Daily Papers

Speech-driven Talking Human (TH) generation, commonly known as "Talker," currently faces limitations in multi-subject driving capabilities. Extending this paradigm to "Multi-Talker," capable of animating multiple subjects simultaneously, introduces richer interactivity and stronger immersion in audiovisual communication. However, current Multi-Talkers still exhibit noticeable quality degradation caused by technical limitations, resulting in suboptimal user experiences. To address this challenge, we construct THQA-MT, the first large-scale Multi-Talker-generated Talking Human Quality Assessment dataset, consisting of 5,492 Multi-Talker-generated THs (MTHs) from 15 representative Multi-Talkers using 400 real portraits collected online. Through subjective experiments, we analyze perceptual discrepancies among different Multi-Talkers and identify 12 common types of distortion. Furthermore, we introduce EvalTalker, a novel TH quality assessment framework. This framework possesses the ability to perceive global quality, human characteristics, and identity consistency, while integrating Qwen-Sync to perceive multimodal synchrony. Experimental results demonstrate that EvalTalker achieves superior correlation with subjective scores, providing a robust foundation for future research on high-quality Multi-Talker generation and evaluation.

We propose to synthesize high-quality and synchronized audio, given video and optional text conditions, using a novel multimodal joint training framework MMAudio. In contrast to single-modality training conditioned on (limited) video data only, MMAudio is jointly trained with larger-scale, readily available text-audio data to learn to generate semantically aligned high-quality audio samples. Additionally, we improve audio-visual synchrony with a conditional synchronization module that aligns video conditions with audio latents at the frame level. Trained with a flow matching objective, MMAudio achieves new video-to-audio state-of-the-art among public models in terms of audio quality, semantic alignment, and audio-visual synchronization, while having a low inference time (1.23s to generate an 8s clip) and just 157M parameters. MMAudio also achieves surprisingly competitive performance in text-to-audio generation, showing that joint training does not hinder single-modality performance. Code and demo are available at: https://hkchengrex.github.io/MMAudio

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.

Recent advances in speech-aware language models have coupled strong acoustic encoders with large language models, enabling systems that move beyond transcription to produce richer outputs. Among these, word-level timestamp prediction is critical for applications such as captioning, media search, and multimodal synchronization, yet it is often handled by external alignment tools. In this work, we extend an existing speech-aware language model to predict timestamps directly alongside transcripts. We introduce a set of novel lightweight training strategies that improve alignment robustness while preserving recognition quality. Experiments across multiple datasets show that these strategies not only enhance timestamp accuracy, but also yield gains in overall ASR performance. Together, they demonstrate an efficient and unified approach to speech recognition with precise timestamp prediction.

Motion, speech, and sound effects are fundamental elements of human-centric videos, yet their heterogeneous temporal characteristics make joint generation highly challenging. Existing audio-video generation models often fail to maintain consistent alignment across these modalities, leading to noticeable mismatches between motion, speech, and environmental sounds. We present Unison, a unified framework that explicitly promotes coherence across the motion, speech, and sound modalities. Within the audio stream, Unison employs a semantic-guided harmonization strategy that decouples the generation of speech and sound-effect components. Leveraging bidirectional audio cross-attention and semantic-conditioned gating for semantic-driven adaptive recomposition, this approach effectively mitigates speech dominance and enhances acoustic clarity. For audio-motion synchronization, we propose a bidirectional cross-modal forcing strategy where the cleaner modality guides the noisier one through decoupled denoising schedules, reinforced by a progressive stabilization strategy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Unison achieves state-of-the-art performance in both audio perceptual quality and cross-modal synchronization, highlighting the importance of explicit multimodal harmonization in human-centric video generation.

Sound design involves creatively selecting, recording, and editing sound effects for various media like cinema, video games, and virtual/augmented reality. One of the most time-consuming steps when designing sound is synchronizing audio with video. In some cases, environmental recordings from video shoots are available, which can aid in the process. However, in video games and animations, no reference audio exists, requiring manual annotation of event timings from the video. We propose a system to extract repetitive actions onsets from a video, which are then used - in conjunction with audio or textual embeddings - to condition a diffusion model trained to generate a new synchronized sound effects audio track. In this way, we leave complete creative control to the sound designer while removing the burden of synchronization with video. Furthermore, editing the onset track or changing the conditioning embedding requires much less effort than editing the audio track itself, simplifying the sonification process. We provide sound examples, source code, and pretrained models to faciliate reproducibility

Text-to-video and image-to-video generation have made rapid progress in visual quality, but they remain limited in controlling the precise timing of motion. In contrast, audio provides temporal cues aligned with video motion, making it a promising condition for temporally controlled video generation. However, existing audio-to-video (A2V) models struggle with fine-grained synchronization due to indirect conditioning mechanisms or limited temporal modeling capacity. We present Syncphony, which generates 380x640 resolution, 24fps videos synchronized with diverse audio inputs. Our approach builds upon a pre-trained video backbone and incorporates two key components to improve synchronization: (1) Motion-aware Loss, which emphasizes learning at high-motion regions; (2) Audio Sync Guidance, which guides the full model using a visually aligned off-sync model without audio layers to better exploit audio cues at inference while maintaining visual quality. To evaluate synchronization, we propose CycleSync, a video-to-audio-based metric that measures the amount of motion cues in the generated video to reconstruct the original audio. Experiments on AVSync15 and The Greatest Hits datasets demonstrate that Syncphony outperforms existing methods in both synchronization accuracy and visual quality. Project page is available at: https://jibin86.github.io/syncphony_project_page

Contextual entrainment is the tendency of a model to let auxiliary context in its input pull its output, independently of whether that context is relevant, true, or even meaningful. Recently, it has been identified and given a mechanistic account in unimodal language models. Whether and how it manifests in vision-language models (VLMs) is, by contrast, largely unexamined, and the field lacks a purpose-built instrument with which to investigate it. We take the position that studying contextual entrainment in VLMs requires more than porting an existing text-only benchmark to the multimodal setting: it requires a taxonomically structured, dual-modality instrument whose conditions are constructed around the item at hand (the depicted image in the textual stream, the textual query in the visual stream). We argue that the move to VLMs is substantive rather than incremental. It makes entrainment a dual phenomenon, drivable independently by textual and by visual context, and it opens a veracity distinction (context that is false of the depicted scene yet possible in the world) that has no counterpart in the unimodal, world-knowledge-only formulation of prior work. To make this position concrete and actionable, we introduce ENTRAP-VL (ENTRainment Assessment Probe for Vision and Language), a manually curated dataset of 1,500 items across eight categories, organized by a taxonomy that spans two axes, i.e., the association of context with the item and its relationship to truth, and split into a textual-entrainment stream (eight context conditions) and a visual-entrainment stream (three context conditions). We do not claim to measure entrainment in any particular model; we provide the instrument, the taxonomy that motivates it, and the evaluation protocols it enables, so that the community can investigate the phenomenon rigorously. We will release the dataset and its documentation publicly.

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.

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.

Human-Centric Video Generation (HCVG) methods seek to synthesize human videos from multimodal inputs, including text, image, and audio. Existing methods struggle to effectively coordinate these heterogeneous modalities due to two challenges: the scarcity of training data with paired triplet conditions and the difficulty of collaborating the sub-tasks of subject preservation and audio-visual sync with multimodal inputs. In this work, we present HuMo, a unified HCVG framework for collaborative multimodal control. For the first challenge, we construct a high-quality dataset with diverse and paired text, reference images, and audio. For the second challenge, we propose a two-stage progressive multimodal training paradigm with task-specific strategies. For the subject preservation task, to maintain the prompt following and visual generation abilities of the foundation model, we adopt the minimal-invasive image injection strategy. For the audio-visual sync task, besides the commonly adopted audio cross-attention layer, we propose a focus-by-predicting strategy that implicitly guides the model to associate audio with facial regions. For joint learning of controllabilities across multimodal inputs, building on previously acquired capabilities, we progressively incorporate the audio-visual sync task. During inference, for flexible and fine-grained multimodal control, we design a time-adaptive Classifier-Free Guidance strategy that dynamically adjusts guidance weights across denoising steps. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that HuMo surpasses specialized state-of-the-art methods in sub-tasks, establishing a unified framework for collaborative multimodal-conditioned HCVG. Project Page: https://phantom-video.github.io/HuMo.

Audio-driven talking face generation has received growing interest, particularly for applications requiring expressive and natural human-avatar interaction. However, most existing emotion-aware methods rely on a single modality (either audio or image) for emotion embedding, limiting their ability to capture nuanced affective cues. Additionally, most methods condition on a single reference image, restricting the model's ability to represent dynamic changes in actions or attributes across time. To address these issues, we introduce SynchroRaMa, a novel framework that integrates a multi-modal emotion embedding by combining emotional signals from text (via sentiment analysis) and audio (via speech-based emotion recognition and audio-derived valence-arousal features), enabling the generation of talking face videos with richer and more authentic emotional expressiveness and fidelity. To ensure natural head motion and accurate lip synchronization, SynchroRaMa includes an audio-to-motion (A2M) module that generates motion frames aligned with the input audio. Finally, SynchroRaMa incorporates scene descriptions generated by Large Language Model (LLM) as additional textual input, enabling it to capture dynamic actions and high-level semantic attributes. Conditioning the model on both visual and textual cues enhances temporal consistency and visual realism. Quantitative and qualitative experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that SynchroRaMa outperforms the state-of-the-art, achieving improvements in image quality, expression preservation, and motion realism. A user study further confirms that SynchroRaMa achieves higher subjective ratings than competing methods in overall naturalness, motion diversity, and video smoothness. Our project page is available at <https://novicemm.github.io/synchrorama>.

