Daily Papers

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in video reasoning via Chain-of-Thought (CoT). However, the robustness of their reasoning chains remains questionable. In this paper, we identify a critical failure mode termed textual inertia, where once a textual hallucination occurs in the thinking process, models tend to blindly adhere to the erroneous text while neglecting conflicting visual evidence. To systematically investigate this, we propose the LogicGraph Perturbation Protocol that structurally injects perturbations into the reasoning chains of diverse LMMs spanning both native reasoning architectures and prompt-driven paradigms to evaluate their self-reflection capabilities. The results reveal that models successfully self-correct in less than 10% of cases and predominantly succumb to blind textual error propagation. To mitigate this, we introduce Active Visual-Context Refinement, a training-free inference paradigm which orchestrates an active visual re-grounding mechanism to enforce fine-grained verification coupled with an adaptive context refinement strategy to summarize and denoise the reasoning history. Experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly stifles hallucination propagation and enhances reasoning robustness.

Vision-language models (VLMs) increasingly leverage diverse knowledge sources to address complex tasks, often encountering conflicts between their internal parametric knowledge and external information. Knowledge conflicts can result in hallucinations and unreliable responses, but the mechanisms governing such interactions remain unknown. To address this gap, we analyze the mechanisms that VLMs use to resolve cross-modal conflicts by introducing a dataset of multimodal counterfactual queries that deliberately contradict internal commonsense knowledge. We localize with logit inspection a small set of heads that control the conflict. Moreover, by modifying these heads, we can steer the model towards its internal knowledge or the visual inputs. Finally, we show that attention from such heads pinpoints localized image regions driving visual overrides, outperforming gradient-based attribution in precision.

We present AVID, the first large-scale benchmark for audio-visual inconsistency understanding in videos. While omni-modal large language models excel at temporally aligned tasks such as captioning and question answering, they struggle to perceive cross-modal conflicts, a fundamental human capability that is critical for trustworthy AI. Existing benchmarks predominantly focus on aligned events or deepfake detection, leaving a significant gap in evaluating inconsistency perception in long-form video contexts. AVID addresses this with: (1) a scalable construction pipeline comprising temporal segmentation that classifies video content into Active Speaker, Voiceover, and Scenic categories; an agent-driven strategy planner that selects semantically appropriate inconsistency categories; and five specialized injectors for diverse audio-visual conflict injection; (2) 11.2K long videos (avg. 235.5s) with 39.4K annotated inconsistency events and 78.7K segment clips, supporting evaluation across detection, temporal grounding, classification, and reasoning with 8 fine-grained inconsistency categories. Comprehensive evaluations of state-of-the-art omni-models reveal significant limitations in temporal grounding and reasoning. Our fine-tuned baseline, AVID-Qwen, achieves substantial improvements over the base model (2.8times higher BLEU-4 in segment reasoning) and surpasses all compared models in temporal grounding (mIoU: 36.1\% vs 26.2\%) and holistic understanding (SODA-m: 7.47 vs 6.15), validating AVID as an effective testbed for advancing trustworthy omni-modal AI systems.

Multimodal sarcasm detection (MSD) aims to identify sarcasm within image-text pairs by modeling semantic incongruities across modalities. Existing methods often exploit cross-modal embedding misalignment to detect inconsistency but struggle when visual and textual content are loosely related or semantically indirect. While recent approaches leverage large language models (LLMs) to generate sarcastic cues, the inherent diversity and subjectivity of these generations often introduce noise. To address these limitations, we propose the Generative Discrepancy Comparison Network (GDCNet). This framework captures cross-modal conflicts by utilizing descriptive, factually grounded image captions generated by Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) as stable semantic anchors. Specifically, GDCNet computes semantic and sentiment discrepancies between the generated objective description and the original text, alongside measuring visual-textual fidelity. These discrepancy features are then fused with visual and textual representations via a gated module to adaptively balance modality contributions. Extensive experiments on MSD benchmarks demonstrate GDCNet's superior accuracy and robustness, establishing a new state-of-the-art on the MMSD2.0 benchmark.

Shadow removal under diverse lighting conditions requires disentangling illumination from intrinsic reflectance, a challenge compounded when physical priors are not properly aligned. We propose PhaSR (Physically Aligned Shadow Removal), addressing this through dual-level prior alignment to enable robust performance from single-light shadows to multi-source ambient lighting. First, Physically Aligned Normalization (PAN) performs closed-form illumination correction via Gray-world normalization, log-domain Retinex decomposition, and dynamic range recombination, suppressing chromatic bias. Second, Geometric-Semantic Rectification Attention (GSRA) extends differential attention to cross-modal alignment, harmonizing depth-derived geometry with DINO-v2 semantic embeddings to resolve modal conflicts under varying illumination. Experiments show competitive performance in shadow removal with lower complexity and generalization to ambient lighting where traditional methods fail under multi-source illumination. Our source code is available at https://github.com/ming053l/PhaSR.

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.

We present Eureka-Audio, a compact yet high-performance audio language model that achieves competitive performance against models that are 4 to 18 times larger across a broad range of audio understanding benchmarks. Despite containing only 1.7B parameters, Eureka-Audio demonstrates strong performance on automatic speech recognition (ASR), audio understanding, and dense audio captioning, matching or surpassing multiple 7B to 30B audio and omni-modal baselines. The model adopts a unified end-to-end architecture composed of a lightweight language backbone, a Whisper-based audio encoder, and a sparsely activated Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) adapter that explicitly accounts for audio heterogeneity and alleviates cross-modal optimization conflicts under limited capacity. To further enhance paralinguistic reasoning, we introduce DataFlux, a closed loop audio instruction data synthesis and verification pipeline that constructs high quality, logically consistent supervision from raw audio. Extensive evaluations across ASR, knowledge reasoning, safety, instruction following, and paralinguistic benchmarks, demonstrate that Eureka-Audio achieves an efficient balance between computational cost and performance. These results establish Eureka Audio as a strong and practical baseline for lightweight audio understanding models.

The dual-stream transformer architecture-based joint audio-video generation method has become the dominant paradigm in current research. By incorporating pre-trained video diffusion models and audio diffusion models, along with a cross-modal interaction attention module, high-quality, temporally synchronized audio-video content can be generated with minimal training data. In this paper, we first revisit the dual-stream transformer paradigm and further analyze its limitations, including model manifold variations caused by the gating mechanism controlling cross-modal interactions, biases in multi-modal background regions introduced by cross-modal attention, and the inconsistencies in multi-modal classifier-free guidance (CFG) during training and inference, as well as conflicts between multiple conditions. To alleviate these issues, we propose Cross-Modal Context Learning (CCL), equipped with several carefully designed modules. Temporally Aligned RoPE and Partitioning (TARP) effectively enhances the temporal alignment between audio latent and video latent representations. The Learnable Context Tokens (LCT) and Dynamic Context Routing (DCR) in the Cross-Modal Context Attention (CCA) module provide stable unconditional anchors for cross-modal information, while dynamically routing based on different training tasks, further enhancing the model's convergence speed and generation quality. During inference, Unconditional Context Guidance (UCG) leverages the unconditional support provided by LCT to facilitate different forms of CFG, improving train-inference consistency and further alleviating conflicts. Through comprehensive evaluations, CCL achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with recent academic methods while requiring substantially fewer resources.

Unified multimodal models for image generation and understanding represent a significant step toward AGI and have attracted widespread attention from researchers. The main challenge of this task lies in the difficulty in establishing an optimal training paradigm due to inherent conflicting targets in understanding and generation tasks. To alleviate these conflicts and pursue higher performance, many researchers adopt varying degrees of model decoupling (e.g., Double image encoders, MOE/MOT architecture, or frozen MLLM). However, excessive model decoupling can lead to the loss of interleave generation ability, undermining the original intent of unified models. In this work, we aim to explore how to mitigate task conflicts without resorting to model decoupling. Firstly, we analyze why decoupling alleviates conflicts by studying the cross-modal attention behavior of models. We observe that model decoupling essentially drives models toward task-specific multimodal interaction patterns, as seen in Qwen-VL and HunyuanImage, and that the more thorough the decoupling, the more consistent the behavior becomes. Motivated by this observation, we propose Attention Interaction Alignment (AIA) loss, which explicitly learns Task-Specific multimodal interaction patterns during training. To demonstrate the generalizability of our AIA loss, we apply it to Emu3 and Janus-Pro during SFT and post-training stage respectively. Without bells and whistles, AIA not only refines cross-modal attention patterns, but also boosts both generation and understanding performance.

Video Foundation Models (VFMs) have received limited exploration due to high computational costs and data scarcity. Previous VFMs rely on Image Foundation Models (IFMs), which face challenges in transferring to the video domain. Although VideoMAE has trained a robust ViT from limited data, its low-level reconstruction poses convergence difficulties and conflicts with high-level cross-modal alignment. This paper proposes a training-efficient method for temporal-sensitive VFMs that integrates the benefits of existing methods. To increase data efficiency, we mask out most of the low-semantics video tokens, but selectively align the unmasked tokens with IFM, which serves as the UnMasked Teacher (UMT). By providing semantic guidance, our method enables faster convergence and multimodal friendliness. With a progressive pre-training framework, our model can handle various tasks including scene-related, temporal-related, and complex video-language understanding. Using only public sources for pre-training in 6 days on 32 A100 GPUs, our scratch-built ViT-L/16 achieves state-of-the-art performances on various video tasks. The code and models will be released at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/unmasked_teacher.

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/.

Omni-modal Large Language Models (OLLMs) greatly expand LLMs' multimodal capabilities but also introduce cross-modal safety risks. However, a systematic understanding of vulnerabilities in omni-modal interactions remains lacking. To bridge this gap, we establish a modality-semantics decoupling principle and construct the AdvBench-Omni dataset, which reveals a significant vulnerability in OLLMs. Mechanistic analysis uncovers a Mid-layer Dissolution phenomenon driven by refusal vector magnitude shrinkage, alongside the existence of a modal-invariant pure refusal direction. Inspired by these insights, we extract a golden refusal vector using Singular Value Decomposition and propose OmniSteer, which utilizes lightweight adapters to modulate intervention intensity adaptively. Extensive experiments show that our method not only increases the Refusal Success Rate against harmful inputs from 69.9% to 91.2%, but also effectively preserves the general capabilities across all modalities. Our code is available at: https://github.com/zhrli324/omni-safety-research.

Ambivalence and hesitancy (A/H) are subtle affective states where a person shows conflicting signals through different channels -- saying one thing while their face or voice tells another story. Recognising these states automatically is valuable in clinical settings, but it is hard for machines because the key evidence lives in the disagreements between what is said, how it sounds, and what the face shows. We present ConflictAwareAH, a multimodal framework built for this problem. Three pre-trained encoders extract video, audio, and text representations. Pairwise conflict features -- element-wise absolute differences between modality embeddings -- serve as bidirectional cues: large cross-modal differences flag A/H, while small differences confirm behavioural consistency and anchor the negative class. This conflict-aware design addresses a key limitation of text-dominant approaches, which tend to over-detect A/H (high F1-AH) while struggling to confirm its absence: our multimodal model improves F1-NoAH by +4.6 points over text alone and halves the class-performance gap. A complementary text-guided late fusion strategy blends a text-only auxiliary head with the full model at inference, adding +4.1 Macro F1. On the BAH dataset from the ABAW10 Ambivalence/Hesitancy Challenge, our method reaches 0.694 Macro F1 on the labelled test split and 0.715 on the private leaderboard, outperforming published multimodal baselines by over 10 points -- all on a single GPU in under 25 minutes of training.

