanisms, which lead to catastrophic performance degradation under modality conflict and uncover a counter-intuitive "less is more" paradox, where removing sensory information can paradoxically improve performance. Our findings suggest that the path toward robust AGI requires a research focus beyond scaling to explicitly address synergistic fusion. Our platform is available for anonymous review at https://github.com/fuqingbie/omni-game-benchmark.

Cross-modal entity linking refers to the ability to align entities and their attributes across different modalities. While cross-modal entity linking is a fundamental skill needed for real-world applications such as multimodal code generation, fake news detection, or scene understanding, it has not been thoroughly studied in the literature. In this paper, we introduce a new task and benchmark to address this gap. Our benchmark, MATE, consists of 5.5k evaluation instances featuring visual scenes aligned with their textual representations. To evaluate cross-modal entity linking performance, we design a question-answering task that involves retrieving one attribute of an object in one modality based on a unique attribute of that object in another modality. We evaluate state-of-the-art Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and humans on this task, and find that VLMs struggle significantly compared to humans, particularly as the number of objects in the scene increases. Our analysis also shows that, while chain-of-thought prompting can improve VLM performance, models remain far from achieving human-level proficiency. These findings highlight the need for further research in cross-modal entity linking and show that MATE is a strong benchmark to support that progress.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) promise enhanced reasoning by integrating diverse inputs such as text, vision, and audio. Yet cross-modal reasoning remains underexplored, with conflicting reports on whether added modalities help or harm performance. These inconsistencies stem from a lack of controlled evaluation frameworks and analysis of models' internals to isolate when and why modality interactions support or undermine reasoning. We address this gap through a logic-grounded evaluation framework that categorizes multimodal reasoning into six interaction patterns, varying how facts are distributed across modalities and logically combined. Empirically, additional modalities enhance reasoning only when they provide independent and sufficient reasoning paths, while redundant or chained entailment support often hurts performance. Moreover, reasoning degrades in three systematic ways: weaker modalities drag down overall performance, conflicts bias preference toward certain modalities, and joint signals from different modalities fail to be integrated effectively. Therefore, we identify two core failures: task-composition bottleneck, where recognition and reasoning cannot be jointly executed in one pass, and fusion bottleneck, where early integration introduces bias. For further investigation, we find that attention patterns fail to encode fact usefulness, but a simple two-step prompting (recognize then reason) restores performance, confirming the task-composition bottleneck. Moreover, modality identity remains recoverable in early layers, and softening attention in early fusion improves reasoning, highlighting biased fusion as another failure mode. Overall, our findings show that integration, not perception, is the main barrier to multimodal reasoning, suggesting composition-aware training and early fusion control as promising directions.

Any-to-any generative models aim to enable seamless interpretation and generation across multiple modalities within a unified framework, yet their ability to preserve relationships across modalities remains uncertain. Do unified models truly achieve cross-modal coherence, or is this coherence merely perceived? To explore this, we introduce ACON, a dataset of 1,000 images (500 newly contributed) paired with captions, editing instructions, and Q&A pairs to evaluate cross-modal transfers rigorously. Using three consistency criteria-cyclic consistency, forward equivariance, and conjugated equivariance-our experiments reveal that any-to-any models do not consistently demonstrate greater cross-modal consistency than specialized models in pointwise evaluations such as cyclic consistency. However, equivariance evaluations uncover weak but observable consistency through structured analyses of the intermediate latent space enabled by multiple editing operations. We release our code and data at https://github.com/JiwanChung/ACON.

We introduce two new benchmarks REST and REST+(Render-Equivalence Stress Tests) to enable systematic evaluation of cross-modal inconsistency in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). MLLMs are trained to represent vision and language in the same embedding space, yet they cannot perform the same tasks in both modalities. Our benchmarks contain samples with the same semantic information in three modalities (image, text, mixed) and we show that state-of-the-art MLLMs cannot consistently reason over these different modalities. We evaluate 15 MLLMs and find that the degree of modality inconsistency varies substantially, even when accounting for problems with text recognition (OCR). Neither rendering text as image nor rendering an image as text solves the inconsistency. Even if OCR is correct, we find that visual characteristics (text colour and resolution, but not font) and the number of vision tokens have an impact on model performance. Finally, we find that our consistency score correlates with the modality gap between text and images, highlighting a mechanistic interpretation of cross-modal inconsistent MLLMs.

We propose a novel multimodal video benchmark - the Perception Test - to evaluate the perception and reasoning skills of pre-trained multimodal models (e.g. Flamingo, BEiT-3, or GPT-4). Compared to existing benchmarks that focus on computational tasks (e.g. classification, detection or tracking), the Perception Test focuses on skills (Memory, Abstraction, Physics, Semantics) and types of reasoning (descriptive, explanatory, predictive, counterfactual) across video, audio, and text modalities, to provide a comprehensive and efficient evaluation tool. The benchmark probes pre-trained models for their transfer capabilities, in a zero-shot / few-shot or limited finetuning regime. For these purposes, the Perception Test introduces 11.6k real-world videos, 23s average length, designed to show perceptually interesting situations, filmed by around 100 participants worldwide. The videos are densely annotated with six types of labels (multiple-choice and grounded video question-answers, object and point tracks, temporal action and sound segments), enabling both language and non-language evaluations. The fine-tuning and validation splits of the benchmark are publicly available (CC-BY license), in addition to a challenge server with a held-out test split. Human baseline results compared to state-of-the-art video QA models show a significant gap in performance (91.4% vs 43.6%), suggesting that there is significant room for improvement in multimodal video understanding. Dataset, baselines code, and challenge server are available at https://github.com/deepmind/perception_test

Collaborative perception integrates multi-agent perspectives to enhance the sensing range and overcome occlusion issues. While existing multimodal approaches leverage complementary sensors to improve performance, they are highly prone to failure--especially when a key sensor like LiDAR is unavailable. The root cause is that feature fusion leads to semantic mismatches between single-modality features and the downstream modules. This paper addresses this challenge for the first time in the field of collaborative perception, introducing Single-Modality-Operable Multimodal Collaborative Perception (SiMO). By adopting the proposed Length-Adaptive Multi-Modal Fusion (LAMMA), SiMO can adaptively handle remaining modal features during modal failures while maintaining consistency of the semantic space. Additionally, leveraging the innovative "Pretrain-Align-Fuse-RD" training strategy, SiMO addresses the issue of modality competition--generally overlooked by existing methods--ensuring the independence of each individual modality branch. Experiments demonstrate that SiMO effectively aligns multimodal features while simultaneously preserving modality-specific features, enabling it to maintain optimal performance across all individual modalities. The implementation details can be found in https://github.com/dempsey-wen/SiMO.

Reasoning in vision-language models (VLMs) has recently attracted significant attention due to its broad applicability across diverse downstream tasks. However, it remains unclear whether the superior performance of VLMs stems from genuine vision-grounded reasoning or relies predominantly on the reasoning capabilities of their textual backbones. To systematically measure this, we introduce CrossMath, a novel multimodal reasoning benchmark designed for controlled cross-modal comparisons. Specifically, we construct each problem in text-only, image-only, and image+text formats guaranteeing identical task-relevant information, verified by human annotators. This rigorous alignment effectively isolates modality-specific reasoning differences while eliminating confounding factors such as information mismatch. Extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art VLMs reveals a consistent phenomenon: a substantial performance gap between textual and visual reasoning. Notably, VLMs excel with text-only inputs, whereas incorporating visual data (image+text) frequently degrades performance compared to the text-only baseline. These findings indicate that current VLMs conduct reasoning primarily in the textual space, with limited genuine reliance on visual evidence. To mitigate this limitation, we curate a CrossMath training set for VLM fine-tuning. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that fine-tuning on this training set significantly boosts reasoning performance across all individual and joint modalities, while yielding robust gains on two general visual reasoning tasks. Source code is available at https://github.com/xuyige/CrossMath.

Cross-modal reasoning (CMR), the intricate process of synthesizing and drawing inferences across divergent sensory modalities, is increasingly recognized as a crucial capability in the progression toward more sophisticated and anthropomorphic artificial intelligence systems. Large Language Models (LLMs) represent a class of AI algorithms specifically engineered to parse, produce, and engage with human language on an extensive scale. The recent trend of deploying LLMs to tackle CMR tasks has marked a new mainstream of approaches for enhancing their effectiveness. This survey offers a nuanced exposition of current methodologies applied in CMR using LLMs, classifying these into a detailed three-tiered taxonomy. Moreover, the survey delves into the principal design strategies and operational techniques of prototypical models within this domain. Additionally, it articulates the prevailing challenges associated with the integration of LLMs in CMR and identifies prospective research directions. To sum up, this survey endeavors to expedite progress within this burgeoning field by endowing scholars with a holistic and detailed vista, showcasing the vanguard of current research whilst pinpointing potential avenues for advancement. An associated GitHub repository that collects the relevant papers can be found at https://github.com/ZuyiZhou/Awesome-Cross-modal-Reasoning-with-LLMs

Recent advances in unified multimodal models (UMM) have demonstrated remarkable progress in both understanding and generation tasks. However, whether these two capabilities are genuinely aligned and integrated within a single model remains unclear. To investigate this question, we introduce GapEval, a bidirectional benchmark designed to quantify the gap between understanding and generation capabilities, and quantitatively measure the cognitive coherence of the two "unified" directions. Each question can be answered in both modalities (image and text), enabling a symmetric evaluation of a model's bidirectional inference capability and cross-modal consistency. Experiments reveal a persistent gap between the two directions across a wide range of UMMs with different architectures, suggesting that current models achieve only surface-level unification rather than deep cognitive convergence of the two. To further explore the underlying mechanism, we conduct an empirical study from the perspective of knowledge manipulation to illustrate the underlying limitations. Our findings indicate that knowledge within UMMs often remains disjoint. The capability emergence and knowledge across modalities are unsynchronized, paving the way for further exploration.

The ability to quickly learn a new task with minimal instruction - known as few-shot learning - is a central aspect of intelligent agents. Classical few-shot benchmarks make use of few-shot samples from a single modality, but such samples may not be sufficient to characterize an entire concept class. In contrast, humans use cross-modal information to learn new concepts efficiently. In this work, we demonstrate that one can indeed build a better {bf visual} dog classifier by {bf read}ing about dogs and {bf listen}ing to them bark. To do so, we exploit the fact that recent multimodal foundation models such as CLIP are inherently cross-modal, mapping different modalities to the same representation space. Specifically, we propose a simple cross-modal adaptation approach that learns from few-shot examples spanning different modalities. By repurposing class names as additional one-shot training samples, we achieve SOTA results with an embarrassingly simple linear classifier for vision-language adaptation. Furthermore, we show that our approach can benefit existing methods such as prefix tuning, adapters, and classifier ensembling. Finally, to explore other modalities beyond vision and language, we construct the first (to our knowledge) audiovisual few-shot benchmark and use cross-modal training to improve the performance of both image and audio classification.

Unified multimodal models (UMMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for general-purpose multimodal intelligence. As they are deployed in real-world applications, effectively updating internal knowledge becomes critical. While knowledge editing has matured for text-only models, it remains unclear whether edits that successfully modify textual outputs also transfer to image generation in UMMs. To study this question, we introduce UniKE, the first benchmark for cross-modality knowledge editing in UMMs, comprising 2,971 edit subjects spanning attribute and relation edits. Using VQA-based visual verification, we reveal a striking modality gap: text-side efficacy can reach approximately 92%, whereas the best overall VQA accuracy under direct image generation is only 18.5%. We further propose Reasoning-augmented Parameter Editing, which explicitly activates edited knowledge before generation and improves overall VQA accuracy for all evaluated model-editor pairs, with gains up to 18.6 percentage points. Mechanistic analysis shows that this gap is associated with partial alignment between edited textual representations and the conditioning pathways for visual generation, where edits sufficient for text outputs may remain too weak or misaligned to steer image synthesis. These findings show that textual knowledge edits do not guarantee reliable cross-modality transfer and motivate modality-aware editing methods. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/gxx27/UniKE.

We introduce OmnixR, an evaluation suite designed to benchmark SoTA Omni-modality Language Models, such as GPT-4o and Gemini. Evaluating OLMs, which integrate multiple modalities such as text, vision, and audio, presents unique challenges. Particularly, the user message might often consist of multiple modalities, such that OLMs have to establish holistic understanding and reasoning across modalities to accomplish the task. Existing benchmarks are limited to single modality or dual-modality tasks, overlooking comprehensive multi-modal assessments of model reasoning. To address this, OmnixR offers two evaluation variants: (1)synthetic subset: a synthetic dataset generated automatically by translating text into multiple modalities--audio, images, video, and hybrids (Omnify). (2)realistic subset: a real-world dataset, manually curated and annotated by experts, for evaluating cross-modal reasoning in natural settings. OmnixR presents a unique evaluation towards assessing OLMs over a diverse mix of modalities, such as a question that involves video, audio, and text, providing a rigorous cross-modal reasoning testbed unlike any existing benchmarks. Our experiments find that all state-of-the-art OLMs struggle with OmnixR questions that require integrating information from multiple modalities to answer. Further analysis highlights differences in reasoning behavior, underscoring the challenges of omni-modal AI alignment.

We introduce SeePhys Pro, a fine-grained modality transfer benchmark that studies whether models preserve the same reasoning capability when critical information is progressively transferred from text to image. Unlike standard vision-essential benchmarks that evaluate a single input form, SeePhys Pro features four semantically aligned variants for each problem with progressively increasing visual elements. Our evaluation shows that current frontier models are far from representation-invariant reasoners: performance degrades on average as information moves from language to diagrams, with visual variable grounding as the most critical bottleneck. Motivated by this inference-time fragility, we further develop large training corpora for multimodal RLVR and use blind training as a diagnostic control, finding that RL with all training images masked can still improve performance on unmasked validation sets. To analyze this effect, text-deletion, image-mask-rate, and format-saturation controls suggest that such gains can arise from residual textual and distributional cues rather than valid visual evidence. Our results highlight the need to evaluate multimodal reasoning not only by final-answer accuracy, but also by robustness under modality transfer and by diagnostics that test whether improvements rely on task-critical visual evidence.

Frontier models have either been language-only or have primarily focused on vision and language modalities. Although recent advancements in models with vision and audio understanding capabilities have shown substantial progress, the field lacks a standardized evaluation framework for thoroughly assessing their cross-modality perception performance. We introduce MAVERIX~(Multimodal Audio-Visual Evaluation Reasoning IndeX), a novel benchmark with 700 videos and 2,556 questions explicitly designed to evaluate multimodal models through tasks that necessitate close integration of video and audio information. MAVERIX uniquely provides models with audiovisual tasks, closely mimicking the multimodal perceptual experiences available to humans during inference and decision-making processes. To our knowledge, MAVERIX is the first benchmark aimed explicitly at assessing comprehensive audiovisual integration. Experiments with state-of-the-art models, including Gemini 1.5 Pro and o1, show performance approaching human levels (around 70% accuracy), while human experts reach near-ceiling performance (95.1%). With standardized evaluation protocols, a rigorously annotated pipeline, and a public toolkit, MAVERIX establishes a challenging testbed for advancing audiovisual multimodal intelligence.