Recent Omni-multimodal Large Language Models show promise in unified audio, vision, and text modeling. However, streaming audio-video understanding remains challenging, as existing approaches suffer from disjointed capabilities: they typically exhibit incomplete modality support or lack autonomous proactive monitoring. To address this, we present ROMA, a real-time omni-multimodal assistant for unified reactive and proactive interaction. ROMA processes continuous inputs as synchronized multimodal units, aligning dense audio with discrete video frames to handle granularity mismatches. For online decision-making, we introduce a lightweight speak head that decouples response initiation from generation to ensure precise triggering without task conflict. We train ROMA with a curated streaming dataset and a two-stage curriculum that progressively optimizes for streaming format adaptation and proactive responsiveness. To standardize the fragmented evaluation landscape, we reorganize diverse benchmarks into a unified suite covering both proactive (alert, narration) and reactive (QA) settings. Extensive experiments across 12 benchmarks demonstrate ROMA achieves state-of-the-art performance on proactive tasks while competitive in reactive settings, validating its robustness in unified real-time omni-multimodal understanding.

Automatic group emotion recognition plays an important role in understanding complex human-human interaction. This paper introduces, Emolysis, a Python-based, standalone open-source group emotion analysis toolkit for use in different social situations upon getting consent from the users. Given any input video, Emolysis processes synchronized multimodal input and maps it to group level emotion, valence and arousal. Additionally, the toolkit supports major mobile and desktop platforms (Android, iOS, Windows). The Emolysis platform also comes with an intuitive graphical user interface that allows users to select different modalities and target persons for more fine-grained emotion analysis. Emolysis is freely available for academic research and encourages application developers to extend it to application specific environments on top of the existing system. We believe that the extension mechanism is quite straightforward. Our code models and interface are available at https://github.com/ControlNet/emolysis.

Cutting-edge robot learning techniques including foundation models and imitation learning from humans all pose huge demands on large-scale and high-quality datasets which constitute one of the bottleneck in the general intelligent robot fields. This paper presents the Kaiwu multimodal dataset to address the missing real-world synchronized multimodal data problems in the sophisticated assembling scenario,especially with dynamics information and its fine-grained labelling. The dataset first provides an integration of human,environment and robot data collection framework with 20 subjects and 30 interaction objects resulting in totally 11,664 instances of integrated actions. For each of the demonstration,hand motions,operation pressures,sounds of the assembling process,multi-view videos, high-precision motion capture information,eye gaze with first-person videos,electromyography signals are all recorded. Fine-grained multi-level annotation based on absolute timestamp,and semantic segmentation labelling are performed. Kaiwu dataset aims to facilitate robot learning,dexterous manipulation,human intention investigation and human-robot collaboration research.

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.

Visual and acoustic events in the physical world are inherently coupled, yet existing video editing methods typically adopt decoupled pipelines, lacking bidirectional modality interaction. This results in two key limitations: (i) audio-visual desynchronization and (ii) contextual conflicts between generated audio and preserved content. To address these, we propose SpongeBob, the first end-to-end audio-visual joint editing framework featuring bidirectional cross-modal interaction. For synchronization, a Sync-Aware Mechanism aligns visual edits with sound events via bidirectional attention, temporal alignment, and spatial constraints. For contextual consistency, a Context-Aware Module leverages acoustic and visual context attention to prevent semantic clashes. Additionally, we introduce Sync-Preserving Training and Guidance (SPTG) to enhance alignment without degrading quality. Due to the scarcity of paired data, we construct a scalable data pipeline and a large-scale subject-level dataset. We also propose SpongeBob-Bench for systematic evaluation. Experiments show SpongeBob significantly outperforms existing baselines, improving Sync-C by 30% and Ctx-F1 by 12.5%. Our project page is available at: https://hy-spongebob.github.io/.

The synthesis of synchronized audio-visual content is a key challenge in generative AI, with open-source models facing challenges in robust audio-video alignment. Our analysis reveals that this issue is rooted in three fundamental challenges of the joint diffusion process: (1) Correspondence Drift, where concurrently evolving noisy latents impede stable learning of alignment; (2) inefficient global attention mechanisms that fail to capture fine-grained temporal cues; and (3) the intra-modal bias of conventional Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG), which enhances conditionality but not cross-modal synchronization. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Harmony, a novel framework that mechanistically enforces audio-visual synchronization. We first propose a Cross-Task Synergy training paradigm to mitigate drift by leveraging strong supervisory signals from audio-driven video and video-driven audio generation tasks. Then, we design a Global-Local Decoupled Interaction Module for efficient and precise temporal-style alignment. Finally, we present a novel Synchronization-Enhanced CFG (SyncCFG) that explicitly isolates and amplifies the alignment signal during inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Harmony establishes a new state-of-the-art, significantly outperforming existing methods in both generation fidelity and, critically, in achieving fine-grained audio-visual synchronization.

Recent years have witnessed remarkable advances in talking head generation, owing to its potential to revolutionize the human-AI interaction from text interfaces into realistic video chats. However, research on text-driven talking heads remains underexplored, with existing methods predominantly adopting a cascaded pipeline that combines TTS systems with audio-driven talking head models. This conventional pipeline not only introduces system complexity and latency overhead but also fundamentally suffers from asynchronous audiovisual output and stylistic discrepancies between generated speech and visual expressions. To address these limitations, we introduce OmniTalker, an end-to-end unified framework that simultaneously generates synchronized speech and talking head videos from text and reference video in real-time zero-shot scenarios, while preserving both speech style and facial styles. The framework employs a dual-branch diffusion transformer architecture: the audio branch synthesizes mel-spectrograms from text, while the visual branch predicts fine-grained head poses and facial dynamics. To bridge modalities, we introduce a novel audio-visual fusion module that integrates cross-modal information to ensure temporal synchronization and stylistic coherence between audio and visual outputs. Furthermore, our in-context reference learning module effectively captures both speech and facial style characteristics from a single reference video without introducing an extra style extracting module. To the best of our knowledge, OmniTalker presents the first unified framework that jointly models speech style and facial style in a zero-shot setting, achieving real-time inference speed of 25 FPS. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method surpasses existing approaches in generation quality, particularly excelling in style preservation and audio-video synchronization.

In this paper, we present a novel diffusion model called that generates multiview-consistent images from a single-view image. Using pretrained large-scale 2D diffusion models, recent work Zero123 demonstrates the ability to generate plausible novel views from a single-view image of an object. However, maintaining consistency in geometry and colors for the generated images remains a challenge. To address this issue, we propose a synchronized multiview diffusion model that models the joint probability distribution of multiview images, enabling the generation of multiview-consistent images in a single reverse process. SyncDreamer synchronizes the intermediate states of all the generated images at every step of the reverse process through a 3D-aware feature attention mechanism that correlates the corresponding features across different views. Experiments show that SyncDreamer generates images with high consistency across different views, thus making it well-suited for various 3D generation tasks such as novel-view-synthesis, text-to-3D, and image-to-3D.

One of the main challenges of multimodal learning is the need to combine heterogeneous modalities (e.g., video, audio, text). For example, video and audio are obtained at much higher rates than text and are roughly aligned in time. They are often not synchronized with text, which comes as a global context, e.g., a title, or a description. Furthermore, video and audio inputs are of much larger volumes, and grow as the video length increases, which naturally requires more compute dedicated to these modalities and makes modeling of long-range dependencies harder. We here decouple the multimodal modeling, dividing it into separate, focused autoregressive models, processing the inputs according to the characteristics of the modalities. We propose a multimodal model, called Mirasol3B, consisting of an autoregressive component for the time-synchronized modalities (audio and video), and an autoregressive component for the context modalities which are not necessarily aligned in time but are still sequential. To address the long-sequences of the video-audio inputs, we propose to further partition the video and audio sequences in consecutive snippets and autoregressively process their representations. To that end, we propose a Combiner mechanism, which models the audio-video information jointly within a timeframe. The Combiner learns to extract audio and video features from raw spatio-temporal signals, and then learns to fuse these features producing compact but expressive representations per snippet. Our approach achieves the state-of-the-art on well established multimodal benchmarks, outperforming much larger models. It effectively addresses the high computational demand of media inputs by both learning compact representations, controlling the sequence length of the audio-video feature representations, and modeling their dependencies in time.

The intrinsic link between facial motion and speech is often overlooked in generative modeling, where talking head synthesis and text-to-speech (TTS) are typically addressed as separate tasks. This paper introduces JAM-Flow, a unified framework to simultaneously synthesize and condition on both facial motion and speech. Our approach leverages flow matching and a novel Multi-Modal Diffusion Transformer (MM-DiT) architecture, integrating specialized Motion-DiT and Audio-DiT modules. These are coupled via selective joint attention layers and incorporate key architectural choices, such as temporally aligned positional embeddings and localized joint attention masking, to enable effective cross-modal interaction while preserving modality-specific strengths. Trained with an inpainting-style objective, JAM-Flow supports a wide array of conditioning inputs-including text, reference audio, and reference motion-facilitating tasks such as synchronized talking head generation from text, audio-driven animation, and much more, within a single, coherent model. JAM-Flow significantly advances multi-modal generative modeling by providing a practical solution for holistic audio-visual synthesis. project page: https://joonghyuk.com/jamflow-web

Video and audio are closely correlated modalities that humans naturally perceive together. While recent advancements have enabled the generation of audio or video from text, producing both modalities simultaneously still typically relies on either a cascaded process or multi-modal contrastive encoders. These approaches, however, often lead to suboptimal results due to inherent information losses during inference and conditioning. In this paper, we introduce SyncFlow, a system that is capable of simultaneously generating temporally synchronized audio and video from text. The core of SyncFlow is the proposed dual-diffusion-transformer (d-DiT) architecture, which enables joint video and audio modelling with proper information fusion. To efficiently manage the computational cost of joint audio and video modelling, SyncFlow utilizes a multi-stage training strategy that separates video and audio learning before joint fine-tuning. Our empirical evaluations demonstrate that SyncFlow produces audio and video outputs that are more correlated than baseline methods with significantly enhanced audio quality and audio-visual correspondence. Moreover, we demonstrate strong zero-shot capabilities of SyncFlow, including zero-shot video-to-audio generation and adaptation to novel video resolutions without further training.