Recently, retrieval augmentation and tool augmentation have demonstrated a remarkable capability to expand the internal memory boundaries of language models (LMs) by providing external context. However, internal memory and external context inevitably clash, leading to knowledge conflicts within LMs. In this paper, we aim to interpret the mechanism of knowledge conflicts through the lens of information flow, and then mitigate conflicts by precise interventions at the pivotal point. We find there are some attention heads with opposite effects in the later layers, where memory heads can recall knowledge from internal memory, and context heads can retrieve knowledge from external context. Moreover, we reveal that the pivotal point at which knowledge conflicts emerge in LMs is the integration of inconsistent information flows by memory heads and context heads. Inspired by the insights, we propose a novel method called Pruning Head via PatH PatcHing (PH3), which can efficiently mitigate knowledge conflicts by pruning conflicting attention heads without updating model parameters. PH3 can flexibly control eight LMs to use internal memory (uparrow 44.0%) or external context (uparrow 38.5%). Moreover, PH3 can also improve the performance of LMs on open-domain QA tasks. We also conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the cross-model, cross-relation, and cross-format generalization of our method.

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.

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.

Empowering Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) with image generation often leads to catastrophic forgetting in understanding tasks due to severe gradient conflicts. While existing paradigms like Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) mitigate this conflict through structural isolation, they fundamentally sever cross-modal synergy and suffer from capacity fragmentation. In this work, we present Symbiotic-MoE, a unified pre-training framework that resolves task interference within a native multimodal Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) Transformers architecture with zero-parameter overhead. We first identify that standard MoE tuning leads to routing collapse, where generative gradients dominate expert utilization. To address this, we introduce Modality-Aware Expert Disentanglement, which partitions experts into task-specific groups while utilizing shared experts as a multimodal semantic bridge. Crucially, this design allows shared experts to absorb fine-grained visual semantics from generative tasks to enrich textual representations. To optimize this, we propose a Progressive Training Strategy featuring differential learning rates and early-stage gradient shielding. This mechanism not only shields pre-trained knowledge from early volatility but eventually transforms generative signals into constructive feedback for understanding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Symbiotic-MoE achieves rapid generative convergence while unlocking cross-modal synergy, boosting inherent understanding with remarkable gains on MMLU and OCRBench.

Multimodal Dataset Distillation (MDD) seeks to condense large-scale image-text datasets into compact surrogates while retaining their effectiveness for cross-modal learning. Despite recent progress, existing MDD approaches often suffer from \textbf{Modality Collapse}, characterized by over-concentrated intra-modal representations and enlarged distributional gap across modalities. In this paper, at the first time, we identify this issue as stemming from a fundamental conflict between the over-compression behavior inherent in dataset distillation and the cross-modal supervision imposed by contrastive objectives. To alleviate modality collapse, we introduce RepBlend, a novel MDD framework that weakens overdominant cross-modal supervision via representation blending, thereby significantly enhancing intra-modal diversity. Additionally, we observe that current MDD methods impose asymmetric supervision across modalities, resulting in biased optimization. To address this, we propose symmetric projection trajectory matching, which synchronizes the optimization dynamics using modality-specific projection heads, thereby promoting balanced supervision and enhancing cross-modal alignment. Experiments on Flickr-30K and MS-COCO show that RepBlend consistently outperforms prior state-of-the-art MDD methods, achieving significant gains in retrieval performance (e.g., +9.4 IR@10, +6.3 TR@10 under the 100-pair setting) and offering up to 6.7times distillation speedup.

Recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models reformulate vision-language models by tuning them with millions of robotic demonstrations. While they perform well when fine-tuned for a single embodiment or task family, extending them to multi-skill settings remains challenging: directly merging VLA experts trained on different tasks results in near-zero success rates. This raises a fundamental question: what prevents VLAs from mastering multiple skills within one model? With an empirical decomposition of learnable parameters during VLA fine-tuning, we identify two key sources of non-mergeability: (1) Finetuning drives LoRA adapters in the VLM backbone toward divergent, task-specific directions beyond the capacity of existing merging methods to unify. (2) Action experts develop inter-block dependencies through self-attention feedback, causing task information to spread across layers and preventing modular recombination. To address these challenges, we present MergeVLA, a merging-oriented VLA architecture that preserves mergeability by design. MergeVLA introduces sparsely activated LoRA adapters via task masks to retain consistent parameters and reduce irreconcilable conflicts in the VLM. Its action expert replaces self-attention with cross-attention-only blocks to keep specialization localized and composable. When the task is unknown, it uses a test-time task router to adaptively select the appropriate task mask and expert head from the initial observation, enabling unsupervised task inference. Across LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, RoboTwin, and multi-task experiments on the real SO101 robotic arm, MergeVLA achieves performance comparable to or even exceeding individually finetuned experts, demonstrating robust generalization across tasks, embodiments, and environments.

Fine-tuning pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) for specialized tasks incurs substantial computational and data costs. While model merging offers a training-free solution to integrate multiple task-specific models, existing methods suffer from safety-utility conflicts where enhanced general capabilities degrade safety safeguards. We identify two root causes: neuron misidentification due to simplistic parameter magnitude-based selection, and cross-task neuron interference during merging. To address these challenges, we propose LED-Merging, a three-stage framework that Locates task-specific neurons via gradient-based attribution, dynamically Elects critical neurons through multi-model importance fusion, and Disjoints conflicting updates through parameter isolation. Extensive experiments on Llama-3-8B, Mistral-7B, and Llama2-13B demonstrate that LED-Merging effectively reduces harmful response rates, showing a 31.4\% decrease on Llama-3-8B-Instruct on HarmBench, while simultaneously preserving 95\% of utility performance, such as achieving 52.39\% accuracy on GSM8K. LED-Merging resolves safety-utility conflicts and provides a lightweight, training-free paradigm for constructing reliable multi-task LLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/MqLeet/LED-Merging{GitHub}.

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%.

Deepface generation has traditionally followed a task-driven paradigm, where distinct tasks (e.g., face transfer and hair transfer) are addressed by task-specific models. Nevertheless, this single-task setting severely limits model generalization and scalability. A unified model capable of solving multiple deepface generation tasks in a single pass represents a promising and practical direction, yet remains challenging due to data scarcity and cross-task conflicts arising from heterogeneous attribute transformations. To this end, we propose UniBioTransfer, the first unified framework capable of handling both conventional deepface tasks (e.g., face transfer and face reenactment) and shape-varying transformations (e.g., hair transfer and head transfer). Besides, UniBioTransfer naturally generalizes to unseen tasks, like lip, eye, and glasses transfer, with minimal fine-tuning. Generally, UniBioTransfer addresses data insufficiency in multi-task generation through a unified data construction strategy, including a swapping-based corruption mechanism designed for spatially dynamic attributes like hair. It further mitigates cross-task interference via an innovative BioMoE, a mixture-of-experts based model coupled with a novel two-stage training strategy that effectively disentangles task-specific knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness, generalization, and scalability of UniBioTransfer, outperforming both existing unified models and task-specific methods across a wide range of deepface generation tasks. Project page is at https://scy639.github.io/UniBioTransfer.github.io/

Recent advances in unified multimodal models indicate a clear trend towards comprehensive content generation. However, the auditory domain remains a significant challenge, with music and speech often developed in isolation, hindering progress towards universal audio synthesis. This separation stems from inherent task conflicts and severe data imbalances, which impede the development of a truly unified audio generation model. To address this challenge, we propose UniMoE-Audio, a unified speech and music generation model within a novel Dynamic-Capacity Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework. Architecturally, UniMoE-Audio introduces a Top-P routing strategy for dynamic expert number allocation, and a hybrid expert design comprising routed experts for domain-specific knowledge, shared experts for domain-agnostic features, and null experts for adaptive computation skipping. To tackle data imbalance, we introduce a three-stage training curriculum: 1) Independent Specialist Training leverages original datasets to instill domain-specific knowledge into each "proto-expert" without interference; 2) MoE Integration and Warmup incorporates these specialists into the UniMoE-Audio architecture, warming up the gate module and shared expert using a subset of balanced dataset; and 3) Synergistic Joint Training trains the entire model end-to-end on the fully balanced dataset, fostering enhanced cross-domain synergy. Extensive experiments show that UniMoE-Audio not only achieves state-of-the-art performance on major speech and music generation benchmarks, but also demonstrates superior synergistic learning, mitigating the performance degradation typically seen in naive joint training. Our findings highlight the substantial potential of specialized MoE architecture and curated training strategies in advancing the field of universal audio generation. Homepage: https://mukioxun.github.io/Uni-MoE-site/home.html

Despite the impressive capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in vision-language tasks, they are prone to hallucinations in real-world scenarios. This paper investigates the hallucination phenomenon in MLLMs from the perspective of modality conflict. Unlike existing works focusing on the conflicts between model responses and inputs, we study the inherent conflicts in inputs from different modalities that place MLLMs in a dilemma and directly lead to hallucinations. We formally define the modality conflict and construct a dataset named Multimodal Modality Conflict (MMMC) to simulate this phenomenon in vision-language tasks. Three methods based on prompt engineering, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning are proposed to alleviate the hallucination caused by modality conflict. Extensive experiments are conducted on the MMMC dataset to analyze the merits and demerits of these methods. Our results show that the reinforcement learning method achieves the best performance in mitigating the hallucination under modality conflict, while the supervised fine-tuning method shows promising and stable performance. Our work sheds light on the unnoticed modality conflict that leads to hallucinations and provides more insights into the robustness of MLLMs.

Large Multimodal Models(LMMs) face notable challenges when encountering multimodal knowledge conflicts, particularly under retrieval-augmented generation(RAG) frameworks where the contextual information from external sources may contradict the model's internal parametric knowledge, leading to unreliable outputs. However, existing benchmarks fail to reflect such realistic conflict scenarios. Most focus solely on intra-memory conflicts, while context-memory and inter-context conflicts remain largely investigated. Furthermore, commonly used factual knowledge-based evaluations are often overlooked, and existing datasets lack a thorough investigation into conflict detection capabilities. To bridge this gap, we propose MMKC-Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate factual knowledge conflicts in both context-memory and inter-context scenarios. MMKC-Bench encompasses three types of multimodal knowledge conflicts and includes 1,573 knowledge instances and 3,381 images across 23 broad types, collected through automated pipelines with human verification. We evaluate three representative series of LMMs on both model behavior analysis and conflict detection tasks. Our findings show that while current LMMs are capable of recognizing knowledge conflicts, they tend to favor internal parametric knowledge over external evidence. We hope MMKC-Bench will foster further research in multimodal knowledge conflict and enhance the development of multimodal RAG systems. The source code is available at https://github.com/MLLMKCBENCH/MLLMKC.