Multimodal foundation models that can holistically process text alongside images, video, audio, and other sensory modalities are increasingly used in a variety of real-world applications. However, it is challenging to characterize and study progress in multimodal foundation models, given the range of possible modeling decisions, tasks, and domains. In this paper, we introduce Holistic Evaluation of Multimodal Models (HEMM) to systematically evaluate the capabilities of multimodal foundation models across a set of 3 dimensions: basic skills, information flow, and real-world use cases. Basic multimodal skills are internal abilities required to solve problems, such as learning interactions across modalities, fine-grained alignment, multi-step reasoning, and the ability to handle external knowledge. Information flow studies how multimodal content changes during a task through querying, translation, editing, and fusion. Use cases span domain-specific challenges introduced in real-world multimedia, affective computing, natural sciences, healthcare, and human-computer interaction applications. Through comprehensive experiments across the 30 tasks in HEMM, we (1) identify key dataset dimensions (e.g., basic skills, information flows, and use cases) that pose challenges to today's models, and (2) distill performance trends regarding how different modeling dimensions (e.g., scale, pre-training data, multimodal alignment, pre-training, and instruction tuning objectives) influence performance. Our conclusions regarding challenging multimodal interactions, use cases, and tasks requiring reasoning and external knowledge, the benefits of data and model scale, and the impacts of instruction tuning yield actionable insights for future work in multimodal foundation models.

Vision-language pre-training and instruction tuning have demonstrated general-purpose capabilities in 2D visual reasoning tasks by aligning visual encoders with state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we introduce a simple, yet effective, cross-modality framework built atop frozen LLMs that allows the integration of various modalities without extensive modality-specific customization. To facilitate instruction-modality fine-tuning, we collect high-quality instruction tuning data in an automatic and scalable manner, composed of 24K QA samples for audio and 250K QA samples for 3D. Leveraging instruction-aware representations, our model performs comparably with leading-edge counterparts without the need of extensive modality-specific pre-training or customization. Furthermore, our approach demonstrates cross-modal reasoning abilities across two or more input modalities, despite each modality projection being trained individually. To study the model's cross-modal abilities, we contribute a novel Discriminative Cross-modal Reasoning (DisCRn) evaluation task, comprising 9K audio-video QA samples and 28K image-3D QA samples that require the model to reason discriminatively across disparate input modalities.

Multimodal question answering (QA) often requires identifying which video, audio, or sensor tokens are relevant to the question. Yet modality disagreements are common: off-camera speech, background noise, or motion outside the field of view often mislead fusion models that weight all streams equally. We present RAVEN, a unified QA architecture whose core is QuART, a query-conditioned cross-modal gating module that assigns scalar relevance scores to each token across modalities, enabling the model to amplify informative signals and suppress distractors before fusion. RAVEN is trained through a three-stage pipeline comprising unimodal pretraining, query-aligned fusion, and disagreement-oriented fine-tuning -- each stage targeting a distinct challenge in multi-modal reasoning: representation quality, cross-modal relevance, and robustness to modality mismatch. To support training and evaluation, we release AVS-QA, a dataset of 300K synchronized Audio--Video-Sensor streams paired with automatically generated question-answer pairs. Experimental results on seven multi-modal QA benchmarks -- including egocentric and exocentric tasks -- show that RAVEN achieves up to 14.5\% and 8.0\% gains in accuracy compared to state-of-the-art multi-modal large language models, respectively. Incorporating sensor data provides an additional 16.4\% boost, and the model remains robust under modality corruption, outperforming SOTA baselines by 50.23\%. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/BASHLab/RAVEN.

Vision Language Models (VLMs) are typically evaluated with Visual Question Answering (VQA) tasks which assess a model's understanding of scenes. Good VQA performance is taken as evidence that the model will perform well on a broader range of tasks that require both visual and language inputs. However, scene-aware VQA does not fully capture input biases or assess hallucinations caused by a misalignment between modalities. To address this, we propose a Cross-modal Alignment Similarity Test (CAST) to probe VLMs for self-consistency across modalities. This test involves asking the models to identify similarities between two scenes through text-only, image-only, or both and then assess the truthfulness of the similarities they generate. Since there is no ground-truth to compare against, this evaluation does not focus on objective accuracy but rather on whether VLMs are internally consistent in their outputs. We argue that while not all self-consistent models are capable or accurate, all capable VLMs must be self-consistent.

Current omni-modal benchmarks mainly evaluate models under settings where multiple modalities are provided simultaneously, while the ability to start from audio alone and actively search for cross-modal evidence remains underexplored. In this paper, we introduce Omni-DeepSearch, a benchmark for audio-driven omni-modal deep search. Given one or more audio clips and a related question, models must infer useful clues from audio, invoke text, image, and video search tools, and perform multi-hop reasoning to produce a short, objective, and verifiable answer. Omni-DeepSearch contains 640 samples across 15 fine-grained categories, covering four retrieval target modalities and four audio content types. A multi-stage filtering pipeline ensures audio dependence, retrieval necessity, visual modality necessity, and answer uniqueness. Experiments on recent closed-source and open-source omni-modal models show that this task remains highly challenging: the strongest evaluated model, Gemini-3-Pro, achieves only 43.44\% average accuracy. Further analyses illustrate key bottlenecks in audio entity inference, query formulation, tool-use reliability, multi-hop retrieval, and cross-modal verification. These results highlight audio-driven omni-modal deep search as an important and underexplored direction for future multimodal agents.

As multimodal large models (MLLMs) continue to advance across challenging tasks, a key question emerges: What essential capabilities are still missing? A critical aspect of human learning is continuous interaction with the environment -- not limited to language, but also involving multimodal understanding and generation. To move closer to human-level intelligence, models must similarly support multi-turn, multimodal interaction. In particular, they should comprehend interleaved multimodal contexts and respond coherently in ongoing exchanges. In this work, we present an initial exploration through the InterMT -- the first preference dataset for multi-turn multimodal interaction, grounded in real human feedback. In this exploration, we particularly emphasize the importance of human oversight, introducing expert annotations to guide the process, motivated by the fact that current MLLMs lack such complex interactive capabilities. InterMT captures human preferences at both global and local levels into nine sub-dimensions, consists of 15.6k prompts, 52.6k multi-turn dialogue instances, and 32.4k human-labeled preference pairs. To compensate for the lack of capability for multi-modal understanding and generation, we introduce an agentic workflow that leverages tool-augmented MLLMs to construct multi-turn QA instances. To further this goal, we introduce InterMT-Bench to assess the ability of MLLMs in assisting judges with multi-turn, multimodal tasks. We demonstrate the utility of \InterMT through applications such as judge moderation and further reveal the multi-turn scaling law of judge model. We hope the open-source of our data can help facilitate further research on aligning current MLLMs to the next step. Our project website can be found at https://pku-intermt.github.io .

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) suffer from cross-modal hallucinations, where one modality inappropriately influences generation about another, leading to fabricated output. This exposes a more fundamental deficiency in modality-interaction control. To address this, we propose Modality-Adaptive Decoding (MAD), a training-free method that adaptively weights modality-specific decoding branches based on task requirements. MAD leverages the model's inherent ability to self-assess modality relevance by querying which modalities are needed for each task. The extracted modality probabilities are then used to adaptively weight contrastive decoding branches, enabling the model to focus on relevant information while suppressing cross-modal interference. Extensive experiments on CMM and AVHBench demonstrate that MAD significantly reduces cross-modal hallucinations across multiple audio-visual language models (7.8\% and 2.0\% improvements for VideoLLaMA2-AV, 8.7\% and 4.7\% improvements for Qwen2.5-Omni). Our approach demonstrates that explicit modality awareness through self-assessment is crucial for robust multimodal reasoning, offering a principled extension to existing contrastive decoding methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/top-yun/MAD{https://github.com/top-yun/MAD}

The rapid advancement of native multi-modal models and omni-models, exemplified by GPT-4o, Gemini, and o3, with their capability to process and generate content across modalities such as text and images, marks a significant milestone in the evolution of intelligence. Systematic evaluation of their multi-modal output capabilities in visual thinking processes (also known as multi-modal chain of thought, M-CoT) becomes critically important. However, existing benchmarks for evaluating multi-modal models primarily focus on assessing multi-modal inputs and text-only reasoning while neglecting the importance of reasoning through multi-modal outputs. In this paper, we present a benchmark, dubbed RBench-V, designed to assess models' vision-indispensable reasoning abilities. To construct RBench-V, we carefully hand-pick 803 questions covering math, physics, counting, and games. Unlike previous benchmarks that typically specify certain input modalities, RBench-V presents problems centered on multi-modal outputs, which require image manipulation such as generating novel images and constructing auxiliary lines to support the reasoning process. We evaluate numerous open- and closed-source models on RBench-V, including o3, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Qwen2.5-VL, etc. Even the best-performing model, o3, achieves only 25.8% accuracy on RBench-V, far below the human score of 82.3%, highlighting that current models struggle to leverage multi-modal reasoning. Data and code are available at https://evalmodels.github.io/rbenchv

Traditional vision-based material perception methods often experience substantial performance degradation under visually impaired conditions, thereby motivating the shift toward non-visual multimodal material perception. Despite this, existing approaches frequently perform naive fusion of multimodal inputs, overlooking key challenges such as modality-specific noise, missing modalities common in real-world scenarios, and the dynamically varying importance of each modality depending on the task. These limitations lead to suboptimal performance across several benchmark tasks. In this paper, we propose a robust multimodal fusion framework, TouchFormer. Specifically, we employ a Modality-Adaptive Gating (MAG) mechanism and intra- and inter-modality attention mechanisms to adaptively integrate cross-modal features, enhancing model robustness. Additionally, we introduce a Cross-Instance Embedding Regularization(CER) strategy, which significantly improves classification accuracy in fine-grained subcategory material recognition tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to existing non-visual methods, the proposed TouchFormer framework achieves classification accuracy improvements of 2.48% and 6.83% on SSMC and USMC tasks, respectively. Furthermore, real-world robotic experiments validate TouchFormer's effectiveness in enabling robots to better perceive and interpret their environment, paving the way for its deployment in safety-critical applications such as emergency response and industrial automation. The code and datasets will be open-source, and the videos are available in the supplementary materials.

Multi-modal models have shown a promising capability to effectively integrate information from various sources, yet meanwhile, they are found vulnerable to pervasive perturbations, such as uni-modal attacks and missing conditions. To counter these perturbations, robust multi-modal representations are highly expected, which are positioned well away from the discriminative multi-modal decision boundary. In this paper, different from conventional empirical studies, we focus on a commonly used joint multi-modal framework and theoretically discover that larger uni-modal representation margins and more reliable integration for modalities are essential components for achieving higher robustness. This discovery can further explain the limitation of multi-modal robustness and the phenomenon that multi-modal models are often vulnerable to attacks on the specific modality. Moreover, our analysis reveals how the widespread issue, that the model has different preferences for modalities, limits the multi-modal robustness by influencing the essential components and could lead to attacks on the specific modality highly effective. Inspired by our theoretical finding, we introduce a training procedure called Certifiable Robust Multi-modal Training (CRMT), which can alleviate this influence from modality preference and explicitly regulate essential components to significantly improve robustness in a certifiable manner. Our method demonstrates substantial improvements in performance and robustness compared with existing methods. Furthermore, our training procedure can be easily extended to enhance other robust training strategies, highlighting its credibility and flexibility.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities for capturing and reasoning over multimodal inputs. However, these models are prone to parametric knowledge conflicts, which arise from inconsistencies of represented knowledge between their vision and language components. In this paper, we formally define the problem of cross-modality parametric knowledge conflict and present a systematic approach to detect, interpret, and mitigate them. We introduce a pipeline that identifies conflicts between visual and textual answers, showing a persistently high conflict rate across modalities in recent LVLMs regardless of the model size. We further investigate how these conflicts interfere with the inference process and propose a contrastive metric to discern the conflicting samples from the others. Building on these insights, we develop a novel dynamic contrastive decoding method that removes undesirable logits inferred from the less confident modality components based on answer confidence. For models that do not provide logits, we also introduce two prompt-based strategies to mitigate the conflicts. Our methods achieve promising improvements in accuracy on both the ViQuAE and InfoSeek datasets. Specifically, using LLaVA-34B, our proposed dynamic contrastive decoding improves an average accuracy of 2.24%.

Multimodal learning seeks to utilize data from multiple sources to improve the overall performance of downstream tasks. It is desirable for redundancies in the data to make multimodal systems robust to missing or corrupted observations in some correlated modalities. However, we observe that the performance of several existing multimodal networks significantly deteriorates if one or multiple modalities are absent at test time. To enable robustness to missing modalities, we propose a simple and parameter-efficient adaptation procedure for pretrained multimodal networks. In particular, we exploit modulation of intermediate features to compensate for the missing modalities. We demonstrate that such adaptation can partially bridge performance drop due to missing modalities and outperform independent, dedicated networks trained for the available modality combinations in some cases. The proposed adaptation requires extremely small number of parameters (e.g., fewer than 1% of the total parameters) and applicable to a wide range of modality combinations and tasks. We conduct a series of experiments to highlight the missing modality robustness of our proposed method on five different multimodal tasks across seven datasets. Our proposed method demonstrates versatility across various tasks and datasets, and outperforms existing methods for robust multimodal learning with missing modalities.

As multimodal learning finds applications in a wide variety of high-stakes societal tasks, investigating their robustness becomes important. Existing work has focused on understanding the robustness of vision-and-language models to imperceptible variations on benchmark tasks. In this work, we investigate the robustness of multimodal classifiers to cross-modal dilutions - a plausible variation. We develop a model that, given a multimodal (image + text) input, generates additional dilution text that (a) maintains relevance and topical coherence with the image and existing text, and (b) when added to the original text, leads to misclassification of the multimodal input. Via experiments on Crisis Humanitarianism and Sentiment Detection tasks, we find that the performance of task-specific fusion-based multimodal classifiers drops by 23.3% and 22.5%, respectively, in the presence of dilutions generated by our model. Metric-based comparisons with several baselines and human evaluations indicate that our dilutions show higher relevance and topical coherence, while simultaneously being more effective at demonstrating the brittleness of the multimodal classifiers. Our work aims to highlight and encourage further research on the robustness of deep multimodal models to realistic variations, especially in human-facing societal applications. The code and other resources are available at https://claws-lab.github.io/multimodal-robustness/.

In this paper, we explore a less-studied yet practically important problem: how to efficiently and effectively adapt multiple (>2) multimodal foundation models (MFMs) for the sequential recommendation task. To this end, we propose a plug-and-play Cross-modal Side Adapter Network (CROSSAN), which leverages a fully decoupled side adapter-based paradigm to achieve efficient and scalable adaptation. Compared to the state-of-the-art efficient approaches, CROSSAN reduces training time by over 30%, GPU memory consumption by 20%, and trainable parameters by over 57%, while enabling effective cross-modal learning across diverse modalities. To further enhance multimodal fusion, we introduce the Mixture of Modality Expert Fusion (MOMEF) mechanism. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate that CROSSAN consistently outperforms existing methods, achieving 6.7%--8.1% performance improvements when adapting four foundation models with raw modalities. Moreover, the overall performance continues to improve as more MFMs are incorporated. We will release our code and datasets to faciliate future research.