Achieving high synchronization in the synthesis of realistic, speech-driven talking head videos presents a significant challenge. A lifelike talking head requires synchronized coordination of subject identity, lip movements, facial expressions, and head poses. The absence of these synchronizations is a fundamental flaw, leading to unrealistic results. To address the critical issue of synchronization, identified as the ''devil'' in creating realistic talking heads, we introduce SyncTalk++, which features a Dynamic Portrait Renderer with Gaussian Splatting to ensure consistent subject identity preservation and a Face-Sync Controller that aligns lip movements with speech while innovatively using a 3D facial blendshape model to reconstruct accurate facial expressions. To ensure natural head movements, we propose a Head-Sync Stabilizer, which optimizes head poses for greater stability. Additionally, SyncTalk++ enhances robustness to out-of-distribution (OOD) audio by incorporating an Expression Generator and a Torso Restorer, which generate speech-matched facial expressions and seamless torso regions. Our approach maintains consistency and continuity in visual details across frames and significantly improves rendering speed and quality, achieving up to 101 frames per second. Extensive experiments and user studies demonstrate that SyncTalk++ outperforms state-of-the-art methods in synchronization and realism. We recommend watching the supplementary video: https://ziqiaopeng.github.io/synctalk++.

Predicting multiple real-world tasks in a single model often requires a particularly diverse feature space. Multimodal (MM) models aim to extract the synergistic predictive potential of multiple data types to create a shared feature space with aligned semantic meaning across inputs of drastically varying sizes (i.e. images, text, sound). Most current MM architectures fuse these representations in parallel, which not only limits their interpretability but also creates a dependency on modality availability. We present MultiModN, a multimodal, modular network that fuses latent representations in a sequence of any number, combination, or type of modality while providing granular real-time predictive feedback on any number or combination of predictive tasks. MultiModN's composable pipeline is interpretable-by-design, as well as innately multi-task and robust to the fundamental issue of biased missingness. We perform four experiments on several benchmark MM datasets across 10 real-world tasks (predicting medical diagnoses, academic performance, and weather), and show that MultiModN's sequential MM fusion does not compromise performance compared with a baseline of parallel fusion. By simulating the challenging bias of missing not-at-random (MNAR), this work shows that, contrary to MultiModN, parallel fusion baselines erroneously learn MNAR and suffer catastrophic failure when faced with different patterns of MNAR at inference. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first inherently MNAR-resistant approach to MM modeling. In conclusion, MultiModN provides granular insights, robustness, and flexibility without compromising performance.

Video recordings of child-caregiver interactions enable investigation of attentional dynamics during naturalistic behavior. Such multimodal recording also allows researchers to examine how attention interacts with action and language use in real time. However, manual annotation of such data is time-consuming. Here, we introduce GazeBehavior Annotation Toolkit, a deep-learning-based toolkit designed to facilitate three key processes in data preprocessing and feature extraction: post-hoc synchronization across multiple videos, semi-automatic annotation of gaze target categories, and categorization of participants' poses and hand actions. This toolkit improves the efficiency and scalability of feature extraction from human egocentric eye-tracking and video data. Such improvement is critical in supporting large-scale and longitudinal investigations of attentional dynamics and naturalistic behavior in human early development.

A central objective in multimodal learning is to capture synergy: task-relevant information that arises only from the joint use of multiple modalities, and is not available from any single modality alone. While most approaches operate at the architectural level through larger or more complex fusion models, we propose a complementary axis: shaping the training objective itself. Standard training often emphasizes unimodal or redundant information, falling short on examples that require cross-modal reasoning. We formalize multimodal synergy through information theory and introduce the Synergistic Information Bottleneck (SynIB), a scalable objective that targets synergy directly. To prioritize learning synergy, SynIB motivates the model to predict accurately from all modalities while penalizing confidence when information from any modality is withheld. Alongside the standard task loss, the model runs forward passes with one modality masked at a time and is penalized for remaining confident, which would indicate reliance on unimodal cues rather than cross-modal interactions. We validate SynIB in two regimes. On synthetic XOR tasks where the ground-truth synergy is known by construction, standard training fails to recover it while SynIB does. On five real-world benchmarks, including three MultiBench affective tasks, Hateful Memes with CLIP-ViT and DeBERTa backbones, and a controllable irony extension of CREMA-D we introduce, SynIB improves accuracy on synergy-dependent examples by up to 7.8% and overall accuracy by up to 3.8%.

Cross-modal alignment (CA) and cross-modal prediction (CP) are the dominant paradigms for multimodal representation learning, yet there is no systematic understanding of when each succeeds, when each fails, and when cross-modal training helps at all -- a gap that leaves practitioners, especially in scientific domains like biomedicine or astrophysics, with heterogeneous instruments and multiple levels of organization and measurement, unable to diagnose why standard methods underperform the best single modality. We develop a unified linear framework that addresses both questions. Under a spiked signal-plus-noise model with structured cross-modal nuisance correlation, we derive separation ratios for both objectives that expose complementary failure modes: alignment whitens each modality and fails when nuisance is strongly correlated across views; prediction encodes whatever is cross-predictable through a one-sided whitening, with recovery governed by source-modality quality. The resulting phase diagram partitions multimodal problems into four regimes: Both, CA only, CP only, and Neither. We present a data-driven procedure to locate real-world datasets in this diagram using a small labeled subsample, identifying the preferred objective and prediction direction before any cross-modal training. Experiments on synthetic data, stereo-vision benchmarks, image-caption pairs, and real astrophysical data validate the predictions in the nonlinear regime, including the Neither regime where cross-modal training is actively harmful. Our framework lets practitioners diagnose their multimodal problem and choose the right objective before committing to training. Code to reproduce the results is available at https://github.com/IlayMalinyak/mm_align_vs_pred.

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.

In this paper we introduce a new synchronisation task, Gesture-Sync: determining if a person's gestures are correlated with their speech or not. In comparison to Lip-Sync, Gesture-Sync is far more challenging as there is a far looser relationship between the voice and body movement than there is between voice and lip motion. We introduce a dual-encoder model for this task, and compare a number of input representations including RGB frames, keypoint images, and keypoint vectors, assessing their performance and advantages. We show that the model can be trained using self-supervised learning alone, and evaluate its performance on the LRS3 dataset. Finally, we demonstrate applications of Gesture-Sync for audio-visual synchronisation, and in determining who is the speaker in a crowd, without seeing their faces. The code, datasets and pre-trained models can be found at: https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/research/gestsync.

Our experience of the world is multimodal - we see objects, hear sounds, feel texture, smell odors, and taste flavors. Modality refers to the way in which something happens or is experienced and a research problem is characterized as multimodal when it includes multiple such modalities. In order for Artificial Intelligence to make progress in understanding the world around us, it needs to be able to interpret such multimodal signals together. Multimodal machine learning aims to build models that can process and relate information from multiple modalities. It is a vibrant multi-disciplinary field of increasing importance and with extraordinary potential. Instead of focusing on specific multimodal applications, this paper surveys the recent advances in multimodal machine learning itself and presents them in a common taxonomy. We go beyond the typical early and late fusion categorization and identify broader challenges that are faced by multimodal machine learning, namely: representation, translation, alignment, fusion, and co-learning. This new taxonomy will enable researchers to better understand the state of the field and identify directions for future research.

As audio-visual generative models evolve into world simulators, cross-modal synchronization stands as a critical proxy for assessing the consistency of world dynamics and causality in generated content. However, existing evaluation metrics presume structural correctness, reducing synchronization to mere temporal alignment. Consequently, they fail on generative outputs, especially when exhibiting structural hallucinations and asymmetric cross-modal relations, which currently mandate expert human annotation to assess synchronization. This dependency introduces a critical paradox: human evaluators rely on relative, reference-dependent comparisons, whereas automated metrics require reference-free, absolute scalars. We resolve this paradox by proposing a framework that distills relative human perception into a continuous, globally consistent metric. First, we introduce SynthSync, a dataset of generative failures ranked via pairwise human annotations. Second, we adapt the Omni-LLM equipped with a continuous latent projection to translate relative human rankings into continuous absolute values. Third, we propose Real-Valued Group Relative Policy Optimization (R-GRPO) to internalize the global causal structure of synchronization via listwise score distributions. Empirically, our metric achieves state-of-the-art human preference alignment. We leverage this estimator to establish a standardized benchmark, advancing AV-Gen assessment from low-level signal correlation to visually grounded causality.

Recent progress in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has brought AI capabilities from static offline data processing to real-time streaming interaction, yet they still remain far from human-level multimodal interaction. The key bottlenecks are no longer modality coverage or latency alone, but the interaction paradigm itself. First, perception and response are still separated into alternating phases, preventing models from incorporating new inputs for timely adjustment during generation. Second, most current models remain reactive, responding only to explicit user requests instead of acting proactively in the evolving multimodal environment. We present MiniCPM-o 4.5, our latest effort towards human-like multimodal interaction, which mitigates these gaps by real-time full-duplex omni-modal interaction. It can see, listen, and speak simultaneously in real-time, while also exhibiting proactive behaviors such as issuing reminders or comments based on its continuous understanding of the live scene. The key technique behind MiniCPM-o 4.5 is Omni-Flow, a unified streaming framework that aligns omni-modal inputs and outputs along a shared temporal axis. This formulation converts conventional turn-based interaction into a full-duplex, time-aligned process, enabling simultaneous perception and response and allowing proactive behavior to arise within the same framework. With a total of 9B parameters, MiniCPM-o 4.5 approaches Gemini 2.5 Flash in vision-language capabilities, delivering state-of-the-art open-source performance at its scale. It also surpasses Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B in omni-modal understanding and delivers better speech generation, with significantly higher computation efficiency. Driven by its efficient architecture design and inference optimization, the model can perform real-time full-duplex omni-modal interaction on edge devices with less than 12GB RAM cost.