Self-supervised pre-training recently demonstrates success on large-scale multimodal data, and state-of-the-art contrastive learning methods often enforce the feature consistency from cross-modality inputs, such as video/audio or video/text pairs. Despite its convenience to formulate and leverage in practice, such cross-modality alignment (CMA) is only a weak and noisy supervision, since two modalities can be semantically misaligned even they are temporally aligned. For example, even in the commonly adopted instructional videos, a speaker can sometimes refer to something that is not visually present in the current frame; and the semantic misalignment would only be more unpredictable for the raw videos from the internet. We conjecture that might cause conflicts and biases among modalities, and may hence prohibit CMA from scaling up to training with larger and more heterogeneous data. This paper first verifies our conjecture by observing that, even in the latest VATT pre-training using only instructional videos, there exist strong gradient conflicts between different CMA losses within the same video, audio, text triplet, indicating them as the noisy source of supervision. We then propose to harmonize such gradients, via two techniques: (i) cross-modality gradient realignment: modifying different CMA loss gradients for each sample triplet, so that their gradient directions are more aligned; and (ii) gradient-based curriculum learning: leveraging the gradient conflict information on an indicator of sample noisiness, to develop a curriculum learning strategy to prioritize training on less noisy sample triplets. Applying those techniques to pre-training VATT on the HowTo100M dataset, we consistently improve its performance on different downstream tasks. Moreover, we are able to scale VATT pre-training to more complicated non-narrative Youtube8M dataset to further improve the state-of-the-arts.

Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) built on shared autoregressive (AR) transformers are attractive for their architectural simplicity. However, we identify a critical limitation: when trained on multimodal inputs, modality-shared transformers suffer from severe gradient conflicts between vision and text, particularly in shallow and deep layers. We trace this issue to the fundamentally different low-level statistical properties of images and text, while noting that conflicts diminish in middle layers where representations become more abstract and semantically aligned. To overcome this challenge, we propose Uni-X, a two-end-separated, middle-shared architecture. Uni-X dedicates its initial and final layers to modality-specific processing, while maintaining shared parameters in the middle layers for high-level semantic fusion. This X-shaped design not only eliminates gradient conflicts at both ends but also further alleviates residual conflicts in the shared layers. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of Uni-X. Under identical training conditions, Uni-X achieves superior training efficiency compared to strong baselines. When scaled to 3B parameters with larger training data, Uni-X matches or surpasses 7B AR-based UMMs, achieving a GenEval score of 82 for image generation alongside strong performance in text and vision understanding tasks. These results establish Uni-X as a parameter-efficient and scalable foundation for future unified multimodal modeling. Our code is available at https://github.com/CURRENTF/Uni-X

Multimodal AI models are increasingly used in fields like healthcare, finance, and autonomous driving, where information is drawn from multiple sources or modalities such as images, texts, audios, videos. However, effectively managing uncertainty - arising from noise, insufficient evidence, or conflicts between modalities - is crucial for reliable decision-making. Current uncertainty-aware machine learning methods leveraging, for example, evidence averaging, or evidence accumulation underestimate uncertainties in high-conflict scenarios. Moreover, the state-of-the-art evidence averaging strategy is not order invariant and fails to scale to multiple modalities. To address these challenges, we propose a novel multimodal learning method with order-invariant evidence fusion and introduce a conflict-based discounting mechanism that reallocates uncertain mass when unreliable modalities are detected. We provide both theoretical analysis and experimental validation, demonstrating that unlike the previous work, the proposed approach effectively distinguishes between conflicting and non-conflicting samples based on the provided uncertainty estimates, and outperforms the previous models in uncertainty-based conflict detection.

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.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on complex tasks with multimodal context. However, it is still understudied whether they exhibit modality preference when processing multimodal contexts. To study this question, we first build a MC\textsuperscript{2} benchmark under controlled evidence conflict scenarios to systematically evaluate modality preference, which is the tendency to favor one modality over another when making decisions based on multimodal conflicting evidence. Our extensive evaluation reveals that all 18 tested MLLMs generally demonstrate clear modality bias, and modality preference can be influenced by external interventions. An in-depth analysis reveals that the preference direction can be captured within the latent representations of MLLMs. Built on this, we propose a probing and steering method based on representation engineering to explicitly control modality preference without additional fine-tuning or carefully crafted prompts. Our method effectively amplifies modality preference toward a desired direction and applies to downstream tasks such as hallucination mitigation and multimodal machine translation, yielding promising improvements.

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.

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

Despite their strong performance in multimodal emotion reasoning, existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often overlook the scenarios involving emotion conflicts, where emotional cues from different modalities are inconsistent. To fill this gap, we first introduce CA-MER, a new benchmark designed to examine MLLMs under realistic emotion conflicts. It consists of three subsets: video-aligned, audio-aligned, and consistent, where only one or all modalities reflect the true emotion. However, evaluations on our CA-MER reveal that current state-of-the-art emotion MLLMs systematically over-rely on audio signal during emotion conflicts, neglecting critical cues from visual modality. To mitigate this bias, we propose MoSEAR, a parameter-efficient framework that promotes balanced modality integration. MoSEAR consists of two modules: (1)MoSE, modality-specific experts with a regularized gating mechanism that reduces modality bias in the fine-tuning heads; and (2)AR, an attention reallocation mechanism that rebalances modality contributions in frozen backbones during inference. Our framework offers two key advantages: it mitigates emotion conflicts and improves performance on consistent samples-without incurring a trade-off between audio and visual modalities. Experiments on multiple benchmarks-including MER2023, EMER, DFEW, and our CA-MER-demonstrate that MoSEAR achieves state-of-the-art performance, particularly under modality conflict conditions.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) must resolve conflicts when different modalities provide contradictory information, a process we term modality following. Prior work measured this behavior only with coarse dataset-level statistics, overlooking the influence of model's confidence in unimodal reasoning. In this paper, we introduce a new framework that decomposes modality following into two fundamental factors: relative reasoning uncertainty (the case-specific confidence gap between unimodal predictions) and inherent modality preference( a model's stable bias when uncertainties are balanced). To validate this framework, we construct a controllable dataset that systematically varies the reasoning difficulty of visual and textual inputs. Using entropy as a fine-grained uncertainty metric, we uncover a universal law: the probability of following a modality decreases monotonically as its relative uncertainty increases. At the relative difficulty level where the model tends to follow both modalities with comparable probability what we call the balance point, a practical indicator of the model's inherent preference. Unlike traditional macro-level ratios, this measure offers a more principled and less confounded way to characterize modality bias, disentangling it from unimodal capabilities and dataset artifacts. Further, by probing layer-wise predictions, we reveal the internal mechanism of oscillation: in ambiguous regions near the balance point, models vacillate between modalities across layers, explaining externally observed indecision. Together, these findings establish relative uncertainty and inherent preference as the two governing principles of modality following, offering both a quantitative framework and mechanistic insight into how MLLMs resolve conflicting information.

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

When audio and text conflict, speech-enabled language models follow text far more often than they do when arbitrating between two conflicting text sources, even under explicit instructions to trust the audio. We introduce ALME (Audio-LLM Modality Evaluation), a dataset of 57,602 controlled audio-text conflict stimuli across eight languages, together with Text Dominance Ratio (TDR), which measures how often a model follows conflicting text when instructed to follow audio. Gemini 2.0 Flash and GPT-4o show TDR 10--26times higher than a baseline that replaces audio with its transcript under otherwise identical conditions (Gemini 2.0 Flash: 16.6% vs. 1.6%; GPT-4o: 23.2% vs. 0.9%). These results suggest that text dominance reflects not only information content, but also an asymmetry in arbitration accessibility, i.e., how easily the model can use competing representations at decision time. Framing the transcript as deliberately corrupted reduces TDR by 80%, whereas forcing explicit transcription increases it by 14%. A fine-tuning ablation further suggests that arbitration behavior depends more on LLM reasoning than on the audio input path alone. Across four audio-LLMs, we observe the same qualitative pattern with substantial cross-model and cross-linguistic variation.

Visual grounding, which aims to ground a visual region via natural language, is a task that heavily relies on cross-modal alignment. Existing works utilized uni-modal pre-trained models to transfer visual/linguistic knowledge separately while ignoring the multimodal corresponding information. Motivated by recent advancements in contrastive language-image pre-training and low-rank adaptation (LoRA) methods, we aim to solve the grounding task based on multimodal pre-training. However, there exists significant task gaps between pre-training and grounding. Therefore, to address these gaps, we propose a concise and efficient hierarchical multimodal fine-grained modulation framework, namely HiVG. Specifically, HiVG consists of a multi-layer adaptive cross-modal bridge and a hierarchical multimodal low-rank adaptation (Hi LoRA) paradigm. The cross-modal bridge can address the inconsistency between visual features and those required for grounding, and establish a connection between multi-level visual and text features. Hi LoRA prevents the accumulation of perceptual errors by adapting the cross-modal features from shallow to deep layers in a hierarchical manner. Experimental results on five datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and showcase the significant grounding capabilities as well as promising energy efficiency advantages. The project page: https://github.com/linhuixiao/HiVG.

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 .

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.

Understanding how neural networks rely on visual cues offers a human-interpretable view of their internal decision processes. The cue-conflict benchmark has been influential in probing shape-texture preference and in motivating the insight that stronger, human-like shape bias is often associated with improved in-domain performance. However, we find that the current stylization-based instantiation can yield unstable and ambiguous bias estimates. Specifically, stylization may not reliably instantiate perceptually valid and separable cues nor control their relative informativeness, ratio-based bias can obscure absolute cue sensitivity, and restricting evaluation to preselected classes can distort model predictions by ignoring the full decision space. Together, these factors can confound preference with cue validity, cue balance, and recognizability artifacts. We introduce REFINED-BIAS, an integrated dataset and evaluation framework for reliable and interpretable shape-texture bias diagnosis. REFINED-BIAS constructs balanced, human- and model- recognizable cue pairs using explicit definitions of shape and texture, and measures cue-specific sensitivity over the full label space via a ranking-based metric, enabling fairer cross-model comparisons. Across diverse training regimes and architectures, REFINED-BIAS enables fairer cross-model comparison, more faithful diagnosis of shape and texture biases, and clearer empirical conclusions, resolving inconsistencies that prior cue-conflict evaluations could not reliably disambiguate.

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}

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.

Building cross-modal applications is challenging due to limited paired multi-modal data. Recent works have shown that leveraging a pre-trained multi-modal contrastive representation space enables cross-modal tasks to be learned from uni-modal data. This is based on the assumption that contrastive optimization makes embeddings from different modalities interchangeable. However, this assumption is under-explored due to the poorly understood geometry of the multi-modal contrastive space, where a modality gap exists. In our study, we provide a theoretical explanation of this space's geometry and introduce a three-step method, C^3 (Connect, Collapse, Corrupt), to bridge the modality gap, enhancing the interchangeability of embeddings. Our C^3 method significantly improves cross-modal learning from uni-modal data, achieving state-of-the-art results on zero-shot image / audio / video captioning and text-to-image generation.