Multimodal information retrieval (MIR) faces inherent challenges due to the heterogeneity of data sources and the complexity of cross-modal alignment. While previous studies have identified modal gaps in feature spaces, a systematic approach to address these challenges remains unexplored. In this work, we introduce UNITE, a universal framework that tackles these challenges through two critical yet underexplored aspects: data curation and modality-aware training configurations. Our work provides the first comprehensive analysis of how modality-specific data properties influence downstream task performance across diverse scenarios. Moreover, we propose Modal-Aware Masked Contrastive Learning (MAMCL) to mitigate the competitive relationships among the instances of different modalities. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple multimodal retrieval benchmarks, outperforming existing methods by notable margins. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that strategic modality curation and tailored training protocols are pivotal for robust cross-modal representation learning. This work not only advances MIR performance but also provides a foundational blueprint for future research in multimodal systems. Our project is available at https://friedrichor.github.io/projects/UNITE.

In different multimodal scenarios, it needs to integrate and utilize information across modalities in a specific way based on the demands of the task. Different integration ways between modalities are referred to as "multimodal interaction". How well a model handles various multimodal interactions largely characterizes its multimodal ability. In this paper, we introduce MIBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the multimodal interaction capabilities of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), which formulates each instance as a (con_v , con_t, task) triplet with contexts from vision and text, necessitating that LMMs employ correct forms of multimodal interaction to effectively complete the task. MIBench assesses models from three key aspects: the ability to source information from vision-centric or text-centric cues, and the ability to generate new information from their joint synergy. Each interaction capability is evaluated hierarchically across three cognitive levels: Recognition, Understanding, and Reasoning. MIBench comprises over 10,000 vision-text context pairs spanning 32 distinct tasks. Evaluation of state-of-the-art LMMs show that: (1) LMMs' ability on multimodal interaction remains constrained, despite the scaling of model parameters and training data; (2) they are easily distracted by textual modalities when processing vision information; (3) they mostly possess a basic capacity for multimodal synergy; and (4) natively trained multimodal models show noticeable deficits in fundamental interaction ability. We expect that these observations can serve as a reference for developing LMMs with more enhanced multimodal ability in the future.

World Generation Models are emerging as a cornerstone of next-generation multimodal intelligence systems. Unlike traditional 2D visual generation, World Models aim to construct realistic, dynamic, and physically consistent 3D/4D worlds from images, videos, or text. These models not only need to produce high-fidelity visual content but also maintain coherence across space, time, physics, and instruction control, enabling applications in virtual reality, autonomous driving, embodied intelligence, and content creation. However, prior benchmarks emphasize different evaluation dimensions and lack a unified assessment of world-realism capability. To systematically evaluate World Models, we introduce the 4DWorldBench, which measures models across four key dimensions: Perceptual Quality, Condition-4D Alignment, Physical Realism, and 4D Consistency. The benchmark covers tasks such as Image-to-3D/4D, Video-to-4D, Text-to-3D/4D. Beyond these, we innovatively introduce adaptive conditioning across multiple modalities, which not only integrates but also extends traditional evaluation paradigms. To accommodate different modality-conditioned inputs, we map all modality conditions into a unified textual space during evaluation, and further integrate LLM-as-judge, MLLM-as-judge, and traditional network-based methods. This unified and adaptive design enables more comprehensive and consistent evaluation of alignment, physical realism, and cross-modal coherence. Preliminary human studies further demonstrate that our adaptive tool selection achieves closer agreement with subjective human judgments. We hope this benchmark will serve as a foundation for objective comparisons and improvements, accelerating the transition from "visual generation" to "world generation." Our project can be found at https://yeppp27.github.io/4DWorldBench.github.io/.

Recent advances in video-to-audio (V2A) generation enable high-quality audio synthesis from visual content, yet achieving robust and fine-grained controllability remains challenging. Existing methods suffer from weak textual controllability under visual-text conflict and imprecise stylistic control due to entangled temporal and timbre information in reference audio. Moreover, the lack of standardized benchmarks limits systematic evaluation. We propose ControlFoley, a unified multimodal V2A framework that enables precise control over video, text, and reference audio. We introduce a joint visual encoding paradigm that integrates CLIP with a spatio-temporal audio-visual encoder to improve alignment and textual controllability. We further propose temporal-timbre decoupling to suppress redundant temporal cues while preserving discriminative timbre features. In addition, we design a modality-robust training scheme with unified multimodal representation alignment (REPA) and random modality dropout. We also present VGGSound-TVC, a benchmark for evaluating textual controllability under varying degrees of visual-text conflict. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across multiple V2A tasks, including text-guided, text-controlled, and audio-controlled generation. ControlFoley achieves superior controllability under cross-modal conflict while maintaining strong synchronization and audio quality, and shows competitive or better performance compared to an industrial V2A system. Code, models, datasets, and demos are available at: https://yjx-research.github.io/ControlFoley/.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can simultaneously process visual, textual, and auditory data, capturing insights that complement human analysis. However, existing video question-answering (VidQA) benchmarks and datasets often exhibit a bias toward a single modality, despite the goal of requiring advanced reasoning skills that integrate diverse modalities to answer the queries. In this work, we introduce the modality importance score (MIS) to identify such bias. It is designed to assess which modality embeds the necessary information to answer the question. Additionally, we propose an innovative method using state-of-the-art MLLMs to estimate the modality importance, which can serve as a proxy for human judgments of modality perception. With this MIS, we demonstrate the presence of unimodal bias and the scarcity of genuinely multimodal questions in existing datasets. We further validate the modality importance score with multiple ablation studies to evaluate the performance of MLLMs on permuted feature sets. Our results indicate that current models do not effectively integrate information due to modality imbalance in existing datasets. Our proposed MLLM-derived MIS can guide the curation of modality-balanced datasets that advance multimodal learning and enhance MLLMs' capabilities to understand and utilize synergistic relations across modalities.

There are increasing concerns about malicious attacks on autonomous vehicles. In particular, inaudible voice command attacks pose a significant threat as voice commands become available in autonomous driving systems. How to empirically defend against these inaudible attacks remains an open question. Previous research investigates utilizing deep learning-based multimodal fusion for defense, without considering the model uncertainty in trustworthiness. As deep learning has been applied to increasingly sensitive tasks, uncertainty measurement is crucial in helping improve model robustness, especially in mission-critical scenarios. In this paper, we propose the Multimodal Fusion Framework (MFF) as an intelligent security system to defend against inaudible voice command attacks. MFF fuses heterogeneous audio-vision modalities using VGG family neural networks and achieves the detection accuracy of 92.25% in the comparative fusion method empirical study. Additionally, extensive experiments on audio-vision tasks reveal the model's uncertainty. Using Expected Calibration Errors, we measure calibration errors and Monte-Carlo Dropout to estimate the predictive distribution for the proposed models. Our findings show empirically to train robust multimodal models, improve standard accuracy and provide a further step toward interpretability. Finally, we discuss the pros and cons of our approach and its applicability for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems.

Cross-modal retrieval aims to measure the content similarity between different types of data. The idea has been previously applied to visual, text, and speech data. In this paper, we present a novel cross-modal retrieval method specifically for multi-view images, called Cross-view Image Retrieval CVIR. Our approach aims to find a feature space as well as an embedding space in which samples from street-view images are compared directly to satellite-view images (and vice-versa). For this comparison, a novel deep metric learning based solution "DeepCVIR" has been proposed. Previous cross-view image datasets are deficient in that they (1) lack class information; (2) were originally collected for cross-view image geolocalization task with coupled images; (3) do not include any images from off-street locations. To train, compare, and evaluate the performance of cross-view image retrieval, we present a new 6 class cross-view image dataset termed as CrossViewRet which comprises of images including freeway, mountain, palace, river, ship, and stadium with 700 high-resolution dual-view images for each class. Results show that the proposed DeepCVIR outperforms conventional matching approaches on the CVIR task for the given dataset and would also serve as the baseline for future research.

Recent progress has shown that video diffusion models (VDMs) can be repurposed for diverse multimodal graphics tasks. However, existing methods often train separate models for each problem setting, which fixes the input-output mapping and limits the modeling of correlations across modalities. We present UniVidX, a unified multimodal framework that leverages VDM priors for versatile video generation. UniVidX formulates pixel-aligned tasks as conditional generation in a shared multimodal space, adapts to modality-specific distributions while preserving the backbone's native priors, and promotes cross-modal consistency during synthesis. It is built on three key designs. Stochastic Condition Masking (SCM) randomly partitions modalities into clean conditions and noisy targets during training, enabling omni-directional conditional generation instead of fixed mappings. Decoupled Gated LoRA (DGL) introduces per-modality LoRAs that are activated when a modality serves as the generation target, preserving the strong priors of the VDM. Cross-Modal Self-Attention (CMSA) shares keys and values across modalities while keeping modality-specific queries, facilitating information exchange and inter-modal alignment. We instantiate UniVidX in two domains: UniVid-Intrinsic, for RGB videos and intrinsic maps including albedo, irradiance, and normal; and UniVid-Alpha, for blended RGB videos and their constituent RGBA layers. Experiments show that both models achieve performance competitive with state-of-the-art methods across distinct tasks and generalize robustly to in-the-wild scenarios, even when trained on fewer than 1,000 videos. Project page: https://houyuanchen111.github.io/UniVidX.github.io/

In recent years, cross-modal reasoning (CMR), the process of understanding and reasoning across different modalities, has emerged as a pivotal area with applications spanning from multimedia analysis to healthcare diagnostics. As the deployment of AI systems becomes more ubiquitous, the demand for transparency and comprehensibility in these systems' decision-making processes has intensified. This survey delves into the realm of interpretable cross-modal reasoning (I-CMR), where the objective is not only to achieve high predictive performance but also to provide human-understandable explanations for the results. This survey presents a comprehensive overview of the typical methods with a three-level taxonomy for I-CMR. Furthermore, this survey reviews the existing CMR datasets with annotations for explanations. Finally, this survey summarizes the challenges for I-CMR and discusses potential future directions. In conclusion, this survey aims to catalyze the progress of this emerging research area by providing researchers with a panoramic and comprehensive perspective, illuminating the state of the art and discerning the opportunities. The summarized methods, datasets, and other resources are available at https://github.com/ZuyiZhou/Awesome-Interpretable-Cross-modal-Reasoning.

Multimodal models often experience a significant performance drop when one or more modalities are missing during inference. To address this challenge, we propose a simple yet effective approach that enhances robustness to missing modalities while maintaining strong performance when all modalities are available. Our method introduces cross-modal proxy tokens (CMPTs), which approximate the class token of a missing modality by attending only to the tokens of the available modality without requiring explicit modality generation or auxiliary networks. To efficiently learn these approximations with minimal computational overhead, we employ low-rank adapters in frozen unimodal encoders and jointly optimize an alignment loss with a task-specific loss. Extensive experiments on five multimodal datasets show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across various missing rates while achieving competitive results in complete-modality settings. Overall, our method offers a flexible and efficient solution for robust multimodal learning. The code and pretrained models will be released on GitHub.

With the rapid advances in high-throughput sequencing technologies, the focus of survival analysis has shifted from examining clinical indicators to incorporating genomic profiles with pathological images. However, existing methods either directly adopt a straightforward fusion of pathological features and genomic profiles for survival prediction, or take genomic profiles as guidance to integrate the features of pathological images. The former would overlook intrinsic cross-modal correlations. The latter would discard pathological information irrelevant to gene expression. To address these issues, we present a Cross-Modal Translation and Alignment (CMTA) framework to explore the intrinsic cross-modal correlations and transfer potential complementary information. Specifically, we construct two parallel encoder-decoder structures for multi-modal data to integrate intra-modal information and generate cross-modal representation. Taking the generated cross-modal representation to enhance and recalibrate intra-modal representation can significantly improve its discrimination for comprehensive survival analysis. To explore the intrinsic crossmodal correlations, we further design a cross-modal attention module as the information bridge between different modalities to perform cross-modal interactions and transfer complementary information. Our extensive experiments on five public TCGA datasets demonstrate that our proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

Intracerebral Hemorrhage (ICH) is the deadliest subtype of stroke, necessitating timely and accurate prognostic evaluation to reduce mortality and disability. However, the multi-factorial nature and complexity of ICH make methods based solely on computed tomography (CT) image features inadequate. Despite the capacity of cross-modal networks to fuse additional information, the effective combination of different modal features remains a significant challenge. In this study, we propose a joint-attention fusion-based 3D cross-modal network termed ICHPro that simulates the ICH prognosis interpretation process utilized by neurosurgeons. ICHPro includes a joint-attention fusion module to fuse features from CT images with demographic and clinical textual data. To enhance the representation of cross-modal features, we introduce a joint loss function. ICHPro facilitates the extraction of richer cross-modal features, thereby improving classification performance. Upon testing our method using a five-fold cross-validation, we achieved an accuracy of 89.11%, an F1 score of 0.8767, and an AUC value of 0.9429. These results outperform those obtained from other advanced methods based on the test dataset, thereby demonstrating the superior efficacy of ICHPro. The code is available at our Github: https://github.com/YU-deep/ICH.

While recent audio-visual models have demonstrated impressive performance, their robustness to distributional shifts at test-time remains not fully understood. Existing robustness benchmarks mainly focus on single modalities, making them insufficient for thoroughly assessing the robustness of audio-visual models. Motivated by real-world scenarios where shifts can occur simultaneously in both audio and visual modalities, we introduce AVROBUSTBENCH, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the test-time robustness of audio-visual recognition models. AVROBUSTBENCH comprises four audio-visual benchmark datasets, AUDIOSET-2C, VGGSOUND-2C, KINETICS-2C, and EPICKITCHENS-2C, each incorporating 75 bimodal audio-visual corruptions that are co-occurring and correlated. Through extensive evaluations, we observe that state-of-the-art supervised and self-supervised audio-visual models exhibit declining robustness as corruption severity increases. Furthermore, online test-time adaptation (TTA) methods, on VGGSOUND-2C and KINETICS-2C, offer minimal improvements in performance under bimodal corruptions. We further propose AV2C, a simple TTA approach enabling on-the-fly cross-modal fusion by penalizing high-entropy samples, which achieves improvements on VGGSOUND-2C. We hope that AVROBUSTBENCH will steer the development of more effective and robust audio-visual TTA approaches. Our code is available https://github.com/sarthaxxxxx/AV-C-Robustness-Benchmark{here}.