Achieving level-5 driving automation in autonomous vehicles necessitates a robust semantic visual perception system capable of parsing data from different sensors across diverse conditions. However, existing semantic perception datasets often lack important non-camera modalities typically used in autonomous vehicles, or they do not exploit such modalities to aid and improve semantic annotations in challenging conditions. To address this, we introduce MUSES, the MUlti-SEnsor Semantic perception dataset for driving in adverse conditions under increased uncertainty. MUSES includes synchronized multimodal recordings with 2D panoptic annotations for 2500 images captured under diverse weather and illumination. The dataset integrates a frame camera, a lidar, a radar, an event camera, and an IMU/GNSS sensor. Our new two-stage panoptic annotation protocol captures both class-level and instance-level uncertainty in the ground truth and enables the novel task of uncertainty-aware panoptic segmentation we introduce, along with standard semantic and panoptic segmentation. MUSES proves both effective for training and challenging for evaluating models under diverse visual conditions, and it opens new avenues for research in multimodal and uncertainty-aware dense semantic perception. Our dataset and benchmark are publicly available at https://muses.vision.ee.ethz.ch.

Unified multimodal models (UMMs) aim to integrate understanding and generation within a single architecture. However, it remains underexplored how to effectively coordinate these two capabilities for more effective and efficient reasoning. Existing coordination approaches either perform coupling during training, without explicit inference-time coordination, or impose a fixed coordination pattern for all inputs. In this work, we show that multimodal tasks exhibit substantial coordination-path diversity: different inputs favor different coordination paths. This suggests that exploiting such diversity is key to improving performance. We propose UniPath, a framework for adaptively modeling and exploiting coordination-path diversity. Instead of enforcing a single coordination pattern, we represent task solving as the selection and execution of a path, ranging from direct answering to textual inference, visual-thought construction, and hypothesis-based exploration. We construct role-aligned trajectories to train a path-conditioned executor and introduce a lightweight planner mechanism to enable input-dependent path selection. Experiments show that leveraging coordination-path diversity improves performance over fixed coordination strategies while providing interpretable intermediate behaviors. The code is available at:https://github.com/AIFrontierLab/TorchUMM/tree/main/src/umm/post_training/unipath.

Recent work on human animation usually incorporates large-scale video models, thereby achieving more vivid performance. However, the practical use of such methods is hindered by the slow inference speed and high computational demands. Moreover, traditional work typically employs separate models for each animation task, increasing costs in multi-task scenarios and worsening the dilemma. To address these limitations, we introduce EchoMimicV3, an efficient framework that unifies multi-task and multi-modal human animation. At the core of EchoMimicV3 lies a threefold design: a Soup-of-Tasks paradigm, a Soup-of-Modals paradigm, and a novel training and inference strategy. The Soup-of-Tasks leverages multi-task mask inputs and a counter-intuitive task allocation strategy to achieve multi-task gains without multi-model pains. Meanwhile, the Soup-of-Modals introduces a Coupled-Decoupled Multi-Modal Cross Attention module to inject multi-modal conditions, complemented by a Multi-Modal Timestep Phase-aware Dynamical Allocation mechanism to modulate multi-modal mixtures. Besides, we propose Negative Direct Preference Optimization, Phase-aware Negative Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG), and Long Video CFG, which ensure stable training and inference. Extensive experiments and analyses demonstrate that EchoMimicV3, with a minimal model size of 1.3 billion parameters, achieves competitive performance in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. We are committed to open-sourcing our code for community use.

Recent game world models can synthesize visually plausible, action-conditioned rollouts. However, their interaction behaviors often remain limited to exploratory or wandering trajectories, and physical dynamics are typically learned as implicit correlations from data rather than as controllable variables. This limitation hinders their applicability to authored game environments, where physical rules are deliberately designed and require explicit manipulation. We introduce PhysEditWorld, a multimodal dataset with physical parameters, with a primary focus on gravity in this initial version. At its core, PhysEditWorld is built upon a replay paradigm implemented with a UE5 replay-and-rendering pipeline. Each scenario records a normalized action trace and replays the same initial state, character controller, action sequence, and camera policy under multiple gravity configurations, enabling controlled and attributable physical variation. PhysEditWorld contains 12 cinematic UE5 scenes, over 100 hours of gameplay interactions, and more than 60 million rendered rollout frames. Each sample provides synchronized multimodal signals, including RGB, depth, normals, audio, action traces, camera trajectory, engine states, semantic annotations, and explicit gravity labels. We further conduct initial utility studies on both generative video models and world understanding models, demonstrating that PhysEditWorld enables improved gravity-faithful dynamics modeling, enhances consistency under physical edits, and provides a scalable foundation for controllable world modeling research.

Current multimodal models aim to transcend the limitations of single-modality representations by unifying understanding and generation, often using text-to-image (T2I) tasks to calibrate semantic consistency. However, their reliance on static, single-image generation in training and evaluation leads to overfitting to static pattern matching and semantic fusion, while fundamentally hindering their ability to model dynamic processes that unfold over time. To address these constraints, we propose Envision-a causal event progression benchmark for chained text-to-multi-image generation. Grounded in world knowledge and structured by spatiotemporal causality, it reorganizes existing evaluation dimensions and includes 1,000 four-stage prompts spanning six scientific and humanities domains. To transition evaluation from single images to sequential frames and assess whether models truly internalize world knowledge while adhering to causal-temporal constraints, we introduce Envision-Score, a holistic metric integrating multi-dimensional consistency, physicality, and aesthetics. Comprehensive evaluation of 15 models (10 specialized T2I models, 5 unified models) uncovers: specialized T2I models demonstrate proficiency in aesthetic rendering yet lack intrinsic world knowledge. Unified multimodal models bridge this gap, consistently outperforming specialized counterparts in causal narrative coherence. However, even these unified architectures remain subordinate to closed-source models and struggle to overcome the core challenge of spatiotemporal consistency. This demonstrates that a focus on causally-isolated single images impedes multi-frame reasoning and generation, promoting static pattern matching over dynamic world modeling-ultimately limiting world knowledge internalization, generation.

Advancing research in fields like Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) and autonomous navigation critically depends on reliable and reproducible multimodal datasets. While several influential datasets have driven progress in these domains, they often suffer from limitations in sensing modalities, environmental diversity, and the reproducibility of the underlying hardware setups. To address these challenges, this paper introduces SMapper, a novel open-hardware, multi-sensor platform designed explicitly for, though not limited to, SLAM research. The device integrates synchronized LiDAR, multi-camera, and inertial sensing, supported by a robust calibration and synchronization pipeline that ensures precise spatio-temporal alignment across modalities. Its open and replicable design allows researchers to extend its capabilities and reproduce experiments across both handheld and robot-mounted scenarios. To demonstrate its practicality, we additionally release SMapper-light, a publicly available SLAM dataset containing representative indoor and outdoor sequences. The dataset includes tightly synchronized multimodal data and ground-truth trajectories derived from offline LiDAR-based SLAM with sub-centimeter accuracy, alongside dense 3D reconstructions. Furthermore, the paper contains benchmarking results on state-of-the-art LiDAR and visual SLAM frameworks using the SMapper-light dataset. By combining open-hardware design, reproducible data collection, and comprehensive benchmarking, SMapper establishes a robust foundation for advancing SLAM algorithm development, evaluation, and reproducibility.

The integration of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), in particular electroencephalography (EEG), with artificial intelligence (AI) has shown tremendous promise in decoding human cognition and behavior from neural signals. In particular, the rise of multimodal AI models have brought new possibilities that have never been imagined before. Here, we present EgoBrain --the world's first large-scale, temporally aligned multimodal dataset that synchronizes egocentric vision and EEG of human brain over extended periods of time, establishing a new paradigm for human-centered behavior analysis. This dataset comprises 61 hours of synchronized 32-channel EEG recordings and first-person video from 40 participants engaged in 29 categories of daily activities. We then developed a muiltimodal learning framework to fuse EEG and vision for action understanding, validated across both cross-subject and cross-environment challenges, achieving an action recognition accuracy of 66.70%. EgoBrain paves the way for a unified framework for brain-computer interface with multiple modalities. All data, tools, and acquisition protocols are openly shared to foster open science in cognitive computing.

Ambivalence/hesitancy recognition in unconstrained videos is a challenging problem due to the subtle, multimodal, and context-dependent nature of this behavioral state. In this paper, a multimodal approach for video-level ambivalence/hesitancy recognition is presented for the 10th ABAW Competition. The proposed approach integrates four complementary modalities: scene, face, audio, and text. Scene dynamics are captured with a VideoMAE-based model, facial information is encoded through emotional frame-level embeddings aggregated by statistical pooling, acoustic representations are extracted with EmotionWav2Vec2.0 and processed by a Mamba-based temporal encoder, and linguistic cues are modeled using fine-tuned transformer-based text models. The resulting unimodal embeddings are further combined using multimodal fusion models, including prototype-augmented variants. Experiments on the BAH corpus demonstrate clear gains of multimodal fusion over all unimodal baselines. The best unimodal configuration achieved an average MF1 of 70.02%, whereas the best multimodal fusion model reached 83.25%. The highest final test performance, 71.43%, was obtained by an ensemble of five prototype-augmented fusion models. The obtained results highlight the importance of complementary multimodal cues and robust fusion strategies for ambivalence/hesitancy recognition.