Knowledge-based visual question answering (KB-VQA) demonstrates significant potential for handling knowledge-intensive tasks. However, conflicts arise between static parametric knowledge in vision language models (VLMs) and dynamically retrieved information due to the static model knowledge from pre-training. The outputs either ignore retrieved contexts or exhibit inconsistent integration with parametric knowledge, posing substantial challenges for KB-VQA. Current knowledge conflict mitigation methods primarily adapted from language-based approaches, focusing on context-level conflicts through engineered prompting strategies or context-aware decoding mechanisms. However, these methods neglect the critical role of visual information in conflicts and suffer from redundant retrieved contexts, which impair accurate conflict identification and effective mitigation. To address these limitations, we propose CC-VQA: a novel training-free, conflict- and correlation-aware method for KB-VQA. Our method comprises two core components: (1) Vision-Centric Contextual Conflict Reasoning, which performs visual-semantic conflict analysis across internal and external knowledge contexts; and (2) Correlation-Guided Encoding and Decoding, featuring positional encoding compression for low-correlation statements and adaptive decoding using correlation-weighted conflict scoring. Extensive evaluations on E-VQA, InfoSeek, and OK-VQA benchmarks demonstrate that CC-VQA achieves state-of-the-art performance, yielding absolute accuracy improvements of 3.3\% to 6.4\% compared to existing methods. Code is available at https://github.com/cqu-student/CC-VQA.

Unified Multimodal Generative Models (UMGMs) unify visual understanding and image generation within a single autoregressive framework. However, their ability to continually learn new tasks is severely hindered by catastrophic forgetting, both within a modality (intra-modal) and across modalities (inter-modal). While intra-modal forgetting has been studied in prior continual learning (CL) work, inter-modal forgetting remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we identify and empirically validate this phenomenon in UMGMs and provide a theoretical explanation rooted in gradient conflict between modalities. To address both intra- and inter-modal forgetting, we propose Modality-Decoupled Experts (MoDE), a lightweight and scalable architecture that isolates modality-specific updates to mitigate the gradient conflict and leverages knowledge distillation to prevent catastrophic forgetting and preserve pre-trained capabilities. Unlike previous CL methods that remain modality-coupled and suffer from modality gradient conflict, MoDE explicitly decouples modalities to prevent interference. Experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that MoDE significantly mitigates both inter- and intra-modal forgetting, outperforming prior CL baselines in unified multimodal generation settings. Codes will be publicly available: https://github.com/Christina200/MoDE-official.git

The emergence of multimodal large language models has redefined the agent paradigm by integrating language and vision modalities with external data sources, enabling agents to better interpret human instructions and execute increasingly complex tasks. However, in this paper, we identify a critical yet previously overlooked security vulnerability in multimodal agents: cross-modal prompt injection attacks. To exploit this vulnerability, we propose CrossInject, a novel attack framework in which attackers embed adversarial perturbations across multiple modalities to align with target malicious content, allowing external instructions to hijack the agent's decision-making process and execute unauthorized tasks. Our approach incorporates two key coordinated components. First, we introduce Visual Latent Alignment, where we optimize adversarial features to the malicious instructions in the visual embedding space based on a text-to-image generative model, ensuring that adversarial images subtly encode cues for malicious task execution. Subsequently, we present Textual Guidance Enhancement, where a large language model is leveraged to construct the black-box defensive system prompt through adversarial meta prompting and generate an malicious textual command that steers the agent's output toward better compliance with attackers' requests. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art attacks, achieving at least a +30.1% increase in attack success rates across diverse tasks. Furthermore, we validate our attack's effectiveness in real-world multimodal autonomous agents, highlighting its potential implications for safety-critical applications.

Large language models (LLMs) often need to balance their internal parametric knowledge with external information, such as user beliefs and content from retrieved documents, in real-world scenarios like RAG or chat-based systems. A model's ability to reliably process these sources is key to system safety. Previous studies on knowledge conflict and sycophancy are limited to a binary conflict paradigm, primarily exploring conflicts between parametric knowledge and either a document or a user, but ignoring the interactive environment where all three sources exist simultaneously. To fill this gap, we propose a three-source interaction framework and systematically evaluate 27 LLMs from 3 families on 2 datasets. Our findings reveal general patterns: most models rely more on document assertions than user assertions, and this preference is reinforced by post-training. Furthermore, our behavioral analysis shows that most models are impressionable, unable to effectively discriminate between helpful and harmful external information. To address this, we demonstrate that fine-tuning on diverse source interaction data can significantly increase a model's discrimination abilities. In short, our work paves the way for developing trustworthy LLMs that can effectively and reliably integrate multiple sources of information. Code is available at https://github.com/shuowl/llm-source-balancing.

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.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in document understanding, a rapidly growing research area with significant industrial demand in recent years. As a multimodal task, document understanding requires models to possess both perceptual and cognitive abilities. However, current MLLMs often face conflicts between perception and cognition. Taking a document VQA task (cognition) as an example, an MLLM might generate answers that do not match the corresponding visual content identified by its OCR (perception). This conflict suggests that the MLLM might struggle to establish an intrinsic connection between the information it "sees" and what it "understands." Such conflicts challenge the intuitive notion that cognition is consistent with perception, hindering the performance and explainability of MLLMs. In this paper, we define the conflicts between cognition and perception as Cognition and Perception (C&P) knowledge conflicts, a form of multimodal knowledge conflicts, and systematically assess them with a focus on document understanding. Our analysis reveals that even GPT-4o, a leading MLLM, achieves only 68.6% C&P consistency. To mitigate the C&P knowledge conflicts, we propose a novel method called Multimodal Knowledge Consistency Fine-tuning. This method first ensures task-specific consistency and then connects the cognitive and perceptual knowledge. Our method significantly reduces C&P knowledge conflicts across all tested MLLMs and enhances their performance in both cognitive and perceptual tasks in most scenarios.

In many machine learning systems that jointly learn from multiple modalities, a core research question is to understand the nature of multimodal interactions: the emergence of new task-relevant information during learning from both modalities that was not present in either alone. We study this challenge of interaction quantification in a semi-supervised setting with only labeled unimodal data and naturally co-occurring multimodal data (e.g., unlabeled images and captions, video and corresponding audio) but when labeling them is time-consuming. Using a precise information-theoretic definition of interactions, our key contributions are the derivations of lower and upper bounds to quantify the amount of multimodal interactions in this semi-supervised setting. We propose two lower bounds based on the amount of shared information between modalities and the disagreement between separately trained unimodal classifiers, and derive an upper bound through connections to approximate algorithms for min-entropy couplings. We validate these estimated bounds and show how they accurately track true interactions. Finally, two semi-supervised multimodal applications are explored based on these theoretical results: (1) analyzing the relationship between multimodal performance and estimated interactions, and (2) self-supervised learning that embraces disagreement between modalities beyond agreement as is typically done.

As audio-visual multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly deployed in safety-critical applications, understanding their vulnerabilities is crucial. To this end, we introduce Multi-Modal Typography, a systematic study examining how typographic attacks across multiple modalities adversely influence MLLMs. While prior work focuses narrowly on unimodal attacks, we expose the cross-modal fragility of MLLMs. We analyze the interactions between audio, visual, and text perturbations and reveal that coordinated multi-modal attack creates a significantly more potent threat than single-modality attacks (attack success rate = 83.43% vs 34.93%).Our findings across multiple frontier MLLMs, tasks, and common-sense reasoning and content moderation benchmarks establishes multi-modal typography as a critical and underexplored attack strategy in multi-modal reasoning. Code and data will be publicly available.

This survey provides an in-depth analysis of knowledge conflicts for large language models (LLMs), highlighting the complex challenges they encounter when blending contextual and parametric knowledge. Our focus is on three categories of knowledge conflicts: context-memory, inter-context, and intra-memory conflict. These conflicts can significantly impact the trustworthiness and performance of LLMs, especially in real-world applications where noise and misinformation are common. By categorizing these conflicts, exploring the causes, examining the behaviors of LLMs under such conflicts, and reviewing available solutions, this survey aims to shed light on strategies for improving the robustness of LLMs, thereby serving as a valuable resource for advancing research in this evolving area.

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.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive advancements across numerous disciplines, yet the critical issue of knowledge conflicts, a major source of hallucinations, has rarely been studied. Only a few research explored the conflicts between the inherent knowledge of LLMs and the retrieved contextual knowledge. However, a thorough assessment of knowledge conflict in LLMs is still missing. Motivated by this research gap, we present ConflictBank, the first comprehensive benchmark developed to systematically evaluate knowledge conflicts from three aspects: (i) conflicts encountered in retrieved knowledge, (ii) conflicts within the models' encoded knowledge, and (iii) the interplay between these conflict forms. Our investigation delves into four model families and twelve LLM instances, meticulously analyzing conflicts stemming from misinformation, temporal discrepancies, and semantic divergences. Based on our proposed novel construction framework, we create 7,453,853 claim-evidence pairs and 553,117 QA pairs. We present numerous findings on model scale, conflict causes, and conflict types. We hope our ConflictBank benchmark will help the community better understand model behavior in conflicts and develop more reliable LLMs.

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.

Negotiation is one of the crucial abilities in human communication, and there has been a resurgent research interest in negotiation dialogue systems recently, which goal is to empower intelligent agents with such ability that can efficiently help humans resolve conflicts or reach beneficial agreements. Although there have been many explorations in negotiation dialogue systems, a systematic review of this task has to date remained notably absent. To this end, we aim to fill this gap by reviewing contemporary studies in the emerging field of negotiation dialogue systems, covering benchmarks, evaluations, and methodologies. Furthermore, we also discuss potential future directions, including multi-modal, multi-party, and cross-cultural negotiation scenarios. Our goal is to provide the community with a systematic overview of negotiation dialogue systems and to inspire 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/

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.

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/.

Detecting emotional inconsistency across modalities is a key challenge in affective computing, as speech and text often convey conflicting cues. Existing approaches generally rely on incomplete emotion representations and employ unconditional fusion, which weakens performance when modalities are inconsistent. Moreover, little prior work explicitly addresses inconsistency detection itself. We propose InconVAD, a two-stage framework grounded in the Valence/Arousal/Dominance (VAD) space. In the first stage, independent uncertainty-aware models yield robust unimodal predictions. In the second stage, a classifier identifies cross-modal inconsistency and selectively integrates consistent signals. Extensive experiments show that InconVAD surpasses existing methods in both multimodal emotion inconsistency detection and modeling, offering a more reliable and interpretable solution for emotion analysis.

Recent advancements in large multimodal models (LMMs) have significantly enhanced performance across diverse tasks, with ongoing efforts to further integrate additional modalities such as video and audio. However, most existing LMMs remain vulnerable to hallucinations, the discrepancy between the factual multimodal input and the generated textual output, which has limited their applicability in various real-world scenarios. This paper presents the first systematic investigation of hallucinations in LMMs involving the three most common modalities: language, visual, and audio. Our study reveals two key contributors to hallucinations: overreliance on unimodal priors and spurious inter-modality correlations. To address these challenges, we introduce the benchmark The Curse of Multi-Modalities (CMM), which comprehensively evaluates hallucinations in LMMs, providing a detailed analysis of their underlying issues. Our findings highlight key vulnerabilities, including imbalances in modality integration and biases from training data, underscoring the need for balanced cross-modal learning and enhanced hallucination mitigation strategies. Based on our observations and findings, we suggest potential research directions that could enhance the reliability of LMMs.

Tool-augmented large language models (LLMs) have powered many applications. However, they are likely to suffer from knowledge conflict. In this paper, we propose a new type of knowledge conflict -- Tool-Memory Conflict (TMC), where the internal parametric knowledge contradicts with the external tool knowledge for tool-augmented LLMs. We find that existing LLMs, though powerful, suffer from TMC, especially on STEM-related tasks. We also uncover that under different conditions, tool knowledge and parametric knowledge may be prioritized differently. We then evaluate existing conflict resolving techniques, including prompting-based and RAG-based methods. Results show that none of these approaches can effectively resolve tool-memory conflicts.