Beneath the stunning visual fidelity of modern AIGC models lies a "logical desert", where systems fail tasks that require physical, causal, or complex spatial reasoning. Current evaluations largely rely on superficial metrics or fragmented benchmarks, creating a ``performance mirage'' that overlooks the generative process. To address this, we introduce ViGoR Vision-G}nerative Reasoning-centric Benchmark), a unified framework designed to dismantle this mirage. ViGoR distinguishes itself through four key innovations: 1) holistic cross-modal coverage bridging Image-to-Image and Video tasks; 2) a dual-track mechanism evaluating both intermediate processes and final results; 3) an evidence-grounded automated judge ensuring high human alignment; and 4) granular diagnostic analysis that decomposes performance into fine-grained cognitive dimensions. Experiments on over 20 leading models reveal that even state-of-the-art systems harbor significant reasoning deficits, establishing ViGoR as a critical ``stress test'' for the next generation of intelligent vision models. The demo have been available at https://vincenthancoder.github.io/ViGoR-Bench/

Recent advances in omni-modal large language models have enabled remarkable progress in joint vision-audio understanding. However, prevailing architectures rely on modality-specific encoders with a video-coarse, audio-dense design -- sampling visual frames at 1--2 fps while processing audio waveforms at 25 fps -- resulting in systems that perceive video frame by frame, modality by modality rather than holistically as humans do. Such a discrepancy leaves models with impoverished cross-modal interaction during encoding and an inability to capture fine-grained visual motion. To bridge this gap, we present Omni-Encoder, a unified Transformer backbone designed to co-embed visual and audio signals at a symmetrical 25 fps within a shared latent space. This architecture leverages three core innovations -- the Omni-Encoder Token Template, Omni-RoPE, and Temporal Window Shifting -- to effectively reconcile the dual challenges of modality disentanglement and computational efficiency. Experiments demonstrate that, compared to the modality-specific baseline Qwen2.5-Omni under the same input token budget to the LLM decoder, Omni-Encoder delivers substantial gains on visual continuous understanding tasks -- such as sign language recognition and fine-grained sports action analysis -- while maintaining competitive performance on established audio-visual benchmarks such as AVQA and Speaker Identification and Localization. These results suggest that unified omnivorous encoding offers a promising direction for building omni-modal models that more closely reflect the integrated nature of human perception.

Existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are predominantly trained and tested on consistent visual-textual inputs, leaving open the question of whether they can handle inconsistencies in real-world, layout-rich content. To bridge this gap, we propose the Multimodal Inconsistency Reasoning (MMIR) benchmark to assess MLLMs' ability to detect and reason about semantic mismatches in artifacts such as webpages, presentation slides, and posters. MMIR comprises 534 challenging samples, each containing synthetically injected errors across five reasoning-heavy categories: Factual Contradiction, Identity Misattribution, Contextual Mismatch, Quantitative Discrepancy, and Temporal/Spatial Incoherence. We evaluate six state-of-the-art MLLMs, showing that models with dedicated multimodal reasoning capabilities, such as o1, substantially outperform their counterparts while open-source models remain particularly vulnerable to inconsistency errors. Detailed error analyses further show that models excel in detecting inconsistencies confined to a single modality, particularly in text, but struggle with cross-modal conflicts and complex layouts. Probing experiments reveal that single-modality prompting, including Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and Set-of-Mark (SoM) methods, yields marginal gains, revealing a key bottleneck in cross-modal reasoning. Our findings highlight the need for advanced multimodal reasoning and point to future research on multimodal inconsistency.

As multimodal large language models (MLLMs) advance rapidly, rigorous evaluation has become essential, providing further guidance for their development. In this work, we focus on a unified and robust evaluation of vision perception abilities, the foundational skill of MLLMs. We find that existing perception benchmarks, each focusing on different question types, domains, and evaluation metrics, introduce significant evaluation variance, complicating comprehensive assessments of perception abilities when relying on any single benchmark. To address this, we introduce AbilityLens, a unified benchmark designed to evaluate MLLMs across six key perception abilities, focusing on both accuracy and stability, with each ability encompassing diverse question types, domains, and metrics. With the assistance of AbilityLens, we: (1) identify the strengths and weaknesses of current models, highlighting stability patterns and revealing a notable performance gap between open-source and closed-source models; (2) introduce an online evaluation mode, which uncovers interesting ability conflict and early convergence phenomena during MLLM training; and (3) design a simple ability-specific model merging method that combines the best ability checkpoint from early training stages, effectively mitigating performance decline due to ability conflict. The benchmark and online leaderboard will be released soon.

While modern text-to-image models excel at prompt-based generation, they often lack the fine-grained control necessary for specific user requirements like spatial layouts or subject appearances. Multi-condition control addresses this, yet its integration into Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) is bottlenecked by the conventional ``concatenate-and-attend'' strategy, which suffers from quadratic computational and memory overhead as the number of conditions scales. Our analysis reveals that much of this cross-modal interaction is spatially or semantically redundant. To this end, we propose Position-aligned and Keyword-scoped Attention (PKA), a highly efficient framework designed to eliminate these redundancies. Specifically, Position-Aligned Attention (PAA) linearizes spatial control by enforcing localized patch alignment, while Keyword-Scoped Attention (KSA) prunes irrelevant subject-driven interactions via semantic-aware masking. To facilitate efficient learning, we further introduce a Conditional Sensitivity-Aware Sampling (CSAS) strategy that reweights the training objective towards critical denoising phases, drastically accelerating convergence and enhancing conditional fidelity. Empirically, PKA delivers a 10.0times inference speedup and a 5.1times VRAM saving, providing a scalable and resource-friendly solution for high-fidelity multi-conditioned generation.

Native Omni-modal Large Language Models (OLLMs) have shifted from pipeline architectures to unified representation spaces. However, this native integration gives rise to a critical yet underexplored phenomenon: modality preference. To bridge this gap, we first systematically quantify modality preference of OLLMs using a newly-curated conflict-based benchmark and the modality selection rate metric. Our evaluation of ten representative OLLMs reveals a notable paradigm shift: unlike the ``text-dominance'' of traditional VLMs, most OLLMs exhibit a pronounced visual preference. To further understand the underlying mechanism, we conduct layer-wise probing and demonstrate that such modality preference is not static but emerges progressively in the mid-to-late layers. Building upon these insights, we leverage these internal signals to diagnose cross-modal hallucinations, achieving competitive performance across three downstream multi-modal benchmarks without task-specific data. Our work provides both a mechanistic understanding and a practical tool for building more trustworthy OLLMs. Our code and related resources are publicly available at: https://github.com/icip-cas/OmniPreference

RGB-Thermal (RGB-T) semantic segmentation is essential for robotic systems operating in low-light or dark environments. However, traditional approaches often overemphasize modality balance, resulting in limited robustness and severe performance degradation when sensor signals are partially missing. Recent advances such as cross-modal knowledge distillation and modality-adaptive fine-tuning attempt to enhance cross-modal interaction, but they typically decouple modality fusion and modality adaptation, requiring multi-stage training with frozen models or teacher-student frameworks. We present RTFDNet, a three-branch encoder-decoder that unifies fusion and decoupling for robust RGB-T segmentation. Synergistic Feature Fusion (SFF) performs channel-wise gated exchange and lightweight spatial attention to inject complementary cues. Cross-Modal Decouple Regularization (CMDR) isolates modality-specific components from the fused representation and supervises unimodal decoders via stop-gradient targets. Region Decouple Regularization (RDR) enforces class-selective prediction consistency in confident regions while blocking gradients to the fusion branch. This feedback loop strengthens unimodal paths without degrading the fused stream, enabling efficient standalone inference at test time. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of RTFDNet, showing consistent performance across varying modality conditions. Our implementation will be released to facilitate further research. Our source code are publicly available at https://github.com/curapima/RTFDNet.

Employing a single, unified model (UM) for both visual understanding (image-to-text: I2T) and and visual generation (text-to-image: T2I) has opened a new direction in Visual Language Model (VLM) research. While UMs can also support broader unimodal tasks (e.g., text-to-text, image-to-image), we focus on the core cross-modal pair T2I and I2T, as consistency between understanding and generation is critical for downstream use. Existing evaluations consider these capabilities in isolation: FID and GenEval for T2I, and benchmarks such as MME, MMBench for I2T. These single-pass metrics do not reveal whether a model that understands a concept can also render it, nor whether meaning is preserved when cycling between image and text modalities. To address this, we introduce the Unified Consistency Framework for Unified Models (UCF-UM), a cyclic evaluation protocol that alternates I2T and T2I over multiple generations to quantify semantic drift. UCF formulates 3 metrics: (i) Mean Cumulative Drift (MCD), an embedding-based measure of overall semantic loss; (ii) Semantic Drift Rate (SDR), that summarizes semantic decay rate; and (iii) Multi-Generation GenEval (MGG), an object-level compliance score extending GenEval. To assess generalization beyond COCO, which is widely used in training; we create a new benchmark ND400, sampled from NoCaps and DOCCI and evaluate on seven recent models. UCF-UM reveals substantial variation in cross-modal stability: some models like BAGEL maintain semantics over many alternations, whereas others like Vila-u drift quickly despite strong single-pass scores. Our results highlight cyclic consistency as a necessary complement to standard I2T and T2I evaluations, and provide practical metrics to consistently assess unified model's cross-modal stability and strength of their shared representations. Code: https://github.com/mollahsabbir/Semantic-Drift-in-Unified-Models

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are evolving from passive observers into active agents, solving problems through Visual Expansion (invoking visual tools) and Knowledge Expansion (open-web search). However, existing evaluations fall short: they lack flexible tool integration, test visual and search tools separately, and evaluate primarily by final answers. Consequently, they cannot verify if tools were actually invoked, applied correctly, or used efficiently. To address this, we introduce Agentic-MME, a process-verified benchmark for Multimodal Agentic Capabilities. It contains 418 real-world tasks across 6 domains and 3 difficulty levels to evaluate capability synergy, featuring over 2,000 stepwise checkpoints that average 10+ person-hours of manual annotation per task. Each task includes a unified evaluation framework supporting sandboxed code and APIs, alongside a human reference trajectory annotated with stepwise checkpoints along dual-axis: S-axis and V-axis. To enable true process-level verification, we audit fine-grained intermediate states rather than just final answers, and quantify efficiency via an overthinking metric relative to human trajectories. Experimental results show the best model, Gemini3-pro, achieves 56.3% overall accuracy, which falls significantly to 23.0% on Level-3 tasks, underscoring the difficulty of real-world multimodal agentic problem solving.

IQ testing has served as a foundational methodology for evaluating human cognitive capabilities, deliberately decoupling assessment from linguistic background, language proficiency, or domain-specific knowledge to isolate core competencies in abstraction and reasoning. Yet, artificial intelligence research currently lacks systematic benchmarks to quantify these critical cognitive dimensions in multimodal systems. To address this critical gap, we propose MM-IQ, a comprehensive evaluation framework comprising 2,710 meticulously curated test items spanning 8 distinct reasoning paradigms. Through systematic evaluation of leading open-source and proprietary multimodal models, our benchmark reveals striking limitations: even state-of-the-art architectures achieve only marginally superior performance to random chance (27.49% vs. 25% baseline accuracy). This substantial performance chasm highlights the inadequacy of current multimodal systems in approximating fundamental human reasoning capacities, underscoring the need for paradigm-shifting advancements to bridge this cognitive divide.

Evaluating generative foundation models on open-ended multimodal understanding (MMU) and generation (MMG) tasks across diverse modalities (e.g., images, audio, video) poses significant challenges due to the complexity of cross-modal interactions. To this end, the idea of utilizing Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) as automated judges has emerged, with encouraging results in assessing vision-language understanding tasks. Moving further, this paper extends MLLM-as-a-Judge across modalities to a unified manner by introducing two benchmarks, TaskAnything and JudgeAnything, to respectively evaluate the overall performance and judging capabilities of MLLMs across any-to-any modality tasks. Specifically, TaskAnything evaluates the MMU and MMG capabilities across 15 any-to-any modality categories, employing 1,500 queries curated from well-established benchmarks. Furthermore, JudgeAnything evaluates the judging capabilities of 5 advanced (e.g., GPT-4o and Gemini-2.0-Flash) from the perspectives of Pair Comparison and Score Evaluation, providing a standardized testbed that incorporates human judgments and detailed rubrics. Our extensive experiments reveal that while these MLLMs show promise in assessing MMU (i.e., achieving an average of 66.55% in Pair Comparison setting and 42.79% in Score Evaluation setting), they encounter significant challenges with MMG tasks (i.e., averaging only 53.37% in Pair Comparison setting and 30.05% in Score Evaluation setting), exposing cross-modality biases and hallucination issues. To address this, we present OmniArena, an automated platform for evaluating omni-models and multimodal reward models. Our work highlights the need for fairer evaluation protocols and stronger alignment with human preferences. The source code and dataset are publicly available at: https://urrealhero.github.io/judgeanythingweb/.

Different from a unimodal model whose input is from a single modality, the input (called multi-modal input) of a multi-modal model is from multiple modalities such as image, 3D points, audio, text, etc. Similar to unimodal models, many existing studies show that a multi-modal model is also vulnerable to adversarial perturbation, where an attacker could add small perturbation to all modalities of a multi-modal input such that the multi-modal model makes incorrect predictions for it. Existing certified defenses are mostly designed for unimodal models, which achieve sub-optimal certified robustness guarantees when extended to multi-modal models as shown in our experimental results. In our work, we propose MMCert, the first certified defense against adversarial attacks to a multi-modal model. We derive a lower bound on the performance of our MMCert under arbitrary adversarial attacks with bounded perturbations to both modalities (e.g., in the context of auto-driving, we bound the number of changed pixels in both RGB image and depth image). We evaluate our MMCert using two benchmark datasets: one for the multi-modal road segmentation task and the other for the multi-modal emotion recognition task. Moreover, we compare our MMCert with a state-of-the-art certified defense extended from unimodal models. Our experimental results show that our MMCert outperforms the baseline.

Next-generation multimodal foundation models capable of any-to-any cross-modal generation and multi-turn interaction will serve as core components of artificial general intelligence systems, playing a pivotal role in human-machine interaction. However, most existing multimodal models remain constrained by autoregressive architectures, whose inherent limitations prevent a balanced integration of understanding and generation capabilities. Although hybrid and decoupling strategies have been explored to address these tasks within unified frameworks separately, their redundant, non-integrated designs limit their applicability to broader scenarios, such as cross-modal retrieval. In this work, we introduce NExT-OMNI, an open-source omnimodal foundation model that achieves unified modeling through discrete flow paradigms. By leveraging metric-induced probability paths and kinetic optimal velocities, NExT-OMNI natively supports any-to-any understanding and generation with enhanced response efficiency, while enabling broader application scenarios through concise unified representations rather than task-decoupled designs. Trained on large-scale interleaved text, image, video, and audio data, NExT-OMNI delivers competitive performance on multimodal generation and understanding benchmarks, while outperforming prior unified models in multi-turn multimodal interaction and cross-modal retrieval, highlighting its architectural advantages as a next-generation multimodal foundation model. To advance further research, we release training details, data protocols, and open-source both the code and model checkpoints.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) recently showed strong capacity in integrating data among multiple modalities, empowered by a generalizable attention architecture. Advanced methods predominantly focus on language-centric tuning while less exploring multimodal tokens mixed through attention, posing challenges in high-level tasks that require fine-grained cognition and emotion understanding. In this work, we identify the attention deficit disorder problem in multimodal learning, caused by inconsistent cross-modal attention and layer-by-layer decayed attention activation. To address this, we propose a novel attention mechanism, termed MOdular Duplex Attention (MODA), simultaneously conducting the inner-modal refinement and inter-modal interaction. MODA employs a correct-after-align strategy to effectively decouple modality alignment from cross-layer token mixing. In the alignment phase, tokens are mapped to duplex modality spaces based on the basis vectors, enabling the interaction between visual and language modality. Further, the correctness of attention scores is ensured through adaptive masked attention, which enhances the model's flexibility by allowing customizable masking patterns for different modalities. Extensive experiments on 21 benchmark datasets verify the effectiveness of MODA in perception, cognition, and emotion tasks. Source code and demo are available in https://zzcheng.top/MODA.

Recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) achieve promising performance on visual and audio benchmarks independently. However, the ability of these models to process cross-modal information synchronously remains largely unexplored. We introduce Daily-Omni, a multiple-choice Audio-Visual QA benchmark featuring 684 real-world videos and 1,197 questions spanning 6 task families that explicitly require cross-modal temporal reasoning. To support scalable benchmark construction, we develop a semi-automatic pipeline for annotation, cross-modal consistency refinement, temporal alignment elicitation, and text-only leakage filtering, followed by human verification. We further provide a diagnostic evaluation suite and extensively evaluate 24 foundation models under 37 model--modality settings (Audio+Video / Audio-only / Video-only / Text-only). Finally, we include a training-free modular diagnostic baseline that composes off-the-shelf unimodal models to serve as a diagnostic baseline and to illustrate how explicit temporal alignment signals affect performance. Results indicate that many end-to-end MLLMs still struggle on alignment-critical questions, suggesting that robust cross-modal temporal alignment remains an important open challenge.

Omni-modal language models are intended to jointly understand audio, visual inputs, and language, but benchmark gains can be inflated when visual evidence alone is enough to answer a query. We study whether current omni-modal benchmarks separate visual shortcuts from genuine audio-visual-language evidence integration, and how post-training behaves under a visually debiased evaluation setting. We audit nine omni-modal benchmarks with visual-only probing, remove visually solvable queries, and retain full subsets when filtering is undefined or would make comparisons unstable. This yields OmniClean, a cleaned evaluation view with 8,551 retained queries from 16,968 audited queries. On OmniClean, we evaluate OmniBoost, a three-stage post-training recipe based on Qwen2.5-Omni-3B: mixed bi-modal SFT, mixed-modality RLVR, and SFT on self-distilled data. Balanced bi-modal SFT gives limited and uneven gains, RLVR provides the first broad improvement, and self-distillation reshapes the benchmark profile. After SFT on self-distilled data, the 3B model reaches performance comparable to, and in aggregate slightly above, Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct without using a stronger omni-modal teacher. These results show that omni-modal progress is easier to interpret when evaluation controls visual leakage, and that small omni-modal models can benefit from staged post-training with self-distilled omni-query supervision. Project page: https://cheliu-computation.github.io/omni/

Multimodal learning enhances the perceptual capabilities of cognitive systems by integrating information from different sensory modalities. However, existing multimodal fusion research typically assumes static integration, not fully incorporating key dynamic mechanisms found in the brain. Specifically, the brain exhibits an inverse effectiveness phenomenon, wherein weaker unimodal cues yield stronger multisensory integration benefits; conversely, when individual modal cues are stronger, the effect of fusion is diminished. This mechanism enables biological systems to achieve robust cognition even with scarce or noisy perceptual cues. Inspired by this biological mechanism, we explore the relationship between multimodal output and information from individual modalities, proposing an inverse effectiveness driven multimodal fusion (IEMF) strategy. By incorporating this strategy into neural networks, we achieve more efficient integration with improved model performance and computational efficiency, demonstrating up to 50% reduction in computational cost across diverse fusion methods. We conduct experiments on audio-visual classification, continual learning, and question answering tasks to validate our method. Results consistently demonstrate that our method performs excellently in these tasks. To verify universality and generalization, we also conduct experiments on Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) and Spiking Neural Networks (SNN), with results showing good adaptability to both network types. Our research emphasizes the potential of incorporating biologically inspired mechanisms into multimodal networks and provides promising directions for the future development of multimodal artificial intelligence. The code is available at https://github.com/Brain-Cog-Lab/IEMF.

Multimodal foundation models aim to create a unified representation space that abstracts away from surface features like language syntax or modality differences. To investigate this, we study the internal representations of three recent models, analyzing the model activations from semantically equivalent sentences across languages in the text and speech modalities. Our findings reveal that: 1) Cross-modal representations converge over model layers, except in the initial layers specialized at text and speech processing. 2) Length adaptation is crucial for reducing the cross-modal gap between text and speech, although current approaches' effectiveness is primarily limited to high-resource languages. 3) Speech exhibits larger cross-lingual differences than text. 4) For models not explicitly trained for modality-agnostic representations, the modality gap is more prominent than the language gap.

Assessing human skill levels in complex activities is a challenging problem with applications in sports, rehabilitation, and training. In this work, we present SkillFormer, a parameter-efficient architecture for unified multi-view proficiency estimation from egocentric and exocentric videos. Building on the TimeSformer backbone, SkillFormer introduces a CrossViewFusion module that fuses view-specific features using multi-head cross-attention, learnable gating, and adaptive self-calibration. We leverage Low-Rank Adaptation to fine-tune only a small subset of parameters, significantly reducing training costs. In fact, when evaluated on the EgoExo4D dataset, SkillFormer achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in multi-view settings while demonstrating remarkable computational efficiency, using 4.5x fewer parameters and requiring 3.75x fewer training epochs than prior baselines. It excels in multiple structured tasks, confirming the value of multi-view integration for fine-grained skill assessment.

Recent advances in video generation have produced vivid content that are often indistinguishable from real videos, making AI-generated video detection an emerging societal challenge. Prior AIGC detection benchmarks mostly evaluate video without audio, target broad narrative domains, and focus on classification solely. Yet it remains unclear whether state-of-the-art video generation models can produce immersive, audio-paired videos that reliably deceive humans and VLMs. To this end, we introduce Video Reality Test, an ASMR-sourced video benchmark suite for testing perceptual realism under tight audio-visual coupling, featuring the following dimensions: (i) Immersive ASMR video-audio sources. Built on carefully curated real ASMR videos, the benchmark targets fine-grained action-object interactions with diversity across objects, actions, and backgrounds. (ii) Peer-Review evaluation. An adversarial creator-reviewer protocol where video generation models act as creators aiming to fool reviewers, while VLMs serve as reviewers seeking to identify fakeness. Our experimental findings show: The best creator Veo3.1-Fast even fools most VLMs: the strongest reviewer (Gemini 2.5-Pro) achieves only 56\% accuracy (random 50\%), far below that of human experts (81.25\%). Adding audio improves real-fake discrimination, yet superficial cues such as watermarks can still significantly mislead models. These findings delineate the current boundary of video generation realism and expose limitations of VLMs in perceptual fidelity and audio-visual consistency. Our code is available at https://github.com/video-reality-test/video-reality-test.

Recent unified models integrate understanding experts (e.g., LLMs) with generative experts (e.g., diffusion models), achieving strong multimodal performance. However, recent advanced methods such as BAGEL and LMFusion follow the Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) paradigm, adopting a symmetric design that mirrors one expert to another for convenient initialization and fusion, which remains suboptimal due to inherent modality discrepancies. In this work, we propose HBridge, an asymmetric H-shaped architecture that enables heterogeneous experts to optimally leverage pretrained priors from their respective modality domains. Unlike prior dense fusion strategies that straightforwardly connect all layers between experts via shared attention, HBridge selectively bridges intermediate layers, reducing over 40% attention sharing, which improves efficiency and enhances generation quality. Shallow and deep layers, which capture modality-specific representations, are decoupled, while mid-layer bridging promotes semantic alignment. To further strengthen cross-modal coherence, we introduce semantic reconstruction tokens that explicitly guide the generative expert to reconstruct visual semantic tokens of the target image. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and superior performance of HBridge, establishing a new paradigm for unified multimodal generation.

Despite the rapid progress of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), the field lacks benchmarks that rigorously diagnose their true reasoning abilities and chart meaningful progress toward human-like multimodal intelligence. Most existing evaluations focus on piecemeal or disconnected tasks, obscuring critical cognitive weaknesses and providing little insight for targeted improvement. To address this gap, we introduce BloomBench, part of the Almieyar benchmarking series, the first cognitively human-grounded, bilingual (English-Arabic) multimodal benchmark for VLMs. Grounded in Bloom's Taxonomy, BloomBench systematically evaluates six levels of cognition (Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyze, Evaluate, Create) through carefully designed image-question-answer tasks. Built with a semi-automated pipeline and validated through a stratified hybrid quality assurance protocol, it ensures scalability, cultural inclusivity, and linguistic fidelity. Leveraging this framework, we conduct a comprehensive study of state-of-the-art VLMs to diagnose their cognitive profiles. Our analysis reveals a sharp cognitive asymmetry: while state-of-the-art models achieve strong performance ceilings in semantic understanding, they struggle substantially with factual recall and creative synthesis. This demonstrates that current general multimodal proficiency masks deeper limitations in specific cognitive layers. Furthermore, our study highlights a critical performance gap between Arabic and English, exposing limitations in current cross-lingual multimodal reasoning. These findings establish a foundation for developing more cognitively aligned and inclusive VLMs. The benchmark framework and dataset is available at: https://github.com/qcri/Almieyar-Oryx-BloomBench.

Cross-capability transfer is a key challenge in large language model (LLM) research, with applications in multi-task integration, model compression, and continual learning. Recent works like FuseLLM and FuseChat have demonstrated the potential of transferring multiple model capabilities to lightweight models, enhancing adaptability and efficiency, which motivates our investigation into more efficient cross-capability transfer methods. However, existing approaches primarily focus on small, homogeneous models, limiting their applicability. For large, heterogeneous models, knowledge distillation with full-parameter fine-tuning often overlooks the student model's intrinsic capacity and risks catastrophic forgetting, while PEFT methods struggle to effectively absorb knowledge from source LLMs. To address these issues, we introduce GraftLLM, a novel method that stores source model capabilities in a target model with SkillPack format. This approach preserves general capabilities, reduces parameter conflicts, and supports forget-free continual learning and model fusion. We employ a module-aware adaptive compression strategy to compress parameter updates, ensuring efficient storage while maintaining task-specific knowledge. The resulting SkillPack serves as a compact and transferable knowledge carrier, ideal for heterogeneous model fusion and continual learning. Experiments across various scenarios demonstrate that GraftLLM outperforms existing techniques in knowledge transfer, knowledge fusion, and forget-free learning, providing a scalable and efficient solution for cross-capability transfer. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/duguodong7/GraftLLM.

Low-light image enhancement (LLIE) is a fundamental yet challenging task due to the presence of noise, loss of detail, and poor contrast in images captured under insufficient lighting conditions. Recent methods often rely solely on pixel-level transformations of RGB images, neglecting the rich contextual information available from multiple visual modalities. In this paper, we present ModalFormer, the first large-scale multimodal framework for LLIE that fully exploits nine auxiliary modalities to achieve state-of-the-art performance. Our model comprises two main components: a Cross-modal Transformer (CM-T) designed to restore corrupted images while seamlessly integrating multimodal information, and multiple auxiliary subnetworks dedicated to multimodal feature reconstruction. Central to the CM-T is our novel Cross-modal Multi-headed Self-Attention mechanism (CM-MSA), which effectively fuses RGB data with modality-specific features--including deep feature embeddings, segmentation information, geometric cues, and color information--to generate information-rich hybrid attention maps. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate ModalFormer's state-of-the-art performance in LLIE. Pre-trained models and results are made available at https://github.com/albrateanu/ModalFormer.

Smart contracts are increasingly targeted by adversaries employing obfuscation techniques such as bogus code injection and control flow manipulation to evade vulnerability detection. Existing multimodal methods often process semantic, temporal, and structural features in isolation and fuse them using simple strategies such as concatenation, which neglects cross-modal interactions and weakens robustness, as obfuscation of a single modality can sharply degrade detection accuracy. To address these challenges, we propose ContractShield, a robust multimodal framework with a novel fusion mechanism that effectively correlates multiple complementary features through a three-level fusion. Self-attention first identifies patterns that indicate vulnerability within each feature space. Cross-modal attention then establishes meaningful connections between complementary signals across modalities. Then, adaptive weighting dynamically calibrates feature contributions based on their reliability under obfuscation. For feature extraction, ContractShield integrates (1) CodeBERT with a sliding window mechanism to capture semantic dependencies in source code, (2) Extended long short-term memory (xLSTM) to model temporal dynamics in opcode sequences, and (3) GATv2 to identify structural invariants in control flow graphs (CFGs) that remain stable across obfuscation. Empirical evaluation demonstrates resilience of ContractShield, achieving a 89 percentage Hamming Score with only a 1-3 percentage drop compared to non-obfuscated data. The framework simultaneously detects five major vulnerability types with 91 percentage F1-score, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches by 6-15 percentage under adversarial conditions.

Image matching for both cross-view and cross-modality plays a critical role in multimodal perception. In practice, the modality gap caused by different imaging systems/styles poses great challenges to the matching task. Existing works try to extract invariant features for specific modalities and train on limited datasets, showing poor generalization. In this paper, we present MINIMA, a unified image matching framework for multiple cross-modal cases. Without pursuing fancy modules, our MINIMA aims to enhance universal performance from the perspective of data scaling up. For such purpose, we propose a simple yet effective data engine that can freely produce a large dataset containing multiple modalities, rich scenarios, and accurate matching labels. Specifically, we scale up the modalities from cheap but rich RGB-only matching data, by means of generative models. Under this setting, the matching labels and rich diversity of the RGB dataset are well inherited by the generated multimodal data. Benefiting from this, we construct MD-syn, a new comprehensive dataset that fills the data gap for general multimodal image matching. With MD-syn, we can directly train any advanced matching pipeline on randomly selected modality pairs to obtain cross-modal ability. Extensive experiments on in-domain and zero-shot matching tasks, including 19 cross-modal cases, demonstrate that our MINIMA can significantly outperform the baselines and even surpass modality-specific methods. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/LSXI7/MINIMA .

With the rapid advancement of sophisticated synthetic audio-visual content, e.g., for subtle malicious manipulations, ensuring the integrity of digital media has become paramount. This work presents a novel approach to temporal localization of deepfakes by leveraging Audio-Visual Speech Representation Reconstruction (AuViRe). Specifically, our approach reconstructs speech representations from one modality (e.g., lip movements) based on the other (e.g., audio waveform). Cross-modal reconstruction is significantly more challenging in manipulated video segments, leading to amplified discrepancies, thereby providing robust discriminative cues for precise temporal forgery localization. AuViRe outperforms the state of the art by +8.9 AP@0.95 on LAV-DF, +9.6 AP@0.5 on AV-Deepfake1M, and +5.1 AUC on an in-the-wild experiment. Code available at https://github.com/mever-team/auvire.

This paper extends Cross Modal Generalization (CMG) to open-set environments by proposing the more challenging Open-set Cross Modal Generalization (OSCMG) task. This task evaluates multimodal unified representations in open-set conditions, addressing the limitations of prior closed-set cross-modal evaluations. OSCMG requires not only cross-modal knowledge transfer but also robust generalization to unseen classes within new modalities, a scenario frequently encountered in real-world applications. Existing multimodal unified representation work lacks consideration for open-set environments. To tackle this, we propose MICU, comprising two key components: Fine-Coarse Masked multimodal InfoNCE (FCMI) and Cross modal Unified Jigsaw Puzzles (CUJP). FCMI enhances multimodal alignment by applying contrastive learning at both holistic semantic and temporal levels, incorporating masking to enhance generalization. CUJP enhances feature diversity and model uncertainty by integrating modality-agnostic feature selection with self-supervised learning, thereby strengthening the model's ability to handle unknown categories in open-set tasks. Extensive experiments on CMG and the newly proposed OSCMG validate the effectiveness of our approach. The code is available at https://github.com/haihuangcode/CMG.