Audio-Visual Large Language Models (AV-LLMs) face prohibitive computational overhead from massive audio and video tokens. Token reduction, while extensively explored for video-only LLMs, is insufficient for the audio-visual domain, as these unimodal methods cannot leverage audio-visual cross-modal synergies. Furthermore, the distinct and dynamic information densities of audio and video render static budgets per modality suboptimal. How to perform token reduction on a joint audio-visual stream thus remains an unaddressed bottleneck. To fill this gap, we introduce EchoingPixels, a framework inspired by the coexistence and interaction of visuals and sound in real-world scenes. The core of our framework is the Cross-Modal Semantic Sieve (CS2), a module enabling early audio-visual interaction. Instead of compressing modalities independently, CS2 co-attends to the joint multimodal stream and reduces tokens from an entire combined pool of audio-visual tokens rather than using fixed budgets per modality. This single-pool approach allows it to adaptively allocate the token budget across both modalities and dynamically identify salient tokens in concert. To ensure this aggressive reduction preserves the vital temporal modeling capability, we co-design a Synchronization-Augmented RoPE (Sync-RoPE) to maintain critical temporal relationships for the sparsely selected tokens. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EchoingPixels achieves performance comparable to strong baselines using only 5-20% of the original tokens, with a 2-3x speedup and memory reduction.

Achieving high synchronization in the synthesis of realistic, speech-driven talking head videos presents a significant challenge. Traditional Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) struggle to maintain consistent facial identity, while Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) methods, although they can address this issue, often produce mismatched lip movements, inadequate facial expressions, and unstable head poses. A lifelike talking head requires synchronized coordination of subject identity, lip movements, facial expressions, and head poses. The absence of these synchronizations is a fundamental flaw, leading to unrealistic and artificial outcomes. To address the critical issue of synchronization, identified as the "devil" in creating realistic talking heads, we introduce SyncTalk. This NeRF-based method effectively maintains subject identity, enhancing synchronization and realism in talking head synthesis. SyncTalk employs a Face-Sync Controller to align lip movements with speech and innovatively uses a 3D facial blendshape model to capture accurate facial expressions. Our Head-Sync Stabilizer optimizes head poses, achieving more natural head movements. The Portrait-Sync Generator restores hair details and blends the generated head with the torso for a seamless visual experience. Extensive experiments and user studies demonstrate that SyncTalk outperforms state-of-the-art methods in synchronization and realism. We recommend watching the supplementary video: https://ziqiaopeng.github.io/synctalk

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) generate responses autoregressively, integrating visual and linguistic information in an evolving context. Prior work on interpretability has focused on individual layers and circuits (where), leaving the token-level dynamics of multimodal computation during generation (when) underexplored. We address this gap and study attention shifts as per semantic role; tracking model attention to image, text, instruction, and previously generated tokens, One Token at a Time (OTaT). We introduce multimodal tasks that require explicit switching between visual and textual context within a single response. Across two mainstream model families and four open-weight MLLMs of varying sizes, we establish consistent patterns: attention to image peaks at tokens requiring image-derived information, instruction tokens are revisited during task transitions, and attention to previously generated tokens increases as the generation progresses. Causal attention blocking interventions validate the functional role of these trends. We profile model behavior under disrupted attention and observe responses falling back to language priors, or exhibiting cross-modal leakage, denial, or recovery. Finally, informed of the attention dynamics through our novel analysis, we propose a simple test-time intervention to boost attention to the relevant modality at the right time, significantly improving multimodal task performance.

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.

Recent advancements in audio-visual generative modeling have been propelled by progress in deep learning and the availability of data-rich benchmarks. However, the growth is not attributed solely to models and benchmarks. Universally accepted evaluation metrics also play an important role in advancing the field. While there are many metrics available to evaluate audio and visual content separately, there is a lack of metrics that offer a quantitative and interpretable measure of audio-visual synchronization for videos "in the wild". To address this gap, we first created a large scale human annotated dataset (100+ hrs) representing nine types of synchronization errors in audio-visual content and how human perceive them. We then developed a PEAVS (Perceptual Evaluation of Audio-Visual Synchrony) score, a novel automatic metric with a 5-point scale that evaluates the quality of audio-visual synchronization. We validate PEAVS using a newly generated dataset, achieving a Pearson correlation of 0.79 at the set level and 0.54 at the clip level when compared to human labels. In our experiments, we observe a relative gain 50% over a natural extension of Fr\'echet based metrics for Audio-Visual synchrony, confirming PEAVS efficacy in objectively modeling subjective perceptions of audio-visual synchronization for videos "in the wild".

Although humans engaged in face-to-face conversation simultaneously communicate both verbally and non-verbally, methods for joint and unified synthesis of speech audio and co-speech 3D gesture motion from text are a new and emerging field. These technologies hold great promise for more human-like, efficient, expressive, and robust synthetic communication, but are currently held back by the lack of suitably large datasets, as existing methods are trained on parallel data from all constituent modalities. Inspired by student-teacher methods, we propose a straightforward solution to the data shortage, by simply synthesising additional training material. Specifically, we use unimodal synthesis models trained on large datasets to create multimodal (but synthetic) parallel training data, and then pre-train a joint synthesis model on that material. In addition, we propose a new synthesis architecture that adds better and more controllable prosody modelling to the state-of-the-art method in the field. Our results confirm that pre-training on large amounts of synthetic data improves the quality of both the speech and the motion synthesised by the multimodal model, with the proposed architecture yielding further benefits when pre-trained on the synthetic data. See https://shivammehta25.github.io/MAGI/ for example output.

We introduce X-Streamer, an end-to-end multimodal human world modeling framework for building digital human agents capable of infinite interactions across text, speech, and video within a single unified architecture. Starting from a single portrait, X-Streamer enables real-time, open-ended video calls driven by streaming multimodal inputs. At its core is a Thinker-Actor dual-transformer architecture that unifies multimodal understanding and generation, turning a static portrait into persistent and intelligent audiovisual interactions. The Thinker module perceives and reasons over streaming user inputs, while its hidden states are translated by the Actor into synchronized multimodal streams in real time. Concretely, the Thinker leverages a pretrained large language-speech model, while the Actor employs a chunk-wise autoregressive diffusion model that cross-attends to the Thinker's hidden states to produce time-aligned multimodal responses with interleaved discrete text and audio tokens and continuous video latents. To ensure long-horizon stability, we design inter- and intra-chunk attentions with time-aligned multimodal positional embeddings for fine-grained cross-modality alignment and context retention, further reinforced by chunk-wise diffusion forcing and global identity referencing. X-Streamer runs in real time on two A100 GPUs, sustaining hours-long consistent video chat experiences from arbitrary portraits and paving the way toward unified world modeling of interactive digital humans.

Automating the generation of scientific videos is a crucial yet challenging task for effective knowledge dissemination. However, existing works on document automation primarily focus on static media such as posters and slides, lacking mechanisms for personalized dynamic orchestration and multimodal content synchronization. To address these challenges, we introduce VideoAgent, a novel multi-agent framework that synthesizes personalized scientific videos through a conversational interface. VideoAgent parses a source paper into a fine-grained asset library and, guided by user requirements, orchestrates a narrative flow that synthesizes both static slides and dynamic animations to explain complex concepts. To enable rigorous evaluation, we also propose SciVidEval, the first comprehensive suite for this task, which combines automated metrics for multimodal content quality and synchronization with a Video-Quiz-based human evaluation to measure knowledge transfer. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing commercial scientific video generation services and approaches human-level quality in scientific communication.

This paper introduces a new model to generate rhythmically relevant non-verbal facial behaviors for virtual agents while they speak. The model demonstrates perceived performance comparable to behaviors directly extracted from the data and replayed on a virtual agent, in terms of synchronization with speech and believability. Interestingly, we found that training the model with two different sets of data, instead of one, did not necessarily improve its performance. The expressiveness of the people in the dataset and the shooting conditions are key elements. We also show that employing an adversarial model, in which fabricated fake examples are introduced during the training phase, increases the perception of synchronization with speech. A collection of videos demonstrating the results and code can be accessed at: https://github.com/aldelb/non_verbal_facial_animation.

Recently, Omni-modal large language models (OLLMs) have sparked a new wave of research, achieving impressive results in tasks such as audio-video understanding and real-time environment perception. However, hallucination issues still persist. Similar to the bimodal setting, the priors from the text modality tend to dominate, leading OLLMs to rely more heavily on textual cues while neglecting visual and audio information. In addition, fully multimodal scenarios introduce new challenges. Most existing models align visual or auditory modalities with text independently during training, while ignoring the intrinsic correlations between video and its corresponding audio. This oversight results in hallucinations when reasoning requires interpreting hidden audio cues embedded in video content. To address these challenges, we propose OmniDPO, a preference-alignment framework designed to mitigate hallucinations in OLLMs. Specifically, OmniDPO incorporates two strategies: (1) constructing text-preference sample pairs to enhance the model's understanding of audio-video interactions; and (2) constructing multimodal-preference sample pairs to strengthen the model's attention to visual and auditory information. By tackling both challenges, OmniDPO effectively improves multimodal grounding and reduces hallucination. Experiments conducted on two OLLMs demonstrate that OmniDPO not only effectively mitigates multimodal hallucinations but also significantly enhances the models' reasoning capabilities across modalities. All code and datasets will be released upon paper acceptance.

The recently developed discrete diffusion models perform extraordinarily well in the text-to-image task, showing significant promise for handling the multi-modality signals. In this work, we harness these traits and present a unified multimodal generation model that can conduct both the "modality translation" and "multi-modality generation" tasks using a single model, performing text-based, image-based, and even vision-language simultaneous generation. Specifically, we unify the discrete diffusion process for multimodal signals by proposing a unified transition matrix. Moreover, we design a mutual attention module with fused embedding layer and a unified objective function to emphasise the inter-modal linkages, which are vital for multi-modality generation. Extensive experiments indicate that our proposed method can perform comparably to the state-of-the-art solutions in various generation tasks.