Multimodal learning holds promise for richer information extraction by capturing dependencies across data sources. Yet, current training methods often underperform due to modality competition, a phenomenon where modalities contend for training resources leaving some underoptimized. This raises a pivotal question: how can we address training imbalances, ensure adequate optimization across all modalities, and achieve consistent performance improvements as we transition from unimodal to multimodal data? This paper proposes the Multimodal Competition Regularizer (MCR), inspired by a mutual information (MI) decomposition designed to prevent the adverse effects of competition in multimodal training. Our key contributions are: 1) A game-theoretic framework that adaptively balances modality contributions by encouraging each to maximize its informative role in the final prediction 2) Refining lower and upper bounds for each MI term to enhance the extraction of both task-relevant unique and shared information across modalities. 3) Proposing latent space permutations for conditional MI estimation, significantly improving computational efficiency. MCR outperforms all previously suggested training strategies and simple baseline, clearly demonstrating that training modalities jointly leads to important performance gains on both synthetic and large real-world datasets. We release our code and models at https://github.com/kkontras/MCR.

Advancing towards generalist agents necessitates the concurrent processing of multiple tasks using a unified model, thereby underscoring the growing significance of simultaneous model training on multiple downstream tasks. A common issue in multi-task learning is the occurrence of gradient conflict, which leads to potential competition among different tasks during joint training. This competition often results in improvements in one task at the expense of deterioration in another. Although several optimization methods have been developed to address this issue by manipulating task gradients for better task balancing, they cannot decrease the incidence of gradient conflict. In this paper, we systematically investigate the occurrence of gradient conflict across different methods and propose a strategy to reduce such conflicts through sparse training (ST), wherein only a portion of the model's parameters are updated during training while keeping the rest unchanged. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that ST effectively mitigates conflicting gradients and leads to superior performance. Furthermore, ST can be easily integrated with gradient manipulation techniques, thus enhancing their effectiveness.

Cross-modal retrieval is gaining increasing efficacy and interest from the research community, thanks to large-scale training, novel architectural and learning designs, and its application in LLMs and multimodal LLMs. In this paper, we move a step forward and design an approach that allows for multimodal queries, composed of both an image and a text, and can search within collections of multimodal documents, where images and text are interleaved. Our model, ReT, employs multi-level representations extracted from different layers of both visual and textual backbones, both at the query and document side. To allow for multi-level and cross-modal understanding and feature extraction, ReT employs a novel Transformer-based recurrent cell that integrates both textual and visual features at different layers, and leverages sigmoidal gates inspired by the classical design of LSTMs. Extensive experiments on M2KR and M-BEIR benchmarks show that ReT achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse settings. Our source code and trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/aimagelab/ReT.

Multimodal entity linking (MEL) aims to link ambiguous mentions within multimodal contexts to corresponding entities in a multimodal knowledge base. Most existing approaches to MEL are based on representation learning or vision-and-language pre-training mechanisms for exploring the complementary effect among multiple modalities. However, these methods suffer from two limitations. On the one hand, they overlook the possibility of considering negative samples from the same modality. On the other hand, they lack mechanisms to capture bidirectional cross-modal interaction. To address these issues, we propose a Multi-level Matching network for Multimodal Entity Linking (M3EL). Specifically, M3EL is composed of three different modules: (i) a Multimodal Feature Extraction module, which extracts modality-specific representations with a multimodal encoder and introduces an intra-modal contrastive learning sub-module to obtain better discriminative embeddings based on uni-modal differences; (ii) an Intra-modal Matching Network module, which contains two levels of matching granularity: Coarse-grained Global-to-Global and Fine-grained Global-to-Local, to achieve local and global level intra-modal interaction; (iii) a Cross-modal Matching Network module, which applies bidirectional strategies, Textual-to-Visual and Visual-to-Textual matching, to implement bidirectional cross-modal interaction. Extensive experiments conducted on WikiMEL, RichpediaMEL, and WikiDiverse datasets demonstrate the outstanding performance of M3EL when compared to the state-of-the-art baselines.

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.

Knowledge conflict arises from discrepancies between information in the context of a large language model (LLM) and the knowledge stored in its parameters. This can hurt performance when using standard decoding techniques, which tend to ignore the context. Existing test-time contrastive methods seek to address this by comparing the LLM's output distribution with and without the context and adjust the model according to the contrast between them. However, we find that these methods frequently misjudge the degree of conflict and struggle to handle instances that vary in their amount of conflict, with static methods over-adjusting when conflict is absent. We propose a fine-grained, instance-level approach called AdaCAD, which dynamically infers the weight of adjustment based on the degree of conflict, as measured by the Jensen-Shannon divergence between distributions representing contextual and parametric knowledge. Our experiments across four models on six diverse question-answering (QA) datasets and three summarization tasks demonstrate that our training-free adaptive method consistently outperforms other decoding methods on QA, with average accuracy gains of 14.21% (absolute) over a static contrastive baseline, and improves the factuality of summaries by 5.59 (AlignScore). Furthermore, our analysis shows that while decoding with contrastive baselines hurts performance when conflict is absent, AdaCAD mitigates these losses, making it more applicable to real-world datasets in which some examples have conflict and others do not.

Contrastive Language--Image Pre-training (CLIP) has manifested remarkable improvements in zero-shot classification and cross-modal vision-language tasks. Yet, from a geometrical point of view, the CLIP embedding space has been found to have a pronounced modality gap. This gap renders the embedding space overly sparse and disconnected, with different modalities being densely distributed in distinct subregions of the hypersphere. In this work, we aim at answering two main questions: 1. Does sharing the parameter space between the multi-modal encoders reduce the modality gap? 2. Can the gap be mitigated by pushing apart the uni-modal embeddings via intra-modality separation? We design AlignCLIP, in order to answer these questions and show that answers to both questions are positive. Through extensive experiments, we show that AlignCLIP achieves noticeable enhancements in the cross-modal alignment of the embeddings, and thereby, reduces the modality gap, while maintaining the performance across several downstream evaluations, such as zero-shot image classification, zero-shot multi-modal retrieval and zero-shot semantic text similarity.

The performance of the keyword spotting (KWS) system based on audio modality, commonly measured in false alarms and false rejects, degrades significantly under the far field and noisy conditions. Therefore, audio-visual keyword spotting, which leverages complementary relationships over multiple modalities, has recently gained much attention. However, current studies mainly focus on combining the exclusively learned representations of different modalities, instead of exploring the modal relationships during each respective modeling. In this paper, we propose a novel visual modality enhanced end-to-end KWS framework (VE-KWS), which fuses audio and visual modalities from two aspects. The first one is utilizing the speaker location information obtained from the lip region in videos to assist the training of multi-channel audio beamformer. By involving the beamformer as an audio enhancement module, the acoustic distortions, caused by the far field or noisy environments, could be significantly suppressed. The other one is conducting cross-attention between different modalities to capture the inter-modal relationships and help the representation learning of each modality. Experiments on the MSIP challenge corpus show that our proposed model achieves 2.79% false rejection rate and 2.95% false alarm rate on the Eval set, resulting in a new SOTA performance compared with the top-ranking systems in the ICASSP2022 MISP challenge.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) with multimodal reasoning capabilities are high-value attack targets, given their potential for handling complex multimodal harmful tasks. Mainstream black-box jailbreak attacks on VLMs work by distributing malicious clues across modalities to disperse model attention and bypass safety alignment mechanisms. However, these adversarial attacks rely on simple and fixed image-text combinations that lack attack complexity scalability, limiting their effectiveness for red-teaming VLMs' continuously evolving reasoning capabilities. We propose CrossTALK (\underline{Cross}-modal en\underline{TA}ng\underline{L}ement attac\underline{K}), which is a scalable approach that extends and entangles information clues across modalities to exceed VLMs' trained and generalized safety alignment patterns for jailbreak. Specifically, {knowledge-scalable reframing} extends harmful tasks into multi-hop chain instructions, {cross-modal clue entangling} migrates visualizable entities into images to build multimodal reasoning links, and {cross-modal scenario nesting} uses multimodal contextual instructions to steer VLMs toward detailed harmful outputs. Experiments show our COMET achieves state-of-the-art attack success rate.

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.

Humans use different modalities, such as speech, text, images, videos, etc., to communicate their intent and goals with teammates. For robots to become better assistants, we aim to endow them with the ability to follow instructions and understand tasks specified by their human partners. Most robotic policy learning methods have focused on one single modality of task specification while ignoring the rich cross-modal information. We present MUTEX, a unified approach to policy learning from multimodal task specifications. It trains a transformer-based architecture to facilitate cross-modal reasoning, combining masked modeling and cross-modal matching objectives in a two-stage training procedure. After training, MUTEX can follow a task specification in any of the six learned modalities (video demonstrations, goal images, text goal descriptions, text instructions, speech goal descriptions, and speech instructions) or a combination of them. We systematically evaluate the benefits of MUTEX in a newly designed dataset with 100 tasks in simulation and 50 tasks in the real world, annotated with multiple instances of task specifications in different modalities, and observe improved performance over methods trained specifically for any single modality. More information at https://ut-austin-rpl.github.io/MUTEX/

Despite rapid progress in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and emerging omni-modal architectures, current benchmarks remain limited in scope and integration, suffering from incomplete modality coverage, restricted interaction to text-centric outputs, and weak interdependence and complementarity among modalities. To bridge these gaps, we introduce FysicsWorld, the first unified full-modality benchmark that supports bidirectional input-output across image, video, audio, and text, enabling comprehensive any-to-any evaluation across understanding, generation, and reasoning. FysicsWorld encompasses 16 primary tasks and 3,268 curated samples, aggregated from over 40 high-quality sources and covering a rich set of open-domain categories with diverse question types. We also propose the Cross-Modal Complementarity Screening (CMCS) strategy integrated in a systematic data construction framework that produces omni-modal data for spoken interaction and fusion-dependent cross-modal reasoning. Through a comprehensive evaluation of over 30 state-of-the-art baselines, spanning MLLMs, modality-specific models, unified understanding-generation models, and omni-modal language models, FysicsWorld exposes the performance disparities and limitations across models in understanding, generation, and reasoning. Our benchmark establishes a unified foundation and strong baselines for evaluating and advancing next-generation full-modality architectures.

Multimodal learning has recently gained significant popularity, demonstrating impressive performance across various zero-shot classification tasks and a range of perceptive and generative applications. Models such as Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) are designed to bridge different modalities, such as images and text, by learning a shared representation space through contrastive learning. Despite their success, the working mechanisms underlying multimodal learning are not yet well understood. Notably, these models often exhibit a modality gap, where different modalities occupy distinct regions within the shared representation space. In this work, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the emergence of modality gap by characterizing the gradient flow learning dynamics. Specifically, we identify the critical roles of mismatched data pairs and a learnable temperature parameter in causing and perpetuating the modality gap during training. Furthermore, our theoretical insights are validated through experiments on practical CLIP models. These findings provide principled guidance for mitigating the modality gap, including strategies such as appropriate temperature scheduling and modality swapping. Additionally, we demonstrate that closing the modality gap leads to improved performance on tasks such as image-text retrieval.