Pre-trained multi-modal Vision-Language Models like CLIP are widely used off-the-shelf for a variety of applications. In this paper, we show that the common practice of individually exploiting the text or image encoders of these powerful multi-modal models is highly suboptimal for intra-modal tasks like image-to-image retrieval. We argue that this is inherently due to the CLIP-style inter-modal contrastive loss that does not enforce any intra-modal constraints, leading to what we call intra-modal misalignment. To demonstrate this, we leverage two optimization-based modality inversion techniques that map representations from their input modality to the complementary one without any need for auxiliary data or additional trained adapters. We empirically show that, in the intra-modal tasks of image-to-image and text-to-text retrieval, approaching these tasks inter-modally significantly improves performance with respect to intra-modal baselines on more than fifteen datasets. Additionally, we demonstrate that approaching a native inter-modal task (e.g. zero-shot image classification) intra-modally decreases performance, further validating our findings. Finally, we show that incorporating an intra-modal term in the pre-training objective or narrowing the modality gap between the text and image feature embedding spaces helps reduce the intra-modal misalignment. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/miccunifi/Cross-the-Gap.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs), equipped with increasingly advanced planning and tool-use capabilities, are evolving into autonomous agents capable of performing multimodal web browsing and deep search in open-world environments. However, existing benchmarks for multimodal browsing remain limited in task complexity, evidence accessibility, and evaluation granularity, hindering comprehensive and reproducible assessments of deep search capabilities. To address these limitations, we introduce BrowseComp-V^3, a novel benchmark consisting of 300 carefully curated and challenging questions spanning diverse domains. The benchmark emphasizes deep, multi-level, and cross-modal multi-hop reasoning, where critical evidence is interleaved across textual and visual modalities within and across web pages. All supporting evidence is strictly required to be publicly searchable, ensuring fairness and reproducibility. Beyond final-answer accuracy, we incorporate an expert-validated, subgoal-driven process evaluation mechanism that enables fine-grained analysis of intermediate reasoning behaviors and systematic characterization of capability boundaries. In addition, we propose OmniSeeker, a unified multimodal browsing agent framework integrating diverse web search and visual perception tools. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that even state-of-the-art models achieve only 36% accuracy on our benchmark, revealing critical bottlenecks in multimodal information integration and fine-grained perception. Our results highlight a fundamental gap between current model capabilities and robust multimodal deep search in real-world settings.

Integrating and processing information from various sources or modalities are critical for obtaining a comprehensive and accurate perception of the real world in autonomous systems and cyber-physical systems. Drawing inspiration from neuroscience, we develop the Information-Theoretic Hierarchical Perception (ITHP) model, which utilizes the concept of information bottleneck. Different from most traditional fusion models that incorporate all modalities identically in neural networks, our model designates a prime modality and regards the remaining modalities as detectors in the information pathway, serving to distill the flow of information. Our proposed perception model focuses on constructing an effective and compact information flow by achieving a balance between the minimization of mutual information between the latent state and the input modal state, and the maximization of mutual information between the latent states and the remaining modal states. This approach leads to compact latent state representations that retain relevant information while minimizing redundancy, thereby substantially enhancing the performance of multimodal representation learning. Experimental evaluations on the MUStARD, CMU-MOSI, and CMU-MOSEI datasets demonstrate that our model consistently distills crucial information in multimodal learning scenarios, outperforming state-of-the-art benchmarks. Remarkably, on the CMU-MOSI dataset, ITHP surpasses human-level performance in the multimodal sentiment binary classification task across all evaluation metrics (i.e., Binary Accuracy, F1 Score, Mean Absolute Error, and Pearson Correlation).

Scene understanding based on image segmentation is a crucial component of autonomous vehicles. Pixel-wise semantic segmentation of RGB images can be advanced by exploiting complementary features from the supplementary modality (X-modality). However, covering a wide variety of sensors with a modality-agnostic model remains an unresolved problem due to variations in sensor characteristics among different modalities. Unlike previous modality-specific methods, in this work, we propose a unified fusion framework, CMX, for RGB-X semantic segmentation. To generalize well across different modalities, that often include supplements as well as uncertainties, a unified cross-modal interaction is crucial for modality fusion. Specifically, we design a Cross-Modal Feature Rectification Module (CM-FRM) to calibrate bi-modal features by leveraging the features from one modality to rectify the features of the other modality. With rectified feature pairs, we deploy a Feature Fusion Module (FFM) to perform sufficient exchange of long-range contexts before mixing. To verify CMX, for the first time, we unify five modalities complementary to RGB, i.e., depth, thermal, polarization, event, and LiDAR. Extensive experiments show that CMX generalizes well to diverse multi-modal fusion, achieving state-of-the-art performances on five RGB-Depth benchmarks, as well as RGB-Thermal, RGB-Polarization, and RGB-LiDAR datasets. Besides, to investigate the generalizability to dense-sparse data fusion, we establish an RGB-Event semantic segmentation benchmark based on the EventScape dataset, on which CMX sets the new state-of-the-art. The source code of CMX is publicly available at https://github.com/huaaaliu/RGBX_Semantic_Segmentation.

Learning from multiple modalities, such as audio and video, offers opportunities for leveraging complementary information, enhancing robustness, and improving contextual understanding and performance. However, combining such modalities presents challenges, especially when modalities differ in data structure, predictive contribution, and the complexity of their learning processes. It has been observed that one modality can potentially dominate the learning process, hindering the effective utilization of information from other modalities and leading to sub-optimal model performance. To address this issue the vast majority of previous works suggest to assess the unimodal contributions and dynamically adjust the training to equalize them. We improve upon previous work by introducing a multi-loss objective and further refining the balancing process, allowing it to dynamically adjust the learning pace of each modality in both directions, acceleration and deceleration, with the ability to phase out balancing effects upon convergence. We achieve superior results across three audio-video datasets: on CREMA-D, models with ResNet backbone encoders surpass the previous best by 1.9% to 12.4%, and Conformer backbone models deliver improvements ranging from 2.8% to 14.1% across different fusion methods. On AVE, improvements range from 2.7% to 7.7%, while on UCF101, gains reach up to 6.1%.

Cognitive science suggests that spatial ability develops progressively-from perception to reasoning and interaction. Yet in multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), this hierarchy remains poorly understood, as most studies focus on a narrow set of tasks. We introduce SpatialTree, a cognitive-science-inspired hierarchy that organizes spatial abilities into four levels: low-level perception (L1), mental mapping (L2), simulation (L3), and agentic competence (L4). Based on this taxonomy, we construct the first capability-centric hierarchical benchmark, thoroughly evaluating mainstream MLLMs across 27 sub-abilities. The evaluation results reveal a clear structure: L1 skills are largely orthogonal, whereas higher-level skills are strongly correlated, indicating increasing interdependency. Through targeted supervised fine-tuning, we uncover a surprising transfer dynamic-negative transfer within L1, but strong cross-level transfer from low- to high-level abilities with notable synergy. Finally, we explore how to improve the entire hierarchy. We find that naive RL that encourages extensive "thinking" is unreliable: it helps complex reasoning but hurts intuitive perception. We propose a simple auto-think strategy that suppresses unnecessary deliberation, enabling RL to consistently improve performance across all levels. By building SpatialTree, we provide a proof-of-concept framework for understanding and systematically scaling spatial abilities in MLLMs.

Reusable skills are a key mechanism for extending agent capabilities, allowing agents to accumulate experience and solve increasingly complex tasks. Yet most existing skill-learning methods store reusable experience as text-only assets, such as instructions, reasoning traces, or summarized trajectories. We argue that this text-only paradigm creates a fundamental bottleneck for visual-centric tasks, where reusable knowledge often depends on spatial layout, visual grounding, fine-grained appearance, and localized state changes. To address this limitation, we propose \NAME, a multimodal skill paradigm that combines declarative textual logic with explicit visual support. We distinguish three reusable forms: static priors for stable spatial conventions, dynamic priors for in-situ visual working memory, and interleaved visual skills that bind ordered text steps to the source frames, screenshots, or page regions that justify them. Rather than only describing what to do, visual skills also encode where to look, how to inspect, and how to verify visual outcomes. To scale visual-skill construction, we introduce \SYSTEM, an automatic system that converts agent experience into reusable multimodal skills by preserving textual reasoning, spatial references, visual boundaries, and interaction patterns from task trajectories. Experiments on GUI and other visual-centric tasks show that visual skills consistently outperform text-only skills, particularly when success requires spatial correspondence, visual evidence, and state-aware interaction. These results support our central position: reusable agent skills should go beyond text and become multimodal assets for future multimodal agents.

Bridging different modalities lies at the heart of cross-modality generation. While conventional approaches treat the text modality as a conditioning signal that gradually guides the denoising process from Gaussian noise to the target image modality, we explore a much simpler paradigm-directly evolving between text and image modalities through flow matching. This requires projecting both modalities into a shared latent space, which poses a significant challenge due to their inherently different representations: text is highly semantic and encoded as 1D tokens, whereas images are spatially redundant and represented as 2D latent embeddings. To address this, we introduce FlowTok, a minimal framework that seamlessly flows across text and images by encoding images into a compact 1D token representation. Compared to prior methods, this design reduces the latent space size by 3.3x at an image resolution of 256, eliminating the need for complex conditioning mechanisms or noise scheduling. Moreover, FlowTok naturally extends to image-to-text generation under the same formulation. With its streamlined architecture centered around compact 1D tokens, FlowTok is highly memory-efficient, requires significantly fewer training resources, and achieves much faster sampling speeds-all while delivering performance comparable to state-of-the-art models. Code will be available at https://github.com/bytedance/1d-tokenizer.

Human sensing, which employs various sensors and advanced deep learning technologies to accurately capture and interpret human body information, has significantly impacted fields like public security and robotics. However, current human sensing primarily depends on modalities such as cameras and LiDAR, each of which has its own strengths and limitations. Furthermore, existing multi-modal fusion solutions are typically designed for fixed modality combinations, requiring extensive retraining when modalities are added or removed for diverse scenarios. In this paper, we propose a modality-invariant foundation model for all modalities, X-Fi, to address this issue. X-Fi enables the independent or combinatory use of sensor modalities without additional training by utilizing a transformer structure to accommodate variable input sizes and incorporating a novel "X-fusion" mechanism to preserve modality-specific features during multimodal integration. This approach not only enhances adaptability but also facilitates the learning of complementary features across modalities. Extensive experiments conducted on the MM-Fi and XRF55 datasets, employing six distinct modalities, demonstrate that X-Fi achieves state-of-the-art performance in human pose estimation (HPE) and human activity recognition (HAR) tasks. The findings indicate that our proposed model can efficiently support a wide range of human sensing applications, ultimately contributing to the evolution of scalable, multimodal sensing technologies.

The Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) is currently experiencing rapid growth, driven by the advanced capabilities of LLMs. Unlike earlier specialists, existing MLLMs are evolving towards a Multimodal Generalist paradigm. Initially limited to understanding multiple modalities, these models have advanced to not only comprehend but also generate across modalities. Their capabilities have expanded from coarse-grained to fine-grained multimodal understanding and from supporting limited modalities to arbitrary ones. While many benchmarks exist to assess MLLMs, a critical question arises: Can we simply assume that higher performance across tasks indicates a stronger MLLM capability, bringing us closer to human-level AI? We argue that the answer is not as straightforward as it seems. This project introduces General-Level, an evaluation framework that defines 5-scale levels of MLLM performance and generality, offering a methodology to compare MLLMs and gauge the progress of existing systems towards more robust multimodal generalists and, ultimately, towards AGI. At the core of the framework is the concept of Synergy, which measures whether models maintain consistent capabilities across comprehension and generation, and across multiple modalities. To support this evaluation, we present General-Bench, which encompasses a broader spectrum of skills, modalities, formats, and capabilities, including over 700 tasks and 325,800 instances. The evaluation results that involve over 100 existing state-of-the-art MLLMs uncover the capability rankings of generalists, highlighting the challenges in reaching genuine AI. We expect this project to pave the way for future research on next-generation multimodal foundation models, providing a robust infrastructure to accelerate the realization of AGI. Project page: https://generalist.top/

We abstract the features (i.e. learned representations) of multi-modal data into 1) uni-modal features, which can be learned from uni-modal training, and 2) paired features, which can only be learned from cross-modal interactions. Multi-modal models are expected to benefit from cross-modal interactions on the basis of ensuring uni-modal feature learning. However, recent supervised multi-modal late-fusion training approaches still suffer from insufficient learning of uni-modal features on each modality. We prove that this phenomenon does hurt the model's generalization ability. To this end, we propose to choose a targeted late-fusion learning method for the given supervised multi-modal task from Uni-Modal Ensemble(UME) and the proposed Uni-Modal Teacher(UMT), according to the distribution of uni-modal and paired features. We demonstrate that, under a simple guiding strategy, we can achieve comparable results to other complex late-fusion or intermediate-fusion methods on various multi-modal datasets, including VGG-Sound, Kinetics-400, UCF101, and ModelNet40.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) process visual, acoustic, and textual inputs, addressing the limitations of single-modality LLMs. However, existing benchmarks often overlook tri-modal evaluation in Traditional Chinese and do not consider inference latency. To address this, we introduce Multi-TW, the first Traditional Chinese benchmark for evaluating the performance and latency of any-to-any multimodal models. Multi-TW includes 900 multiple-choice questions (image and text, audio and text pairs) sourced from official proficiency tests developed with the Steering Committee for the Test of Proficiency-Huayu (SC-TOP). We evaluated various any-to-any models and vision-language models (VLMs) with audio transcription. Our results show that closed-source models generally outperform open-source ones across modalities, although open-source models can perform well in audio tasks. End-to-end any-to-any pipelines offer clear latency advantages compared to VLMs using separate audio transcription. Multi-TW presents a comprehensive view of model capabilities and highlights the need for Traditional Chinese fine-tuning and efficient multimodal architectures.

Accurate and reliable personality assessment plays a vital role in many fields, such as emotional intelligence, mental health diagnostics, and personalized education. Unlike fleeting emotions, personality traits are stable, often subconsciously leaked through language, facial expressions, and body behaviors, with asynchronous patterns across modalities. It was hard to model personality semantics with traditional superficial features and seemed impossible to achieve effective cross-modal understanding. To address these challenges, we propose a novel personality assessment framework called \textbf{Traits Run Deep}. It employs \textbf{psychology-informed prompts} to elicit high-level personality-relevant semantic representations. Besides, it devises a \textbf{Text-Centric Trait Fusion Network} that anchors rich text semantics to align and integrate asynchronous signals from other modalities. To be specific, such fusion module includes a Chunk-Wise Projector to decrease dimensionality, a Cross-Modal Connector and a Text Feature Enhancer for effective modality fusion and an ensemble regression head to improve generalization in data-scarce situations. To our knowledge, we are the first to apply personality-specific prompts to guide large language models (LLMs) in extracting personality-aware semantics for improved representation quality. Furthermore, extracting and fusing audio-visual apparent behavior features further improves the accuracy. Experimental results on the AVI validation set have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed components, i.e., approximately a 45\% reduction in mean squared error (MSE). Final evaluations on the test set of the AVI Challenge 2025 confirm our method's superiority, ranking first in the Personality Assessment track. The source code will be made available at https://github.com/MSA-LMC/TraitsRunDeep.