Automatic recognition of ambivalence and hesitancy is challenging because these states may be expressed through inconsistent linguistic, acoustic, facial, and contextual patterns, while top-performing systems often rely on computationally expensive ensembles. We present a single text-centered multimodal approach for video-level ambivalence and hesitancy recognition for the 11th Affective & Behavior Analysis in-the-Wild (ABAW) Challenge. The proposed approach combines linguistic, acoustic, facial, and scene features using text-centered multimodal fusion model. Text Residual Fusion treats text as the anchor modality and applies gated residual adjustments based on the other modalities. Experiments on the Behavioural Ambivalence/Hesitancy (BAH) corpus confirm that text is the strongest unimodal modality. The Text Residual Fusion model achieves an average Macro F1-score (MF1) of 75.14% across the Development and Public Test subsets. On the Private Test subset, it reaches an MF1 of 78.24%, outperforming the text model by 4.03%. These results demonstrate that complementary multimodal information can improve recognition performance without requiring a large model ensemble.

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.

Existing video avatar models can produce fluid human animations, yet they struggle to move beyond mere physical likeness to capture a character's authentic essence. Their motions typically synchronize with low-level cues like audio rhythm, lacking a deeper semantic understanding of emotion, intent, or context. To bridge this gap, we propose a framework designed to generate character animations that are not only physically plausible but also semantically coherent and expressive. Our model, OmniHuman-1.5, is built upon two key technical contributions. First, we leverage Multimodal Large Language Models to synthesize a structured textual representation of conditions that provides high-level semantic guidance. This guidance steers our motion generator beyond simplistic rhythmic synchronization, enabling the production of actions that are contextually and emotionally resonant. Second, to ensure the effective fusion of these multimodal inputs and mitigate inter-modality conflicts, we introduce a specialized Multimodal DiT architecture with a novel Pseudo Last Frame design. The synergy of these components allows our model to accurately interpret the joint semantics of audio, images, and text, thereby generating motions that are deeply coherent with the character, scene, and linguistic content. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model achieves leading performance across a comprehensive set of metrics, including lip-sync accuracy, video quality, motion naturalness and semantic consistency with textual prompts. Furthermore, our approach shows remarkable extensibility to complex scenarios, such as those involving multi-person and non-human subjects. Homepage: https://omnihuman-lab.github.io/v1_5/

Recent advancements in video diffusion models have shown exceptional abilities in simulating real-world dynamics and maintaining 3D consistency. This progress inspires us to investigate the potential of these models to ensure dynamic consistency across various viewpoints, a highly desirable feature for applications such as virtual filming. Unlike existing methods focused on multi-view generation of single objects for 4D reconstruction, our interest lies in generating open-world videos from arbitrary viewpoints, incorporating 6 DoF camera poses. To achieve this, we propose a plug-and-play module that enhances a pre-trained text-to-video model for multi-camera video generation, ensuring consistent content across different viewpoints. Specifically, we introduce a multi-view synchronization module to maintain appearance and geometry consistency across these viewpoints. Given the scarcity of high-quality training data, we design a hybrid training scheme that leverages multi-camera images and monocular videos to supplement Unreal Engine-rendered multi-camera videos. Furthermore, our method enables intriguing extensions, such as re-rendering a video from novel viewpoints. We also release a multi-view synchronized video dataset, named SynCamVideo-Dataset. Project page: https://jianhongbai.github.io/SynCamMaster/.

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

Modality following serves as the capacity of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to selectively utilize multimodal contexts based on user instructions. It is fundamental to ensuring safety and reliability in real-world deployments. However, the underlying mechanisms governing this decision-making process remain poorly understood. In this paper, we investigate its working mechanism through an information flow lens. Our findings reveal that instruction tokens function as structural anchors for modality arbitration: Shallow attention layers perform non-selective information transfer, routing multimodal cues to these anchors as a latent buffer; Modality competition is resolved within deep attention layers guided by the instruction intent, while MLP layers exhibit semantic inertia, acting as an adversarial force. Furthermore, we identify a sparse set of specialized attention heads that drive this arbitration. Causal interventions demonstrate that manipulating a mere 5% of these critical heads can decrease the modality-following ratio by 60% through blocking, or increase it by 60% through targeted amplification of failed samples. Our work provides a substantial step toward model transparency and offers a principled framework for the orchestration of multimodal information in MLLMs.

The pursuit of autonomous driving has produced one of the richest sensor data collections in all of robotics. However, its scale and diversity remain largely untapped. Each dataset adopts different 2D and 3D modalities, such as cameras, lidar, ego states, annotations, traffic lights, and HD maps, with different rates and synchronization schemes. They come in fragmented formats requiring complex dependencies that cannot natively coexist in the same development environment. Further, major inconsistencies in annotation conventions prevent training or measuring generalization across multiple datasets. We present 123D, an open-source framework that unifies such multi-modal driving data through a single API. To handle synchronization, we store each modality as an independent timestamped event stream with no prescribed rate, enabling synchronous or asynchronous access across arbitrary datasets. Using 123D, we consolidate eight real-world driving datasets spanning 3,300 hours and 90,000 kilometers, together with a synthetic dataset with configurable collection scripts, and provide tools for data analysis and visualization. We conduct a systematic study comparing annotation statistics and assessing each dataset's pose and calibration accuracy. Further, we showcase two applications 123D enables: cross-dataset 3D object detection transfer and reinforcement learning for planning, and offer recommendations for future directions. Code and documentation are available at https://github.com/kesai-labs/py123d.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have achieved remarkable progress in aligning and generating content across text and image modalities. However, the potential of using non-visual, continuous sequential, as a conditioning signal for high-fidelity image generation remains largely unexplored. Furthermore, existing methods that convert series into "pseudo-images" for temporal forecasting fail to establish semantic-level alignment. In this paper, we propose TimeArtist, a temporal-visual conversion framework that pioneers semantic-level alignment between time series fluctuations and visual concepts. It pioneers a "warmup-align" paradigm: first, a dual-autoencoder and shared quantizer are self-supervised trained on large-scale datasets to learn modality-shared representations. Then, the encoders and quantizer are frozen, and a projection is introduced to align temporal and visual samples at the representation level. TimeArtist establishes a versatile cross-modal framework, enabling high-quality, diverse image generation directly from time series, while capturing temporal fluctuation patterns to render images as styles transfer. Extensive experiments show that TimeArtist achieves satisfactory performance in image generation metrics, while also attaining superior results in zero-shot temporal tasks. Our work establishes a new paradigm for cross-modal generation, bridging the gap between temporal dynamics and visual semantics.

Biosignals acquired from different locations on the body often provide temporally ordered views of the same underlying physiological process. However, most existing self supervised learning methods treat these signals as interchangeable views, overlooking the directional temporal dynamics that link them. A canonical example is the relationship between electrocardiography (ECG), which captures the electrical activation initiating each heartbeat, and photoplethysmography (PPG), which records the resulting peripheral pulse delayed by vascular dynamics. To capture this structured relationship, we introduce xMAE, a biosignal pretraining framework that leverages masked cross modal reconstruction across temporally ordered biosignals as a training time constraint to encourage physiologically meaningful timing structure in the learned representations. We show that pretraining with xMAE yields representations that outperform both unimodal and multimodal baselines on 15 of 19 downstream tasks, including cardiovascular outcome prediction, abnormal laboratory test detection, sleep staging, and demographic inference, while generalizing across devices, body locations, and acquisition settings. Further analysis suggests that the ECG PPG timing structure is reflected in the learned PPG representations. More broadly, xMAE demonstrates the effectiveness of incorporating temporal structure into multimodal pretraining when signals observe different stages of a shared underlying process. Code is available at https://github.com/hzhou3/xMAE.

Lip synchronization and audio-visual editing have emerged as fundamental challenges in multimodal learning, underpinning a wide range of applications, including film production, virtual avatars, and telepresence. Despite recent progress, most existing methods for lip synchronization and audio-visual editing depend on supervised fine-tuning of pre-trained models, leading to considerable computational overhead and data requirements. In this paper, we present OmniEdit, a training-free framework designed for both lip synchronization and audio-visual editing. Our approach reformulates the editing paradigm by substituting the edit sequence in FlowEdit with the target sequence, yielding an unbiased estimation of the desired output. Moreover, by removing stochastic elements from the generation process, we establish a smooth and stable editing trajectory. Extensive experimental results validate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed framework. Code is available at https://github.com/l1346792580123/OmniEdit.

Although audio-visual representation has been proved to be applicable in many downstream tasks, the representation of dancing videos, which is more specific and always accompanied by music with complex auditory contents, remains challenging and uninvestigated. Considering the intrinsic alignment between the cadent movement of dancer and music rhythm, we introduce MuDaR, a novel Music-Dance Representation learning framework to perform the synchronization of music and dance rhythms both in explicit and implicit ways. Specifically, we derive the dance rhythms based on visual appearance and motion cues inspired by the music rhythm analysis. Then the visual rhythms are temporally aligned with the music counterparts, which are extracted by the amplitude of sound intensity. Meanwhile, we exploit the implicit coherence of rhythms implied in audio and visual streams by contrastive learning. The model learns the joint embedding by predicting the temporal consistency between audio-visual pairs. The music-dance representation, together with the capability of detecting audio and visual rhythms, can further be applied to three downstream tasks: (a) dance classification, (b) music-dance retrieval, and (c) music-dance retargeting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed framework outperforms other self-supervised methods by a large margin.

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

In this work, we build a simple but strong baseline for sounding video generation. Given base diffusion models for audio and video, we integrate them with additional modules into a single model and train it to make the model jointly generate audio and video. To enhance alignment between audio-video pairs, we introduce two novel mechanisms in our model. The first one is timestep adjustment, which provides different timestep information to each base model. It is designed to align how samples are generated along with timesteps across modalities. The second one is a new design of the additional modules, termed Cross-Modal Conditioning as Positional Encoding (CMC-PE). In CMC-PE, cross-modal information is embedded as if it represents temporal position information, and the embeddings are fed into the model like positional encoding. Compared with the popular cross-attention mechanism, CMC-PE provides a better inductive bias for temporal alignment in the generated data. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of the two newly introduced mechanisms and also demonstrate that our method outperforms existing methods.