Cross-modal alignment Learning integrates information from different modalities like text, image, audio and video to create unified models. This approach develops shared representations and learns correlations between modalities, enabling applications such as visual question answering and audiovisual content analysis. Current techniques rely on large modality-specific encoders, necessitating fine-tuning or training from scratch on vast aligned datasets (e.g., text-image, text-audio, image-audio). This approach has limitations: (i) it is very expensive due to the need for training large encoders on extensive datasets, (ii) acquiring aligned large paired datasets is challenging, and (iii) adding new modalities requires retraining the entire framework to incorporate these modalities. To address these issues, we propose OneEncoder, a lightweight framework that progressively represents and aligns four modalities (image, text, audio, video). Initially, we train a lightweight Universal Projection module (UP) to align image and text modalities. Then, we freeze the pretrained UP and progressively align future modalities to those already aligned. OneEncoder operates efficiently and cost-effectively, even in scenarios where vast aligned datasets are unavailable, due to its lightweight design. Trained on small paired datasets, it shows strong performance in tasks like classification, querying, and visual question answering, surpassing methods that rely on large datasets and specialized encoders.

Investigating hallucination issues in large language models (LLMs) within cross-lingual and cross-modal scenarios can greatly advance the large-scale deployment in real-world applications. Nevertheless, the current studies are limited to a single scenario, either cross-lingual or cross-modal, leaving a gap in the exploration of hallucinations in the joint cross-lingual and cross-modal scenarios. Motivated by this, we introduce a novel joint Cross-lingual and Cross-modal Hallucinations benchmark (CCHall) to fill this gap. Specifically, CCHall simultaneously incorporates both cross-lingual and cross-modal hallucination scenarios, which can be used to assess the cross-lingual and cross-modal capabilities of LLMs. Furthermore, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation on CCHall, exploring both mainstream open-source and closed-source LLMs. The experimental results highlight that current LLMs still struggle with CCHall. We hope CCHall can serve as a valuable resource to assess LLMs in joint cross-lingual and cross-modal scenarios.

Due to the lack of effective cross-modal modeling, existing open-source audio-video generation methods often exhibit compromised lip synchronization and insufficient semantic consistency. To mitigate these drawbacks, we propose UniAVGen, a unified framework for joint audio and video generation. UniAVGen is anchored in a dual-branch joint synthesis architecture, incorporating two parallel Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) to build a cohesive cross-modal latent space. At its heart lies an Asymmetric Cross-Modal Interaction mechanism, which enables bidirectional, temporally aligned cross-attention, thus ensuring precise spatiotemporal synchronization and semantic consistency. Furthermore, this cross-modal interaction is augmented by a Face-Aware Modulation module, which dynamically prioritizes salient regions in the interaction process. To enhance generative fidelity during inference, we additionally introduce Modality-Aware Classifier-Free Guidance, a novel strategy that explicitly amplifies cross-modal correlation signals. Notably, UniAVGen's robust joint synthesis design enables seamless unification of pivotal audio-video tasks within a single model, such as joint audio-video generation and continuation, video-to-audio dubbing, and audio-driven video synthesis. Comprehensive experiments validate that, with far fewer training samples (1.3M vs. 30.1M), UniAVGen delivers overall advantages in audio-video synchronization, timbre consistency, and emotion consistency.

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.

Multimodal models have gained significant success in recent years. Standard multimodal approaches often assume unchanged modalities from training stage to inference stage. In practice, however, many scenarios fail to satisfy such assumptions with missing modalities during inference, leading to limitations on where multimodal models can be applied. While existing methods mitigate the problem through reconstructing the missing modalities, it increases unnecessary computational cost, which could be just as critical, especially for large, deployed systems. To solve the problem from both sides, we propose a novel guidance network that promotes knowledge sharing during training, taking advantage of the multimodal representations to train better single-modality models for inference. Real-life experiment in violence detection shows that our proposed framework trains single-modality models that significantly outperform its traditionally trained counterparts while maintaining the same inference cost.

Training multimodal large language models has long been limited by the scarcity of high-quality paired multimodal data. Recent studies show that the shared representation space of pretrained multimodal contrastive models can serve as a bridge, enabling models to perform multimodal training with unimodal data. However, the key premise of this paradigm remains insufficiently understood: can representations from different modalities be reliably interchanged? The core obstacle lies in the persistent Modality Gap in the shared space. In this work, we revisit the geometric nature of the modality gap. We find that modality representations already share compatible dominant semantic geometry. What truly hinders modality interchangeability is not a simple global shift, but an anisotropic residual structure concentrated along a small number of dominant directions. Based on this finding, we further propose the principle of anisotropic modality gap alignment: effective modality alignment should align with the target-modality distribution while preserving the semantic structure of the source modality. Guided by this principle, we propose an anisotropic geometric correction framework, AnisoAlign, for unpaired modality alignment. This framework leverages the internal geometric prior of the target modality and performs bounded correction on source-modality representations, thereby constructing substitute representations in the target modality. Experiments confirm its benefits in both geometric diagnostics and text-only MLLM training. Overall, this work recasts the modality gap from an empirical observation into a correctable, structured geometric phenomenon and provides a new representation alignment perspective for training multimodal models with unimodal data.

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.

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.

In this work, we explore a scalable way for building a general representation model toward unlimited modalities. We release ONE-PEACE, a highly extensible model with 4B parameters that can seamlessly align and integrate representations across vision, audio, and language modalities. The architecture of ONE-PEACE comprises modality adapters, shared self-attention layers, and modality FFNs. This design allows for the easy extension of new modalities by adding adapters and FFNs, while also enabling multi-modal fusion through self-attention layers. To pretrain ONE-PEACE, we develop two modality-agnostic pretraining tasks, cross-modal aligning contrast and intra-modal denoising contrast, which align the semantic space of different modalities and capture fine-grained details within modalities concurrently. With the scaling-friendly architecture and pretraining tasks, ONE-PEACE has the potential to expand to unlimited modalities. Without using any vision or language pretrained model for initialization, ONE-PEACE achieves leading results on a wide range of uni-modal and multi-modal tasks, including image classification (ImageNet), semantic segmentation (ADE20K), audio-text retrieval (AudioCaps, Clotho), audio classification (ESC-50, FSD50K, VGGSound), audio question answering (AVQA), image-text retrieval (MSCOCO, Flickr30K), and visual grounding (RefCOCO/+/g). Code is available at https://github.com/OFA-Sys/ONE-PEACE.

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.

The emergence of large Vision Language Models (VLMs) has broadened the scope and capabilities of single-modal Large Language Models (LLMs) by integrating visual modalities, thereby unlocking transformative cross-modal applications in a variety of real-world scenarios. Despite their impressive performance, VLMs are prone to significant hallucinations, particularly in the form of cross-modal inconsistencies. Building on the success of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) in aligning LLMs, recent advancements have focused on applying direct preference optimization (DPO) on carefully curated datasets to mitigate these issues. Yet, such approaches typically introduce preference signals in a brute-force manner, neglecting the crucial role of visual information in the alignment process. In this paper, we introduce Re-Align, a novel alignment framework that leverages image retrieval to construct a dual-preference dataset, effectively incorporating both textual and visual preference signals. We further introduce rDPO, an extension of the standard direct preference optimization that incorporates an additional visual preference objective during fine-tuning. Our experimental results demonstrate that Re-Align not only mitigates hallucinations more effectively than previous methods but also yields significant performance gains in general visual question-answering (VQA) tasks. Moreover, we show that Re-Align maintains robustness and scalability across a wide range of VLM sizes and architectures. This work represents a significant step forward in aligning multimodal LLMs, paving the way for more reliable and effective cross-modal applications. We release all the code in https://github.com/taco-group/Re-Align.

Joint audio-video (AV) generation is still a significant challenge in generative AI, primarily due to three critical requirements: quality of the generated samples, seamless multimodal synchronization and temporal coherence, with audio tracks that match the visual data and vice versa, and limitless video duration. In this paper, we present , a novel transformer-based architecture that addresses all the key challenges of AV generation. We explore three distinct cross modality interaction modules, with our lightweight temporal fusion module emerging as the most effective and computationally efficient approach for aligning audio and visual modalities. Our experimental results demonstrate that outperforms existing state-of-the-art models in multimodal AV generation tasks. Our code and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/ErgastiAlex/R-FLAV.

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.

Large language models frequently rely on both contextual input and parametric knowledge to perform tasks. However, these sources can come into conflict, especially when retrieved documents contradict the model's parametric knowledge. We propose a diagnostic framework to systematically evaluate LLM behavior under context-memory conflict, where the contextual information diverges from their parametric beliefs. We construct diagnostic data that elicit these conflicts and analyze model performance across multiple task types. Our findings reveal that (1) knowledge conflict has minimal impact on tasks that do not require knowledge utilization, (2) model performance is consistently higher when contextual and parametric knowledge are aligned, (3) models are unable to fully suppress their internal knowledge even when instructed, and (4) providing rationales that explain the conflict increases reliance on contexts. These insights raise concerns about the validity of model-based evaluation and underscore the need to account for knowledge conflict in the deployment of LLMs.

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/.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have gained community-spanning prominence due to their ability to integrate visual and textual inputs to perform complex tasks. Despite their success, the internal decision-making processes of these models remain opaque, posing challenges in high-stakes applications. To address this, we introduce NOTICE, the first Noise-free Text-Image Corruption and Evaluation pipeline for mechanistic interpretability in VLMs. NOTICE incorporates a Semantic Minimal Pairs (SMP) framework for image corruption and Symmetric Token Replacement (STR) for text. This approach enables semantically meaningful causal mediation analysis for both modalities, providing a robust method for analyzing multimodal integration within models like BLIP. Our experiments on the SVO-Probes, MIT-States, and Facial Expression Recognition datasets reveal crucial insights into VLM decision-making, identifying the significant role of middle-layer cross-attention heads. Further, we uncover a set of ``universal cross-attention heads'' that consistently contribute across tasks and modalities, each performing distinct functions such as implicit image segmentation, object inhibition, and outlier inhibition. This work paves the way for more transparent and interpretable multimodal systems.

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.

As chatbots continue to evolve toward human-like, real-world, interactions, multimodality remains an active area of research and exploration. So far, efforts to integrate multimodality into chatbots have primarily focused on image-centric tasks, such as visual dialogue and image-based instructions, placing emphasis on the "eyes" of human perception while neglecting the "ears", namely auditory aspects. Moreover, these studies often center around static interactions that focus on discussing the modality rather than naturally incorporating it into the conversation, which limits the richness of simultaneous, dynamic engagement. Furthermore, while multimodality has been explored in multi-party and multi-session conversations, task-specific constraints have hindered its seamless integration into dynamic, natural conversations. To address these challenges, this study aims to equip chatbots with "eyes and ears" capable of more immersive interactions with humans. As part of this effort, we introduce a new multimodal conversation dataset, Multimodal Multi-Session Multi-Party Conversation (M^3C), and propose a novel multimodal conversation model featuring multimodal memory retrieval. Our model, trained on the M^3C, demonstrates the ability to seamlessly engage in long-term conversations with multiple speakers in complex, real-world-like settings, effectively processing visual and auditory inputs to understand and respond appropriately. Human evaluations highlight the model's strong performance in maintaining coherent and dynamic interactions, demonstrating its potential for advanced multimodal conversational agents.