While LLM-based agents excel at planning and executing long action sequences, their execution often remains inconsistent across trials, limiting reliability. Consolidating agent consistency requires distilling trial-error trajectories into reusable skills that preserve task-relevant invariants while discarding trajectory-specific noise. However, in multimodal settings, the key challenge is not only that useful invariants are distributed across vision and language information, but that different modalities support different kinds of reusable skill content: while some skills are verbalizable and interpretable, others reside in perceptual evidence beyond text. Text-only skills may lose perceptual cues, whereas storing text and perception naively introduces redundancy and noise. Existing inference-time methods, such as self-consistency, improve reliability through costly multi-sample decoding, while internalization strategies lack a way to separate verbalizable skill content from residual perceptual information. To address this, we introduce Conditional Multimodal Information Bottleneck (CMIB), a method for multimodal skill construction. CMIB begins with a joint bottleneck over multimodal skills and derives an exact sequential decomposition: (1) a text-stage bottleneck distilling interpretable skill cards, and (2) a conditional multimodal bottleneck compressing only residual information in perception that remains predictive beyond text. Unlike naive two-stream formulations, CMIB explicitly conditions the multimodal latent on the text skill, thus structurally reducing cross-modal redundancy and enabling independent control over textual and perceptual compression. We instantiate CMIB with a variational objective that makes its conditional decomposition tractable to optimize, yielding reusable multimodal skills that improve execution stability without incurring multi-sample inference overhead.

How does audio describe the world around us? In this work, we propose a method for generating images of visual scenes from diverse in-the-wild sounds. This cross-modal generation task is challenging due to the significant information gap between auditory and visual signals. We address this challenge by designing a model that aligns audio-visual modalities by enriching audio features with visual information and translating them into the visual latent space. These features are then fed into the pre-trained image generator to produce images. To enhance image quality, we use sound source localization to select audio-visual pairs with strong cross-modal correlations. Our method achieves substantially better results on the VEGAS and VGGSound datasets compared to previous work and demonstrates control over the generation process through simple manipulations to the input waveform or latent space. Furthermore, we analyze the geometric properties of the learned embedding space and demonstrate that our learning approach effectively aligns audio-visual signals for cross-modal generation. Based on this analysis, we show that our method is agnostic to specific design choices, showing its generalizability by integrating various model architectures and different types of audio-visual data.

The sequential structure of videos poses a challenge to the ability of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to locate multi-frame evidence and conduct multimodal reasoning. However, existing video benchmarks mainly focus on understanding tasks, which only require models to match frames mentioned in the question (hereafter referred to as "question frame") and perceive a few adjacent frames. To address this gap, we propose MMR-V: A Benchmark for Multimodal Deep Reasoning in Videos. The benchmark is characterized by the following features. (1) Long-range, multi-frame reasoning: Models are required to infer and analyze evidence frames that may be far from the question frame. (2) Beyond perception: Questions cannot be answered through direct perception alone but require reasoning over hidden information. (3) Reliability: All tasks are manually annotated, referencing extensive real-world user understanding to align with common perceptions. (4) Confusability: Carefully designed distractor annotation strategies to reduce model shortcuts. MMR-V consists of 317 videos and 1,257 tasks. Our experiments reveal that current models still struggle with multi-modal reasoning; even the best-performing model, o4-mini, achieves only 52.5% accuracy. Additionally, current reasoning enhancement strategies (Chain-of-Thought and scaling test-time compute) bring limited gains. Further analysis indicates that the CoT demanded for multi-modal reasoning differs from it in textual reasoning, which partly explains the limited performance gains. We hope that MMR-V can inspire further research into enhancing multi-modal reasoning capabilities.

Multimodal learning has gained attention for its capacity to integrate information from different modalities. However, it is often hindered by the multimodal imbalance problem, where certain modality dominates while others remain underutilized. Although recent studies have proposed various methods to alleviate this problem, they lack comprehensive and fair comparisons. In this paper, we systematically categorize various mainstream multimodal imbalance algorithms into four groups based on the strategies they employ to mitigate imbalance. To facilitate a comprehensive evaluation of these methods, we introduce BalanceBenchmark, a benchmark including multiple widely used multidimensional datasets and evaluation metrics from three perspectives: performance, imbalance degree, and complexity. To ensure fair comparisons, we have developed a modular and extensible toolkit that standardizes the experimental workflow across different methods. Based on the experiments using BalanceBenchmark, we have identified several key insights into the characteristics and advantages of different method groups in terms of performance, balance degree and computational complexity. We expect such analysis could inspire more efficient approaches to address the imbalance problem in the future, as well as foundation models. The code of the toolkit is available at https://github.com/GeWu-Lab/BalanceBenchmark.

While the field of multi-modal learning keeps growing fast, the deficiency of the standard joint training paradigm has become clear through recent studies. They attribute the sub-optimal performance of the jointly trained model to the modality competition phenomenon. Existing works attempt to improve the jointly trained model by modulating the training process. Despite their effectiveness, those methods can only apply to late fusion models. More importantly, the mechanism of the modality competition remains unexplored. In this paper, we first propose an adaptive gradient modulation method that can boost the performance of multi-modal models with various fusion strategies. Extensive experiments show that our method surpasses all existing modulation methods. Furthermore, to have a quantitative understanding of the modality competition and the mechanism behind the effectiveness of our modulation method, we introduce a novel metric to measure the competition strength. This metric is built on the mono-modal concept, a function that is designed to represent the competition-less state of a modality. Through systematic investigation, our results confirm the intuition that the modulation encourages the model to rely on the more informative modality. In addition, we find that the jointly trained model typically has a preferred modality on which the competition is weaker than other modalities. However, this preferred modality need not dominate others. Our code will be available at https://github.com/lihong2303/AGM_ICCV2023.

Recent advancements in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated significant progress in tackling complex multimodal tasks. Among these cutting-edge developments, Google's Bard stands out for its remarkable multimodal capabilities, promoting comprehensive comprehension and reasoning across various domains. This work presents an early and holistic evaluation of LVLMs' multimodal abilities, with a particular focus on Bard, by proposing a lightweight variant of LVLM-eHub, named Tiny LVLM-eHub. In comparison to the vanilla version, Tiny LVLM-eHub possesses several appealing properties. Firstly, it provides a systematic assessment of six categories of multimodal capabilities, including visual perception, visual knowledge acquisition, visual reasoning, visual commonsense, object hallucination, and embodied intelligence, through quantitative evaluation of 42 standard text-related visual benchmarks. Secondly, it conducts an in-depth analysis of LVLMs' predictions using the ChatGPT Ensemble Evaluation (CEE), which leads to a robust and accurate evaluation and exhibits improved alignment with human evaluation compared to the word matching approach. Thirdly, it comprises a mere 2.1K image-text pairs, facilitating ease of use for practitioners to evaluate their own offline LVLMs. Through extensive experimental analysis, this study demonstrates that Bard outperforms previous LVLMs in most multimodal capabilities except object hallucination, to which Bard is still susceptible. Tiny LVLM-eHub serves as a baseline evaluation for various LVLMs and encourages innovative strategies aimed at advancing multimodal techniques. Our project is publicly available at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/Multi-Modality-Arena.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a diverse range of multimodal tasks. However, these models suffer from a core problem known as text dominance: they depend heavily on text for their inference, while underutilizing other modalities. While prior work has acknowledged this phenomenon in vision-language tasks, often attributing it to data biases or model architectures. In this paper, we conduct the first systematic investigation of text dominance across diverse data modalities, including images, videos, audio, time-series, and graphs. To measure this imbalance, we propose two evaluation metrics: the Modality Dominance Index (MDI) and the Attention Efficiency Index (AEI). Our comprehensive analysis reveals that text dominance is both significant and pervasive across all tested modalities. Our in-depth analysis identifies three underlying causes: attention dilution from severe token redundancy in non-textual modalities, the influence of fusion architecture design, and task formulations that implicitly favor textual inputs. Furthermore, we propose a simple token compression method that effectively rebalances model attention. Applying this method to LLaVA-7B, for instance, drastically reduces its MDI from 10.23 to a well-balanced value of 0.86. Our analysis and methodological framework offer a foundation for the development of more equitable and comprehensive multimodal language models.

While Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) have achieved remarkable success in cross-modal comprehension, a significant gap persists in their ability to leverage such internal knowledge for high-quality generation. We formalize this discrepancy as Conduction Aphasia, a phenomenon where models accurately interpret multimodal inputs but struggle to translate that understanding into faithful and controllable synthesis. To address this, we propose UniCorn, a simple yet elegant self-improvement framework that eliminates the need for external data or teacher supervision. By partitioning a single UMM into three collaborative roles: Proposer, Solver, and Judge, UniCorn generates high-quality interactions via self-play and employs cognitive pattern reconstruction to distill latent understanding into explicit generative signals. To validate the restoration of multimodal coherence, we introduce UniCycle, a cycle-consistency benchmark based on a Text to Image to Text reconstruction loop. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniCorn achieves comprehensive and substantial improvements over the base model across six general image generation benchmarks. Notably, it achieves SOTA performance on TIIF(73.8), DPG(86.8), CompBench(88.5), and UniCycle while further delivering substantial gains of +5.0 on WISE and +6.5 on OneIG. These results highlight that our method significantly enhances T2I generation while maintaining robust comprehension, demonstrating the scalability of fully self-supervised refinement for unified multimodal intelligence.

Recent audio-video generative systems suggest that coupling modalities benefits not only audio-video synchrony but also the video modality itself. We pose a fundamental question: Does audio-video joint denoising training improve video generation, even when we only care about video quality? To study this, we introduce a parameter-efficient Audio-Video Full DiT (AVFullDiT) architecture that leverages pre-trained text-to-video (T2V) and text-to-audio (T2A) modules for joint denoising. We train (i) a T2AV model with AVFullDiT and (ii) a T2V-only counterpart under identical settings. Our results provide the first systematic evidence that audio-video joint denoising can deliver more than synchrony. We observe consistent improvements on challenging subsets featuring large and object contact motions. We hypothesize that predicting audio acts as a privileged signal, encouraging the model to internalize causal relationships between visual events and their acoustic consequences (e.g., collision times impact sound), which in turn regularizes video dynamics. Our findings suggest that cross-modal co-training is a promising approach to developing stronger, more physically grounded world models. Code and dataset will be made publicly available.

Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have aimed to integrate and interpret data across diverse modalities. However, the capacity of these models to concurrently process and reason about multiple modalities remains inadequately explored, partly due to the lack of comprehensive modality-wise benchmarks. We introduce OmniBench, a novel benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate models' ability to recognize, interpret, and reason across visual, acoustic, and textual inputs simultaneously. We define models capable of such tri-modal processing as omni-language models (OLMs). OmniBench is distinguished by high-quality human annotations, ensuring that accurate responses require integrated understanding and reasoning across all three modalities. Our main findings reveal that: i) open-source OLMs exhibit critical limitations in instruction-following and reasoning capabilities within tri-modal contexts; and ii) the baseline models perform poorly (below 50% accuracy) even when provided with alternative textual representations of images and audio. These results suggest that the ability to construct a consistent context from text, image, and audio is often overlooked in existing MLLM training paradigms. We advocate for future research to focus on developing more robust tri-modal integration techniques and training strategies to enhance OLM performance across diverse modalities. The codes and live leaderboard could be found at https://m-a-p.ai/OmniBench.

In the era of large language models (LLMs) and artificial general intelligence (AGI), computer audition must evolve beyond traditional paradigms to fully leverage the capabilities of foundation models, towards more comprehensive understanding, more natural generation and more human-like interaction. Audio, as a modality rich in semantic, emotional, and contextual cues, plays a vital role in achieving naturalistic and embodied machine intelligence. This survey provides a comprehensive review of recent progress in integrating audio into LLMs, with a focus on four key areas: audio comprehension, audio generation, speech-based interaction, and audio-visual understanding. We analyze how LLMs are reshaping audio perception and reasoning, enabling systems to understand sound at a deeper semantic level, generate expressive audio outputs, and engage in human-like spoken interaction. Furthermore, we explore how the fusion of audio and visual modalities enhances situational awareness and cross-modal reasoning, pushing the boundaries of multimodal intelligence. This survey not only synthesizes existing research but also identifies critical challenges and future directions for building audio-native AGI systems capable of perceiving, understanding, and interacting through sound as naturally as humans do.

We propose to improve transformers of a specific modality with irrelevant data from other modalities, e.g., improve an ImageNet model with audio or point cloud datasets. We would like to highlight that the data samples of the target modality are irrelevant to the other modalities, which distinguishes our method from other works utilizing paired (e.g., CLIP) or interleaved data of different modalities. We propose a methodology named Multimodal Pathway - given a target modality and a transformer designed for it, we use an auxiliary transformer trained with data of another modality and construct pathways to connect components of the two models so that data of the target modality can be processed by both models. In this way, we utilize the universal sequence-to-sequence modeling abilities of transformers obtained from two modalities. As a concrete implementation, we use a modality-specific tokenizer and task-specific head as usual but utilize the transformer blocks of the auxiliary model via a proposed method named Cross-Modal Re-parameterization, which exploits the auxiliary weights without any inference costs. On the image, point cloud, video, and audio recognition tasks, we observe significant and consistent performance improvements with irrelevant data from other modalities. The code and models are available at https://github.com/AILab-CVC/M2PT.

Audio-Visual Intelligence (AVI) has emerged as a central frontier in artificial intelligence, bridging auditory and visual modalities to enable machines that can perceive, generate, and interact in the multimodal real world. In the era of large foundation models, joint modeling of audio and vision has become increasingly crucial, i.e., not only for understanding but also for controllable generation and reasoning across dynamic, temporally grounded signals. Recent advances, such as Meta MovieGen and Google Veo-3, highlight the growing industrial and academic focus on unified audio-vision architectures that learn from massive multimodal data. However, despite rapid progress, the literature remains fragmented, spanning diverse tasks, inconsistent taxonomies, and heterogeneous evaluation practices that impede systematic comparison and knowledge integration. This survey provides the first comprehensive review of AVI through the lens of large foundation models. We establish a unified taxonomy covering the broad landscape of AVI tasks, ranging from understanding (e.g., speech recognition, sound localization) to generation (e.g., audio-driven video synthesis, video-to-audio) and interaction (e.g., dialogue, embodied, or agentic interfaces). We synthesize methodological foundations, including modality tokenization, cross-modal fusion, autoregressive and diffusion-based generation, large-scale pretraining, instruction alignment, and preference optimization. Furthermore, we curate representative datasets, benchmarks, and evaluation metrics, offering a structured comparison across task families and identifying open challenges in synchronization, spatial reasoning, controllability, and safety. By consolidating this rapidly expanding field into a coherent framework, this survey aims to serve as a foundational reference for future research on large-scale AVI.