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

Our interaction with the world is an inherently multimodal experience. However, the understanding of human-to-object interactions has historically been addressed focusing on a single modality. In particular, a limited number of works have considered to integrate the visual and audio modalities for this purpose. In this work, we propose a multimodal approach for egocentric action recognition in a kitchen environment that relies on audio and visual information. Our model combines a sparse temporal sampling strategy with a late fusion of audio, spatial, and temporal streams. Experimental results on the EPIC-Kitchens dataset show that multimodal integration leads to better performance than unimodal approaches. In particular, we achieved a 5.18% improvement over the state of the art on verb classification.

Currently, high-quality, synchronized audio is synthesized using various multi-modal joint learning frameworks, leveraging video and optional text inputs. In the video-to-audio benchmarks, video-to-audio quality, semantic alignment, and audio-visual synchronization are effectively achieved. However, in real-world scenarios, speech and audio often coexist in videos simultaneously, and the end-to-end generation of synchronous speech and audio given video and text conditions are not well studied. Therefore, we propose an end-to-end multi-modal generation framework that simultaneously produces speech and audio based on video and text conditions. Furthermore, the advantages of video-to-audio (V2A) models for generating speech from videos remain unclear. The proposed framework, DeepAudio, consists of a video-to-audio (V2A) module, a text-to-speech (TTS) module, and a dynamic mixture of modality fusion (MoF) module. In the evaluation, the proposed end-to-end framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on the video-audio benchmark, video-speech benchmark, and text-speech benchmark. In detail, our framework achieves comparable results in the comparison with state-of-the-art models for the video-audio and text-speech benchmarks, and surpassing state-of-the-art models in the video-speech benchmark, with WER 16.57% to 3.15% (+80.99%), SPK-SIM 78.30% to 89.38% (+14.15%), EMO-SIM 66.24% to 75.56% (+14.07%), MCD 8.59 to 7.98 (+7.10%), MCD SL 11.05 to 9.40 (+14.93%) across a variety of dubbing settings.

Audio-Visual Speech Recognition (AVSR) enhances speech recognition robustness by leveraging visual cues, while real-world scenarios remain challenging due to viewpoint variation, audio distortion, and visual occlusion, which degrade modality quality and increase audio-visual asynchrony. In this paper, we propose a novel Modality-aware Multi-view Self-supervised representation framework for robust Audio-Visual Speech Recognition (M2S-AVSR). First, we introduce a multi-view representation learning encoder to learn view-invariant visual speech representations. Next, we employ a modality-aware module that explicitly models modality quality and cross-modal synchrony to perform fine-grained modality-aware fusion, enabling fine-grained visual information injection during decoding. In addition, we present AISHELL8-RealScene, a public multi-scenario, multi-view conversational audio-visual dataset recorded in real-world environments, and establish a speech recognition benchmark on it. Experiments on English and Mandarin benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method under challenging conditions. On LRS3, M2S-AVSR achieves up to 29.4% relative improvement under viewpoint perturbation and visual degradation settings. Our method also achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the MISP2021-AVSR test set. On AISHELL8-RealScene, it achieves the best result in outdoor scenes. The proposed method and dataset provide useful support for future research on robust speech and multimodal tasks under realistic conditions.

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/.

Learning holistic computational representations in physical, chemical or biological systems requires the ability to process information from different distributions and modalities within the same model. Thus, the demand for multimodal machine learning models has sharply risen for modalities that go beyond vision and language, such as sequences, graphs, time series, or tabular data. While there are many available multimodal fusion and alignment approaches, most of them require end-to-end training, scale quadratically with the number of modalities, cannot handle cases of high modality imbalance in the training set, or are highly topology-specific, making them too restrictive for many biomedical learning tasks. This paper presents Multimodal Lego (MM-Lego), a modular and general-purpose fusion and model merging framework to turn any set of encoders into a competitive multimodal model with no or minimal fine-tuning. We achieve this by introducing a wrapper for unimodal encoders that enforces lightweight dimensionality assumptions between modalities and harmonises their representations by learning features in the frequency domain to enable model merging with little signal interference. We show that MM-Lego 1) can be used as a model merging method which achieves competitive performance with end-to-end fusion models without any fine-tuning, 2) can operate on any unimodal encoder, and 3) is a model fusion method that, with minimal fine-tuning, achieves state-of-the-art results on six benchmarked multimodal biomedical tasks.

Understanding how the brain represents visual information is a fundamental challenge in neuroscience and artificial intelligence. While AI-driven decoding of neural data has provided insights into the human visual system, integrating multimodal neuroimaging signals, such as EEG, MEG, and fMRI, remains a critical hurdle due to their inherent spatiotemporal misalignment. Current approaches often analyze these modalities in isolation, limiting a holistic view of neural representation. In this study, we introduce BrainFLORA, a unified framework for integrating cross-modal neuroimaging data to construct a shared neural representation. Our approach leverages multimodal large language models (MLLMs) augmented with modality-specific adapters and task decoders, achieving state-of-the-art performance in joint-subject visual retrieval task and has the potential to extend multitasking. Combining neuroimaging analysis methods, we further reveal how visual concept representations align across neural modalities and with real world object perception. We demonstrate that the brain's structured visual concept representations exhibit an implicit mapping to physical-world stimuli, bridging neuroscience and machine learning from different modalities of neural imaging. Beyond methodological advancements, BrainFLORA offers novel implications for cognitive neuroscience and brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Our code is available at https://github.com/ncclab-sustech/BrainFLORA.

Gesture synthesis is a vital realm of human-computer interaction, with wide-ranging applications across various fields like film, robotics, and virtual reality. Recent advancements have utilized the diffusion model and attention mechanisms to improve gesture synthesis. However, due to the high computational complexity of these techniques, generating long and diverse sequences with low latency remains a challenge. We explore the potential of state space models (SSMs) to address the challenge, implementing a two-stage modeling strategy with discrete motion priors to enhance the quality of gestures. Leveraging the foundational Mamba block, we introduce MambaTalk, enhancing gesture diversity and rhythm through multimodal integration. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method matches or exceeds the performance of state-of-the-art models.

Despite the success of audio-visual large-language models (LLMs), they can produce plausible but ungrounded outputs, termed hallucination. Existing benchmarks focus on environmental sounds (e.g., dog barking) to indicate event occurrence. In contrast, human speech carries fundamentally different, rich semantics and temporal structures, yet it remains unexplored whether current models can accurately align speech content with corresponding visual signals. In this work, we show that speech content can induce hallucinations in audio-visual LLMs. To systematically study this, we introduce SVHalluc, the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating speech-vision hallucination in audio-visual LLMs. Our benchmark diagnoses speech-vision hallucinations from two critical and complementary aspects: semantic and temporal. Experimental results demonstrate that state-of-the-art open-source audio-visual LLMs struggle with aligning speech content with corresponding visual signals, with a near-random accuracy on multiple tasks. In contrast, Gemini 2.5 Pro significantly outperforms the open-source models. Our analysis suggests that their failures stem from limited ability in cross-modality understanding, despite strong performance in single-modality perception. Our work uncovers a new and fundamental limitation of current audio-visual LLMs and highlights the need for speech-grounded video comprehension. Project page: https://chenshuang-zhang.github.io/projects/svhalluc/.

The goal of multimodal summarization is to extract the most important information from different modalities to form output summaries. Unlike the unimodal summarization, the multimodal summarization task explicitly leverages cross-modal information to help generate more reliable and high-quality summaries. However, existing methods fail to leverage the temporal correspondence between different modalities and ignore the intrinsic correlation between different samples. To address this issue, we introduce Align and Attend Multimodal Summarization (A2Summ), a unified multimodal transformer-based model which can effectively align and attend the multimodal input. In addition, we propose two novel contrastive losses to model both inter-sample and intra-sample correlations. Extensive experiments on two standard video summarization datasets (TVSum and SumMe) and two multimodal summarization datasets (Daily Mail and CNN) demonstrate the superiority of A2Summ, achieving state-of-the-art performances on all datasets. Moreover, we collected a large-scale multimodal summarization dataset BLiSS, which contains livestream videos and transcribed texts with annotated summaries. Our code and dataset are publicly available at ~https://boheumd.github.io/A2Summ/.

With read-aloud speech synthesis achieving high naturalness scores, there is a growing research interest in synthesising spontaneous speech. However, human spontaneous face-to-face conversation has both spoken and non-verbal aspects (here, co-speech gestures). Only recently has research begun to explore the benefits of jointly synthesising these two modalities in a single system. The previous state of the art used non-probabilistic methods, which fail to capture the variability of human speech and motion, and risk producing oversmoothing artefacts and sub-optimal synthesis quality. We present the first diffusion-based probabilistic model, called Diff-TTSG, that jointly learns to synthesise speech and gestures together. Our method can be trained on small datasets from scratch. Furthermore, we describe a set of careful uni- and multi-modal subjective tests for evaluating integrated speech and gesture synthesis systems, and use them to validate our proposed approach. Please see https://shivammehta25.github.io/Diff-TTSG/ for video examples, data, and code.