Safety evaluation and red-teaming of large language models remain predominantly text-centric, and existing frameworks lack the infrastructure to systematically test whether alignment generalizes to audio, image, and video inputs. We present MUSE (Multimodal Unified Safety Evaluation), an open-source, run-centric platform that integrates automatic cross-modal payload generation, three multi-turn attack algorithms (Crescendo, PAIR, Violent Durian), provider-agnostic model routing, and an LLM judge with a five-level safety taxonomy into a single browser-based system. A dual-metric framework distinguishes hard Attack Success Rate (Compliance only) from soft ASR (including Partial Compliance), capturing partial information leakage that binary metrics miss. To probe whether alignment generalizes across modality boundaries, we introduce Inter-Turn Modality Switching (ITMS), which augments multi-turn attacks with per-turn modality rotation. Experiments across six multimodal LLMs from four providers show that multi-turn strategies can achieve up to 90-100% ASR against models with near-perfect single-turn refusal. ITMS does not uniformly raise final ASR on already-saturated baselines, but accelerates convergence by destabilizing early-turn defenses, and ablation reveals that the direction of modality effects is model-family-specific rather than universal, underscoring the need for provider-aware cross-modal safety testing.

As Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) becomes increasingly integrated into various facets of human life, ensuring the safety and ethical alignment of such systems is paramount. Previous studies primarily focus on single-modality threats, which may not suffice given the integrated and complex nature of cross-modality interactions. We introduce a novel safety alignment challenge called Safe Inputs but Unsafe Output (SIUO) to evaluate cross-modality safety alignment. Specifically, it considers cases where single modalities are safe independently but could potentially lead to unsafe or unethical outputs when combined. To empirically investigate this problem, we developed the SIUO, a cross-modality benchmark encompassing 9 critical safety domains, such as self-harm, illegal activities, and privacy violations. Our findings reveal substantial safety vulnerabilities in both closed- and open-source LVLMs, such as GPT-4V and LLaVA, underscoring the inadequacy of current models to reliably interpret and respond to complex, real-world scenarios.

Text-to-image person retrieval aims to identify the target person based on a given textual description query. The primary challenge is to learn the mapping of visual and textual modalities into a common latent space. Prior works have attempted to address this challenge by leveraging separately pre-trained unimodal models to extract visual and textual features. However, these approaches lack the necessary underlying alignment capabilities required to match multimodal data effectively. Besides, these works use prior information to explore explicit part alignments, which may lead to the distortion of intra-modality information. To alleviate these issues, we present IRRA: a cross-modal Implicit Relation Reasoning and Aligning framework that learns relations between local visual-textual tokens and enhances global image-text matching without requiring additional prior supervision. Specifically, we first design an Implicit Relation Reasoning module in a masked language modeling paradigm. This achieves cross-modal interaction by integrating the visual cues into the textual tokens with a cross-modal multimodal interaction encoder. Secondly, to globally align the visual and textual embeddings, Similarity Distribution Matching is proposed to minimize the KL divergence between image-text similarity distributions and the normalized label matching distributions. The proposed method achieves new state-of-the-art results on all three public datasets, with a notable margin of about 3%-9% for Rank-1 accuracy compared to prior methods.

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.

Cross-modal retrieval aims to bridge the semantic gap between different modalities, such as visual and textual data, enabling accurate retrieval across them. Despite significant advancements with models like CLIP that align cross-modal representations, a persistent challenge remains: the hubness problem, where a small subset of samples (hubs) dominate as nearest neighbors, leading to biased representations and degraded retrieval accuracy. Existing methods often mitigate hubness through post-hoc normalization techniques, relying on prior data distributions that may not be practical in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we directly mitigate hubness during training and introduce NeighborRetr, a novel method that effectively balances the learning of hubs and adaptively adjusts the relations of various kinds of neighbors. Our approach not only mitigates the hubness problem but also enhances retrieval performance, achieving state-of-the-art results on multiple cross-modal retrieval benchmarks. Furthermore, NeighborRetr demonstrates robust generalization to new domains with substantial distribution shifts, highlighting its effectiveness in real-world applications. We make our code publicly available at: https://github.com/zzezze/NeighborRetr .

Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with hallucinations and outdated knowledge due to their reliance on static training data. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates these issues by integrating external dynamic information enhancing factual and updated grounding. Recent advances in multimodal learning have led to the development of Multimodal RAG, incorporating multiple modalities such as text, images, audio, and video to enhance the generated outputs. However, cross-modal alignment and reasoning introduce unique challenges to Multimodal RAG, distinguishing it from traditional unimodal RAG. This survey offers a structured and comprehensive analysis of Multimodal RAG systems, covering datasets, metrics, benchmarks, evaluation, methodologies, and innovations in retrieval, fusion, augmentation, and generation. We precisely review training strategies, robustness enhancements, and loss functions, while also exploring the diverse Multimodal RAG scenarios. Furthermore, we discuss open challenges and future research directions to support advancements in this evolving field. This survey lays the foundation for developing more capable and reliable AI systems that effectively leverage multimodal dynamic external knowledge bases. Resources are available at https://github.com/llm-lab-org/Multimodal-RAG-Survey.

Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) have recently demonstrated remarkable progress in embodied environments, enabling robots to perceive, reason, and act through unified multimodal understanding. Despite their impressive capabilities, the adversarial robustness of these systems remains largely unexplored, especially under realistic multimodal and black-box conditions. Existing studies mainly focus on single-modality perturbations and overlook the cross-modal misalignment that fundamentally affects embodied reasoning and decision-making. In this paper, we introduce VLA-Fool, a comprehensive study of multimodal adversarial robustness in embodied VLA models under both white-box and black-box settings. VLA-Fool unifies three levels of multimodal adversarial attacks: (1) textual perturbations through gradient-based and prompt-based manipulations, (2) visual perturbations via patch and noise distortions, and (3) cross-modal misalignment attacks that intentionally disrupt the semantic correspondence between perception and instruction. We further incorporate a VLA-aware semantic space into linguistic prompts, developing the first automatically crafted and semantically guided prompting framework. Experiments on the LIBERO benchmark using a fine-tuned OpenVLA model reveal that even minor multimodal perturbations can cause significant behavioral deviations, demonstrating the fragility of embodied multimodal alignment.

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.

Recent advances in joint audio-video generation have been remarkable, yet real-world applications demand strong per-modality fidelity, cross-modal alignment, and fine-grained synchronization. Reinforcement Learning (RL) offers a promising paradigm, but its extension to multi-objective and multi-modal joint audio-video generation remains unexplored. Notably, our in-depth analysis first reveals that the primary obstacles to applying RL in this stem from: (i) multi-objective advantages inconsistency, where the advantages of multimodal outputs are not always consistent within a group; (ii) multi-modal gradients imbalance, where video-branch gradients leak into shallow audio layers responsible for intra-modal generation; (iii) uniform credit assignment, where fine-grained cross-modal alignment regions fail to get efficient exploration. These shortcomings suggest that vanilla RL fine-tuning strategy with a single global advantage often leads to suboptimal results. To address these challenges, we propose OmniNFT, a novel modality-aware online diffusion RL framework with three key innovations: (1) Modality-wise advantage routing, which routes independent per-reward advantages to their respective modality generation branches. (2) Layer-wise gradient surgery, which selectively detaches video-branch gradients on shallow audio layers while retaining those for cross-modal interaction layers. (3) Region-wise loss reweighting, which modulates policy optimization toward critical regions related to audio-video synchronization and fine-grained alignment. Extensive experiments on JavisBench and VBench with the LTX-2 backbone demonstrate that OmniNFT achieves comprehensive improvements in audio and video perceptual quality, cross-modal alignment, and audio-video synchronization.

As information exists in various modalities in real world, effective interaction and fusion among multimodal information plays a key role for the creation and perception of multimodal data in computer vision and deep learning research. With superb power in modeling the interaction among multimodal information, multimodal image synthesis and editing has become a hot research topic in recent years. Instead of providing explicit guidance for network training, multimodal guidance offers intuitive and flexible means for image synthesis and editing. On the other hand, this field is also facing several challenges in alignment of multimodal features, synthesis of high-resolution images, faithful evaluation metrics, etc. In this survey, we comprehensively contextualize the advance of the recent multimodal image synthesis and editing and formulate taxonomies according to data modalities and model types. We start with an introduction to different guidance modalities in image synthesis and editing, and then describe multimodal image synthesis and editing approaches extensively according to their model types. After that, we describe benchmark datasets and evaluation metrics as well as corresponding experimental results. Finally, we provide insights about the current research challenges and possible directions for future research. A project associated with this survey is available at https://github.com/fnzhan/Generative-AI.

Current Cross-Modality Generation Models (GMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities in various generative tasks. Given the ubiquity and information richness of vision modality inputs in real-world scenarios, Cross-vision, encompassing Vision-Language Perception (VLP) and Image-to-Image (I2I), tasks have attracted significant attention. Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) and I2I GMs are employed to handle VLP and I2I tasks, respectively. Previous research indicates that printing typographic words into input images significantly induces LVLMs and I2I GMs to generate disruptive outputs semantically related to those words. Additionally, visual prompts, as a more sophisticated form of typography, are also revealed to pose security risks to various applications of VLP tasks when injected into images. In this paper, we comprehensively investigate the performance impact induced by Typographic Visual Prompt Injection (TVPI) in various LVLMs and I2I GMs. To better observe performance modifications and characteristics of this threat, we also introduce the TVPI Dataset. Through extensive explorations, we deepen the understanding of the underlying causes of the TVPI threat in various GMs and offer valuable insights into its potential origins.

Social media platforms enable the propagation of hateful content across different modalities such as textual, auditory, and visual, necessitating effective detection methods. While recent approaches have shown promise in handling individual modalities, their effectiveness across different modality combinations remains unexplored. This paper presents a systematic analysis of fusion-based approaches for multimodal hate detection, focusing on their performance across video and image-based content. Our comprehensive evaluation reveals significant modality-specific limitations: while simple embedding fusion achieves state-of-the-art performance on video content (HateMM dataset) with a 9.9% points F1-score improvement, it struggles with complex image-text relationships in memes (Hateful Memes dataset). Through detailed ablation studies and error analysis, we demonstrate how current fusion approaches fail to capture nuanced cross-modal interactions, particularly in cases involving benign confounders. Our findings provide crucial insights for developing more robust hate detection systems and highlight the need for modality-specific architectural considerations. The code is available at https://github.com/gak97/Video-vs-Meme-Hate.

Cross-lingual Cross-modal Retrieval (CCR) is an essential task in web search, which aims to break the barriers between modality and language simultaneously and achieves image-text retrieval in the multi-lingual scenario with a single model. In recent years, excellent progress has been made based on cross-lingual cross-modal pre-training; particularly, the methods based on contrastive learning on large-scale data have significantly improved retrieval tasks. However, these methods directly follow the existing pre-training methods in the cross-lingual or cross-modal domain, leading to two problems of inconsistency in CCR: The methods with cross-lingual style suffer from the intra-modal error propagation, resulting in inconsistent recall performance across languages in the whole dataset. The methods with cross-modal style suffer from the inter-modal optimization direction bias, resulting in inconsistent rank across languages within each instance, which cannot be reflected by Recall@K. To solve these problems, we propose a simple but effective 1-to-K contrastive learning method, which treats each language equally and eliminates error propagation and optimization bias. In addition, we propose a new evaluation metric, Mean Rank Variance (MRV), to reflect the rank inconsistency across languages within each instance. Extensive experiments on four CCR datasets show that our method improves both recall rates and MRV with smaller-scale pre-trained data, achieving the new state-of-art.