Image matching, which aims to identify corresponding pixel locations between images, is crucial in a wide range of scientific disciplines, aiding in image registration, fusion, and analysis. In recent years, deep learning-based image matching algorithms have dramatically outperformed humans in rapidly and accurately finding large amounts of correspondences. However, when dealing with images captured under different imaging modalities that result in significant appearance changes, the performance of these algorithms often deteriorates due to the scarcity of annotated cross-modal training data. This limitation hinders applications in various fields that rely on multiple image modalities to obtain complementary information. To address this challenge, we propose a large-scale pre-training framework that utilizes synthetic cross-modal training signals, incorporating diverse data from various sources, to train models to recognize and match fundamental structures across images. This capability is transferable to real-world, unseen cross-modality image matching tasks. Our key finding is that the matching model trained with our framework achieves remarkable generalizability across more than eight unseen cross-modality registration tasks using the same network weight, substantially outperforming existing methods, whether designed for generalization or tailored for specific tasks. This advancement significantly enhances the applicability of image matching technologies across various scientific disciplines and paves the way for new applications in multi-modality human and artificial intelligence analysis and beyond.

Omnimodal large language models (OmniLLMs) have recently gained increasing attention for unified audio-video understanding. However, processing long multimodal token sequences introduces substantial computational overhead, making efficient token compression crucial. Existing methods typically rely on fixed, modality-specific guidance, which fails to account for the varying importance of modalities across different queries. To address this limitation, we propose OmniSelect, a training-free, modality-adaptive token pruning framework that dynamically selects appropriate compression strategies for multimodal inputs. Specifically, we leverage a lightweight AudioCLIP model to estimate cross-modal relevance and categorize each input into three pruning regimes: Audio-Centric, Video-Centric, and Uniform pruning. Based on these relevance scores, OmniSelect further performs fine-grained token pruning within each temporal group, adaptively allocating pruning ratios to preserve informative tokens across modalities. By explicitly modeling modality preference and enabling dynamic strategy selection, OmniSelect effectively avoids the pitfalls of one-size-fits-all compression. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves efficient multimodal token reduction while maintaining strong performance, without requiring any additional training.

Multimodal fusion integrates the complementary information present in multiple modalities and has gained much attention recently. Most existing fusion approaches either learn a fixed fusion strategy during training and inference, or are only capable of fusing the information to a certain extent. Such solutions may fail to fully capture the dynamics of interactions across modalities especially when there are complex intra- and inter-modality correlations to be considered for informative multimodal fusion. In this paper, we propose a novel deep equilibrium (DEQ) method towards multimodal fusion via seeking a fixed point of the dynamic multimodal fusion process and modeling the feature correlations in an adaptive and recursive manner. This new way encodes the rich information within and across modalities thoroughly from low level to high level for efficacious downstream multimodal learning and is readily pluggable to various multimodal frameworks. Extensive experiments on BRCA, MM-IMDB, CMU-MOSI, SUN RGB-D, and VQA-v2 demonstrate the superiority of our DEQ fusion. More remarkably, DEQ fusion consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple multimodal benchmarks. The code will be released.

This position paper argues that Mean Opinion Score (MOS), while historically foundational, is no longer sufficient as the sole supervisory signal for multimedia quality assessment models. MOS reduces rich, context-sensitive human judgments to a single scalar, obscuring semantic failures, user intent, and the rationale behind quality decisions. We contend that modern quality assessment models must integrate three interdependent capabilities: (1) context-awareness, to adapt evaluations to task-specific goals and viewing conditions; (2) reasoning, to produce interpretable, evidence-grounded justifications for quality judgments; and (3) multimodality, to align perceptual and semantic cues using vision-language models. We critique the limitations of current MOS-centric benchmarks and propose a roadmap for reform: richer datasets with contextual metadata and expert rationales, and new evaluation metrics that assess semantic alignment, reasoning fidelity, and contextual sensitivity. By reframing quality assessment as a contextual, explainable, and multimodal modeling task, we aim to catalyze a shift toward more robust, human-aligned, and trustworthy evaluation systems.

Motivated by in-context learning (ICL) capabilities of Large Language models (LLMs), multimodal LLMs with additional visual modality are also exhibited with similar ICL abilities when multiple image-text pairs are provided as demonstrations. However, relatively less work has been done to investigate the principles behind how and why multimodal ICL works. We conduct a systematic and principled evaluation of multimodal ICL for models of different scales on a broad spectrum of new yet critical tasks. Through perturbations over different modality information, we show that modalities matter differently across tasks in multimodal ICL. Considering such modality impact, we further utilize modality-driven demonstration strategies to boost ICL performance. We also identify that demonstration selection is closely related to the models' ability to capture task inductive biases from multimodal ICL. Our principled analysis provides a comprehensive way of understanding the role of demonstrations in multimodal in-context learning, and sheds light on effectively improving multimodal ICL on a wide range of tasks even if those tasks are not seen in or even contradict pretraining data.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel in integrating visual and textual information for vision-centric tasks, but their handling of inconsistencies between modalities is underexplored. We investigate VLMs' modality preferences when faced with visual data and varied textual inputs in vision-centered settings. By introducing textual variations to four vision-centric tasks and evaluating ten Vision-Language Models (VLMs), we discover a ``blind faith in text'' phenomenon: VLMs disproportionately trust textual data over visual data when inconsistencies arise, leading to significant performance drops under corrupted text and raising safety concerns. We analyze factors influencing this text bias, including instruction prompts, language model size, text relevance, token order, and the interplay between visual and textual certainty. While certain factors, such as scaling up the language model size, slightly mitigate text bias, others like token order can exacerbate it due to positional biases inherited from language models. To address this issue, we explore supervised fine-tuning with text augmentation and demonstrate its effectiveness in reducing text bias. Additionally, we provide a theoretical analysis suggesting that the blind faith in text phenomenon may stem from an imbalance of pure text and multi-modal data during training. Our findings highlight the need for balanced training and careful consideration of modality interactions in VLMs to enhance their robustness and reliability in handling multi-modal data inconsistencies.

Multimodal sentiment analysis aims to extract and integrate semantic information collected from multiple modalities to recognize the expressed emotions and sentiment in multimodal data. This research area's major concern lies in developing an extraordinary fusion scheme that can extract and integrate key information from various modalities. However, one issue that may restrict previous work to achieve a higher level is the lack of proper modeling for the dynamics of the competition between the independence and relevance among modalities, which could deteriorate fusion outcomes by causing the collapse of modality-specific feature space or introducing extra noise. To mitigate this, we propose the Bi-Bimodal Fusion Network (BBFN), a novel end-to-end network that performs fusion (relevance increment) and separation (difference increment) on pairwise modality representations. The two parts are trained simultaneously such that the combat between them is simulated. The model takes two bimodal pairs as input due to the known information imbalance among modalities. In addition, we leverage a gated control mechanism in the Transformer architecture to further improve the final output. Experimental results on three datasets (CMU-MOSI, CMU-MOSEI, and UR-FUNNY) verifies that our model significantly outperforms the SOTA. The implementation of this work is available at https://github.com/declare-lab/multimodal-deep-learning.

Evaluating whether vision-language models (VLMs) reason consistently across representations is challenging because modality comparisons are typically confounded by task differences and asymmetric information. We introduce SEAM, a benchmark that pairs semantically equivalent inputs across four domains that have existing standardized textual and visual notations. By employing distinct notation systems across modalities, in contrast to OCR-based image-text pairing, SEAM provides a rigorous comparative assessment of the textual-symbolic and visual-spatial reasoning capabilities of VLMs. Across 21 contemporary models, we observe systematic modality imbalance: vision frequently lags language in overall performance, despite the problems containing semantically equivalent information, and cross-modal agreement is relatively low. Our error analysis reveals two main drivers: textual perception failures from tokenization in domain notation and visual perception failures that induce hallucinations. We also show that our results are largely robust to visual transformations. SEAM establishes a controlled, semantically equivalent setting for measuring and improving modality-agnostic reasoning.

We investigate whether post-trained capabilities can be transferred across models without retraining, with a focus on transfer across different model scales. We propose the Master Key Hypothesis, which states that model capabilities correspond to directions in a low-dimensional latent subspace that induce specific behaviors and are transferable across models through linear alignment. Based on this hypothesis, we introduce UNLOCK, a training-free and label-free framework that extracts a capability direction by contrasting activations between capability-present and capability-absent Source variants, aligns it with a Target model through a low-rank linear transformation, and applies it at inference time to elicit the behavior. Experiments on reasoning behaviors, including Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and mathematical reasoning, demonstrate substantial improvements across model scales without training. For example, transferring CoT reasoning from Qwen1.5-14B to Qwen1.5-7B yields an accuracy gain of 12.1% on MATH, and transferring a mathematical reasoning direction from Qwen3-4B-Base to Qwen3-14B-Base improves AGIEval Math accuracy from 61.1% to 71.3%, surpassing the 67.8% achieved by the 14B post-trained model. Our analysis shows that the success of transfer depends on the capabilities learned during pre-training, and that our intervention amplifies latent capabilities by sharpening the output distribution toward successful reasoning trajectories.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can process text presented as images, yet they often perform worse than when the same content is provided as textual tokens. We systematically diagnose this "modality gap" by evaluating seven MLLMs across seven benchmarks in five input modes, spanning both synthetically rendered text and realistic document images from arXiv PDFs to Wikipedia pages. We find that the modality gap is task- and data-dependent. For example, math tasks degrade by over 60 points on synthetic renderings, while natural document images often match or exceed text-mode performance. Rendering choices such as font and resolution are strong confounds, with font alone swinging accuracy by up to 47 percentage points. To understand this, we conduct a grounded-theory error analysis of over 4,000 examples, revealing that image mode selectively amplifies reading errors (calculation and formatting failures) while leaving knowledge and reasoning errors largely unchanged, and that some models exhibit a chain-of-thought reasoning collapse under visual input. Motivated by these findings, we propose a self-distillation method that trains the model on its own pure text reasoning traces paired with image inputs, raising image-mode accuracy on GSM8K from 30.71% to 92.72% and transferring to unseen benchmarks without catastrophic forgetting. Overall, our study provides a systematic understanding of the modality gap and suggests a practical path toward improving visual text understanding in multimodal language models.

Remote sensing change captioning (RSICC) aims to describe changes between bitemporal images in natural language. Existing methods often fail under challenges like illumination differences, viewpoint changes, blur effects, leading to inaccuracies, especially in no-change regions. Moreover, the images acquired at different spatial resolutions and have registration errors tend to affect the captions. To address these issues, we introduce SECOND-CC, a novel RSICC dataset featuring high-resolution RGB image pairs, semantic segmentation maps, and diverse real-world scenarios. SECOND-CC which contains 6,041 pairs of bitemporal RS images and 30,205 sentences describing the differences between images. Additionally, we propose MModalCC, a multimodal framework that integrates semantic and visual data using advanced attention mechanisms, including Cross-Modal Cross Attention (CMCA) and Multimodal Gated Cross Attention (MGCA). Detailed ablation studies and attention visualizations further demonstrate its effectiveness and ability to address RSICC challenges. Comprehensive experiments show that MModalCC outperforms state-of-the-art RSICC methods, including RSICCformer, Chg2Cap, and PSNet with +4.6% improvement on BLEU4 score and +9.6% improvement on CIDEr score. We will make our dataset and codebase publicly available to facilitate future research at https://github.com/ChangeCapsInRS/SecondCC

With the availability of diverse sensor modalities (i.e., RGB, Depth, Infrared) and the success of multi-modal learning, multi-modal face anti-spoofing (FAS) has emerged as a prominent research focus. The intuition behind it is that leveraging multiple modalities can uncover more intrinsic spoofing traces. However, this approach presents more risk of misalignment. We identify two main types of misalignment: (1) Intra-domain modality misalignment, where the importance of each modality varies across different attacks. For instance, certain modalities (e.g., Depth) may be non-defensive against specific attacks (e.g., 3D mask), indicating that each modality has unique strengths and weaknesses in countering particular attacks. Consequently, simple fusion strategies may fall short. (2) Inter-domain modality misalignment, where the introduction of additional modalities exacerbates domain shifts, potentially overshadowing the benefits of complementary fusion. To tackle (1), we propose a alignment module between modalities based on mutual information, which adaptively enhances favorable modalities while suppressing unfavorable ones. To address (2), we employ a dual alignment optimization method that aligns both sub-domain hyperplanes and modality angle margins, thereby mitigating domain gaps. Our method, dubbed Dual Alignment of Domain and Modality (DADM), achieves state-of-the-art performance in extensive experiments across four challenging protocols demonstrating its robustness in multi-modal domain generalization scenarios. The codes will be released soon.

Contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP) has demonstrated remarkable zero-shot classification ability, namely image classification using novel text labels. Existing works have attempted to enhance CLIP by fine-tuning on downstream tasks, but these have inadvertently led to performance degradation on unseen classes, thus harming zero-shot generalization. This paper aims to address this challenge by leveraging readily available image-text pairs from an external dataset for cross-modal guidance during inference. To this end, we propose X-MoRe, a novel inference method comprising two key steps: (1) cross-modal retrieval and (2) modal-confidence-based ensemble. Given a query image, we harness the power of CLIP's cross-modal representations to retrieve relevant textual information from an external image-text pair dataset. Then, we assign higher weights to the more reliable modality between the original query image and retrieved text, contributing to the final prediction. X-MoRe demonstrates robust performance across a diverse set of tasks without the need for additional training, showcasing the effectiveness of utilizing cross-modal features to maximize CLIP's zero-shot ability.

Cybersickness remains a major obstacle to the widespread adoption of immersive virtual reality (VR), particularly in consumer-grade environments. While prior methods rely on invasive signals such as electroencephalography (EEG) for high predictive accuracy, these approaches require specialized hardware and are impractical for real-world applications. In this work, we propose a scalable, deployable framework for personalized cybersickness prediction leveraging only non-invasive signals readily available from commercial VR headsets, including head motion, eye tracking, and physiological responses. Our model employs a modality-specific graph neural network enhanced with a Difference Attention Module to extract temporal-spatial embeddings capturing dynamic changes across modalities. A cross-modal alignment module jointly trains the video encoder to learn personalized traits by aligning video features with sensor-derived representations. Consequently, the model accurately predicts individual cybersickness using only video input during inference. Experimental results show our model achieves 88.4\% accuracy, closely matching EEG-based approaches (89.16\%), while reducing deployment complexity. With an average inference latency of 90ms, our framework supports real-time applications, ideal for integration into consumer-grade VR platforms without compromising personalization or performance. The code will be relesed at https://github.com/U235-Aurora/PTGNN.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have witnessed remarkable growth, showcasing formidable capabilities in handling intricate multimodal tasks with exceptional performance. Recent research has underscored the inclination of large language models to passively accept defective inputs, often resulting in futile reasoning on invalid prompts. However, the same critical question of whether LMMs can actively detect and scrutinize erroneous inputs still remains unexplored. To address this gap, we introduce the Input Scrutiny Ability Evaluation Framework (ISEval), which encompasses seven categories of flawed premises and three evaluation metrics. Our extensive evaluation of ten advanced LMMs has identified key findings. Most models struggle to actively detect flawed textual premises without guidance, which reflects a strong reliance on explicit prompts for premise error identification. Error type affects performance: models excel at identifying logical fallacies but struggle with surface-level linguistic errors and certain conditional flaws. Modality trust varies-Gemini 2.5 pro and Claude Sonnet 4 balance visual and textual info, while aya-vision-8b over-rely on text in conflicts. These insights underscore the urgent need to enhance LMMs' proactive verification of input validity and shed novel insights into mitigating the problem. The code is available at https://github.com/MLGroupJLU/LMM_ISEval.