Cross-modal alignment is crucial for multimodal representation fusion due to the inherent heterogeneity between modalities. While Transformer-based methods have shown promising results in modeling inter-modal relationships, their quadratic computational complexity limits their applicability to long-sequence or large-scale data. Although recent Mamba-based approaches achieve linear complexity, their sequential scanning mechanism poses fundamental challenges in comprehensively modeling cross-modal relationships. To address this limitation, we propose AlignMamba, an efficient and effective method for multimodal fusion. Specifically, grounded in Optimal Transport, we introduce a local cross-modal alignment module that explicitly learns token-level correspondences between different modalities. Moreover, we propose a global cross-modal alignment loss based on Maximum Mean Discrepancy to implicitly enforce the consistency between different modal distributions. Finally, the unimodal representations after local and global alignment are passed to the Mamba backbone for further cross-modal interaction and multimodal fusion. Extensive experiments on complete and incomplete multimodal fusion tasks demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method.

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.

Multi-modal pre-training models have been intensively explored to bridge vision and language in recent years. However, most of them explicitly model the cross-modal interaction between image-text pairs, by assuming that there exists strong semantic correlation between the text and image modalities. Since this strong assumption is often invalid in real-world scenarios, we choose to implicitly model the cross-modal correlation for large-scale multi-modal pre-training, which is the focus of the Chinese project `WenLan' led by our team. Specifically, with the weak correlation assumption over image-text pairs, we propose a two-tower pre-training model called BriVL within the cross-modal contrastive learning framework. Unlike OpenAI CLIP that adopts a simple contrastive learning method, we devise a more advanced algorithm by adapting the latest method MoCo into the cross-modal scenario. By building a large queue-based dictionary, our BriVL can incorporate more negative samples in limited GPU resources. We further construct a large Chinese multi-source image-text dataset called RUC-CAS-WenLan for pre-training our BriVL model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the pre-trained BriVL model outperforms both UNITER and OpenAI CLIP on various downstream tasks.

Vision-language pre-training (VLP) models have shown vulnerability to adversarial examples in multimodal tasks. Furthermore, malicious adversaries can be deliberately transferred to attack other black-box models. However, existing work has mainly focused on investigating white-box attacks. In this paper, we present the first study to investigate the adversarial transferability of recent VLP models. We observe that existing methods exhibit much lower transferability, compared to the strong attack performance in white-box settings. The transferability degradation is partly caused by the under-utilization of cross-modal interactions. Particularly, unlike unimodal learning, VLP models rely heavily on cross-modal interactions and the multimodal alignments are many-to-many, e.g., an image can be described in various natural languages. To this end, we propose a highly transferable Set-level Guidance Attack (SGA) that thoroughly leverages modality interactions and incorporates alignment-preserving augmentation with cross-modal guidance. Experimental results demonstrate that SGA could generate adversarial examples that can strongly transfer across different VLP models on multiple downstream vision-language tasks. On image-text retrieval, SGA significantly enhances the attack success rate for transfer attacks from ALBEF to TCL by a large margin (at least 9.78% and up to 30.21%), compared to the state-of-the-art.

Cultural differences in common ground may result in pragmatic failure and misunderstandings during communication. We develop our method Rational Speech Acts for Cross-Cultural Communication (RSA+C3) to resolve cross-cultural differences in common ground. To measure the success of our method, we study RSA+C3 in the collaborative referential game of Codenames Duet and show that our method successfully improves collaboration between simulated players of different cultures. Our contributions are threefold: (1) creating Codenames players using contrastive learning of an embedding space and LLM prompting that are aligned with human patterns of play, (2) studying culturally induced differences in common ground reflected in our trained models, and (3) demonstrating that our method RSA+C3 can ease cross-cultural communication in gameplay by inferring sociocultural context from interaction. Our code is publicly available at github.com/icwhite/codenames.

Multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA) identifies individuals' sentiment states in videos by integrating visual, audio, and text modalities. Despite progress in existing methods, the inherent modality heterogeneity limits the effective capture of interactive sentiment features across modalities. In this paper, by introducing a Multi-Modality Collaborative Learning (MMCL) framework, we facilitate cross-modal interactions and capture enhanced and complementary features from modality-common and modality-specific representations, respectively. Specifically, we design a parameter-free decoupling module and separate uni-modality into modality-common and modality-specific components through semantics assessment of cross-modal elements. For modality-specific representations, inspired by the act-reward mechanism in reinforcement learning, we design policy models to adaptively mine complementary sentiment features under the guidance of a joint reward. For modality-common representations, intra-modal attention is employed to highlight crucial components, playing enhanced roles among modalities. Experimental results, including superiority evaluations on four databases, effectiveness verification of each module, and assessment of complementary features, demonstrate that MMCL successfully learns collaborative features across modalities and significantly improves performance. The code can be available at https://github.com/smwanghhh/MMCL.

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.

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.

State-of-the-art vision and vision-and-language models rely on large-scale visio-linguistic pretraining for obtaining good performance on a variety of downstream tasks. Generally, such models are often either cross-modal (contrastive) or multi-modal (with earlier fusion) but not both; and they often only target specific modalities or tasks. A promising direction would be to use a single holistic universal model, as a "foundation", that targets all modalities at once -- a true vision and language foundation model should be good at vision tasks, language tasks, and cross- and multi-modal vision and language tasks. We introduce FLAVA as such a model and demonstrate impressive performance on a wide range of 35 tasks spanning these target modalities.

Different modalities hold considerable gaps in optimization trajectories, including speeds and paths, which lead to modality laziness and modality clash when jointly training multimodal models, resulting in insufficient and imbalanced multimodal learning. Existing methods focus on enforcing the weak modality by adding modality-specific optimization objectives, aligning their optimization speeds, or decomposing multimodal learning to enhance unimodal learning. These methods fail to achieve both unimodal sufficiency and multimodal balance. In this paper, we, for the first time, address both concerns by proposing multimodal Data Remixing, including decoupling multimodal data and filtering hard samples for each modality to mitigate modality imbalance; and then batch-level reassembling to align the gradient directions and avoid cross-modal interference, thus enhancing unimodal learning sufficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can be seamlessly integrated with existing approaches, improving accuracy by approximately 6.50%uparrow on CREMAD and 3.41%uparrow on Kinetic-Sounds, without training set expansion or additional computational overhead during inference. The source code is available at https://github.com/MatthewMaxy/Remix_ICML2025.

AIGC has rapidly expanded from text-to-image generation toward high-quality multimodal synthesis across video and audio. Within this context, joint audio-video generation (JAVG) has emerged as a fundamental task that produces synchronized and semantically aligned sound and vision from textual descriptions. However, compared with advanced commercial models such as Veo3, existing open-source methods still suffer from limitations in generation quality, temporal synchrony, and alignment with human preferences. To bridge the gap, this paper presents JavisDiT++, a concise yet powerful framework for unified modeling and optimization of JAVG. First, we introduce a modality-specific mixture-of-experts (MS-MoE) design that enables cross-modal interaction efficacy while enhancing single-modal generation quality. Then, we propose a temporal-aligned RoPE (TA-RoPE) strategy to achieve explicit, frame-level synchronization between audio and video tokens. Besides, we develop an audio-video direct preference optimization (AV-DPO) method to align model outputs with human preference across quality, consistency, and synchrony dimensions. Built upon Wan2.1-1.3B-T2V, our model achieves state-of-the-art performance merely with around 1M public training entries, significantly outperforming prior approaches in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations. Comprehensive ablation studies have been conducted to validate the effectiveness of our proposed modules. All the code, model, and dataset are released at https://JavisVerse.github.io/JavisDiT2-page.

Knowledge-intensive language understanding tasks require Language Models (LMs) to integrate relevant context, mitigating their inherent weaknesses, such as incomplete or outdated knowledge. Nevertheless, studies indicate that LMs often ignore the provided context as it can conflict with the pre-existing LM's memory learned during pre-training. Moreover, conflicting knowledge can already be present in the LM's parameters, termed intra-memory conflict. Existing works have studied the two types of knowledge conflicts only in isolation. We conjecture that the (degree of) intra-memory conflicts can in turn affect LM's handling of context-memory conflicts. To study this, we introduce the DYNAMICQA dataset, which includes facts with a temporal dynamic nature where a fact can change with a varying time frequency and disputable dynamic facts, which can change depending on the viewpoint. DYNAMICQA is the first to include real-world knowledge conflicts and provide context to study the link between the different types of knowledge conflicts. With the proposed dataset, we assess the use of uncertainty for measuring the intra-memory conflict and introduce a novel Coherent Persuasion (CP) score to evaluate the context's ability to sway LM's semantic output. Our extensive experiments reveal that static facts, which are unlikely to change, are more easily updated with additional context, relative to temporal and disputable facts.

Understanding the interplay between intra-modality dependencies (the contribution of an individual modality to a target task) and inter-modality dependencies (the relationships between modalities and the target task) is fundamental to advancing multi-modal learning. However, the nature of and interaction between these dependencies within current benchmark evaluations remains poorly characterized. In this work, we present a large-scale empirical study to quantify these dependencies across 23 visual question-answering benchmarks using multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) covering domains such as general and expert knowledge reasoning, optical character recognition, and document understanding. Our findings show that the reliance on vision, question (text), and their interaction varies significantly, both across and within benchmarks. We discover that numerous benchmarks intended to mitigate text-only biases have inadvertently amplified image-only dependencies. This characterization persists across model sizes and types, with models often obtaining high performance by using each modality independently and showing limited dependence on their interaction. We provide a quantitative characterization of multi-modal datasets, enabling a principled approach to multi-modal benchmark design and evaluation.

Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown promising results in integrating diverse modalities such as texts and images. MLLMs are heavily influenced by modality bias, often relying on language while under-utilizing other modalities like visual inputs. This position paper argues that MLLMs are deeply affected by modality bias. Firstly, we diagnose the current state of modality bias, highlighting its manifestations across various tasks. Secondly, we propose a systematic research road-map related to modality bias in MLLMs. Thirdly, we identify key factors of modality bias in MLLMs and offer actionable suggestions for future research to mitigate it. To substantiate these findings, we conduct experiments that demonstrate the influence of each factor: 1. Data Characteristics: Language data is compact and abstract, while visual data is redundant and complex, creating an inherent imbalance in learning dynamics. 2. Imbalanced Backbone Capabilities: The dominance of pretrained language models in MLLMs leads to overreliance on language and neglect of visual information. 3. Training Objectives: Current objectives often fail to promote balanced cross-modal alignment, resulting in shortcut learning biased toward language. These findings highlight the need for balanced training strategies and model architectures to better integrate multiple modalities in MLLMs. We call for interdisciplinary efforts to tackle these challenges and drive innovation in MLLM research. Our work provides a fresh perspective on modality bias in MLLMs and offers insights for developing more robust and generalizable multimodal systems-advancing progress toward Artificial General Intelligence.