Recent time series modeling faces a sharp divide between numerical generation and semantic understanding, with research showing that generation models often rely on superficial pattern matching, while understanding-oriented models struggle with high-fidelity numerical output. Although unified multimodal models (UMMs) have bridged this gap in vision, their potential for time series remains untapped. We propose TimeOmni-VL, the first vision-centric framework that unifies time series understanding and generation through two key innovations: (1) Fidelity-preserving bidirectional mapping between time series and images (Bi-TSI), which advances Time Series-to-Image (TS2I) and Image-to-Time Series (I2TS) conversions to ensure near-lossless transformations. (2) Understanding-guided generation. We introduce TSUMM-Suite, a novel dataset consists of six understanding tasks rooted in time series analytics that are coupled with two generation tasks. With a calibrated Chain-of-Thought, TimeOmni-VL is the first to leverage time series understanding as an explicit control signal for high-fidelity generation. Experiments confirm that this unified approach significantly improves both semantic understanding and numerical precision, establishing a new frontier for multimodal time series modeling.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) often suffer from multimodal hallucinations, wherein they may create content that is not present in the visual inputs. In this paper, we explore a new angle of this issue: overly detailed training data hinders the model's ability to timely terminate generation, leading to continued outputs beyond visual perception limits. By investigating how the model decides to terminate generation with EOS, the special end-of-sentence token, we find that the model assesses the completeness of the entire sequence by comparing the generated text with the image. This observation suggests that the model possesses an inherent potential of making proper EOS decisions based on its visual perception to avoid overly lengthy outputs. To take advantage of such potential, we explore two methods to mitigate multimodal hallucinations: a training objective that enables the model to reduce hallucinations by learning from regular instruction data, and a data filtering strategy to prevent harmful training data from exacerbating model hallucinations. Both methods significantly improve the hallucination performance of LMMs, without requiring any additional data or knowledge.

Despite broad interest in modeling spoken dialogue agents, most approaches are inherently "half-duplex" -- restricted to turn-based interaction with responses requiring explicit prompting by the user or implicit tracking of interruption or silence events. Human dialogue, by contrast, is "full-duplex" allowing for rich synchronicity in the form of quick and dynamic turn-taking, overlapping speech, and backchanneling. Technically, the challenge of achieving full-duplex dialogue with LLMs lies in modeling synchrony as pre-trained LLMs do not have a sense of "time". To bridge this gap, we propose Synchronous LLMs for full-duplex spoken dialogue modeling. We design a novel mechanism to integrate time information into Llama3-8b so that they run synchronously with the real-world clock. We also introduce a training recipe that uses 212k hours of synthetic spoken dialogue data generated from text dialogue data to create a model that generates meaningful and natural spoken dialogue, with just 2k hours of real-world spoken dialogue data. Synchronous LLMs outperform state-of-the-art in dialogue meaningfulness while maintaining naturalness. Finally, we demonstrate the model's ability to participate in full-duplex dialogue by simulating interaction between two agents trained on different datasets, while considering Internet-scale latencies of up to 240 ms. Webpage: https://syncllm.cs.washington.edu/.

Lip synchronization is the task of aligning a speaker's lip movements in video with corresponding speech audio, and it is essential for creating realistic, expressive video content. However, existing methods often rely on reference frames and masked-frame inpainting, which limit their robustness to identity consistency, pose variations, facial occlusions, and stylized content. In addition, since audio signals provide weaker conditioning than visual cues, lip shape leakage from the original video will affect lip sync quality. In this paper, we present OmniSync, a universal lip synchronization framework for diverse visual scenarios. Our approach introduces a mask-free training paradigm using Diffusion Transformer models for direct frame editing without explicit masks, enabling unlimited-duration inference while maintaining natural facial dynamics and preserving character identity. During inference, we propose a flow-matching-based progressive noise initialization to ensure pose and identity consistency, while allowing precise mouth-region editing. To address the weak conditioning signal of audio, we develop a Dynamic Spatiotemporal Classifier-Free Guidance (DS-CFG) mechanism that adaptively adjusts guidance strength over time and space. We also establish the AIGC-LipSync Benchmark, the first evaluation suite for lip synchronization in diverse AI-generated videos. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OmniSync significantly outperforms prior methods in both visual quality and lip sync accuracy, achieving superior results in both real-world and AI-generated videos.

Recent advancements in time series forecasting have explored augmenting models with text or vision modalities to improve accuracy. While text provides contextual understanding, it often lacks fine-grained temporal details. Conversely, vision captures intricate temporal patterns but lacks semantic context, limiting the complementary potential of these modalities. To address this, we propose \method, a novel multimodal framework that leverages pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to bridge temporal, visual, and textual modalities for enhanced forecasting. Our framework comprises three key components: (1) a Retrieval-Augmented Learner, which extracts enriched temporal features through memory bank interactions; (2) a Vision-Augmented Learner, which encodes time series as informative images; and (3) a Text-Augmented Learner, which generates contextual textual descriptions. These components collaborate with frozen pre-trained VLMs to produce multimodal embeddings, which are then fused with temporal features for final prediction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Time-VLM achieves superior performance, particularly in few-shot and zero-shot scenarios, thereby establishing a new direction for multimodal time series forecasting. Code is available at https://github.com/CityMind-Lab/ICML25-TimeVLM.

Following the success of Large Language Models (LLMs), expanding their boundaries to new modalities represents a significant paradigm shift in multimodal understanding. Human perception is inherently multimodal, relying not only on text but also on auditory and visual cues for a complete understanding of the world. In recognition of this fact, audio-visual LLMs have recently emerged. Despite promising developments, the lack of dedicated benchmarks poses challenges for understanding and evaluating models. In this work, we show that audio-visual LLMs struggle to discern subtle relationships between audio and visual signals, leading to hallucinations, underscoring the need for reliable benchmarks. To address this, we introduce AVHBench, the first comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the perception and comprehension capabilities of audio-visual LLMs. Our benchmark includes tests for assessing hallucinations, as well as the cross-modal matching and reasoning abilities of these models. Our results reveal that most existing audio-visual LLMs struggle with hallucinations caused by cross-interactions between modalities, due to their limited capacity to perceive complex multimodal signals and their relationships. Additionally, we demonstrate that simple training with our AVHBench improves robustness of audio-visual LLMs against hallucinations.

Sleep abnormalities can have severe health consequences. Automated sleep staging, i.e. labelling the sequence of sleep stages from the patient's physiological recordings, could simplify the diagnostic process. Previous work on automated sleep staging has achieved great results, mainly relying on the EEG signal. However, often multiple sources of information are available beyond EEG. This can be particularly beneficial when the EEG recordings are noisy or even missing completely. In this paper, we propose CoRe-Sleep, a Coordinated Representation multimodal fusion network that is particularly focused on improving the robustness of signal analysis on imperfect data. We demonstrate how appropriately handling multimodal information can be the key to achieving such robustness. CoRe-Sleep tolerates noisy or missing modalities segments, allowing training on incomplete data. Additionally, it shows state-of-the-art performance when testing on both multimodal and unimodal data using a single model on SHHS-1, the largest publicly available study that includes sleep stage labels. The results indicate that training the model on multimodal data does positively influence performance when tested on unimodal data. This work aims at bridging the gap between automated analysis tools and their clinical utility.

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

Human interaction is continuous, multimodal, and full-duplex by nature. Although recent omni models have made substantial progress in unified speech, vision, and text modeling, combining seamless real-time interaction with complex reasoning and tool use remains challenging. We present DuplexOmni, a method for real-time multimodal full-duplex interaction. DuplexOmni separates model capability into an interaction layer and a thinking layer, which collaborate asynchronously in parallel. The interaction layer is implemented by the DuplexOmni model, an end-to-end system that processes streaming audio and video inputs while generating text and speech responses in real time. The thinking layer is a pluggable module that provides complex reasoning and tool-use capabilities. To support this method, we further develop a Writer-Director pipeline for constructing continuous-interaction training data. Experiments show that DuplexOmni achieves strong performance on multiple public benchmarks and exhibits natural full-duplex interaction ability.

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.

We focus on multi-modal fusion for egocentric action recognition, and propose a novel architecture for multi-modal temporal-binding, i.e. the combination of modalities within a range of temporal offsets. We train the architecture with three modalities -- RGB, Flow and Audio -- and combine them with mid-level fusion alongside sparse temporal sampling of fused representations. In contrast with previous works, modalities are fused before temporal aggregation, with shared modality and fusion weights over time. Our proposed architecture is trained end-to-end, outperforming individual modalities as well as late-fusion of modalities. We demonstrate the importance of audio in egocentric vision, on per-class basis, for identifying actions as well as interacting objects. Our method achieves state of the art results on both the seen and unseen test sets of the largest egocentric dataset: EPIC-Kitchens, on all metrics using the public leaderboard.

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

Video-to-audio (V2A) generation leverages visual-only video features to render plausible sounds that match the scene. Importantly, the generated sound onsets should match the visual actions that are aligned with them, otherwise unnatural synchronization artifacts arise. Recent works have explored the progression of conditioning sound generators on still images and then video features, focusing on quality and semantic matching while ignoring synchronization, or by sacrificing some amount of quality to focus on improving synchronization only. In this work, we propose a V2A generative model, named MaskVAT, that interconnects a full-band high-quality general audio codec with a sequence-to-sequence masked generative model. This combination allows modeling both high audio quality, semantic matching, and temporal synchronicity at the same time. Our results show that, by combining a high-quality codec with the proper pre-trained audio-visual features and a sequence-to-sequence parallel structure, we are able to yield highly synchronized results on one hand, whilst being competitive with the state of the art of non-codec generative audio models. Sample videos and generated audios are available at https://maskvat.github.io .

We use (multi)modal deep neural networks (DNNs) to probe for sites of multimodal integration in the human brain by predicting stereoencephalography (SEEG) recordings taken while human subjects watched movies. We operationalize sites of multimodal integration as regions where a multimodal vision-language model predicts recordings better than unimodal language, unimodal vision, or linearly-integrated language-vision models. Our target DNN models span different architectures (e.g., convolutional networks and transformers) and multimodal training techniques (e.g., cross-attention and contrastive learning). As a key enabling step, we first demonstrate that trained vision and language models systematically outperform their randomly initialized counterparts in their ability to predict SEEG signals. We then compare unimodal and multimodal models against one another. Because our target DNN models often have different architectures, number of parameters, and training sets (possibly obscuring those differences attributable to integration), we carry out a controlled comparison of two models (SLIP and SimCLR), which keep all of these attributes the same aside from input modality. Using this approach, we identify a sizable number of neural sites (on average 141 out of 1090 total sites or 12.94%) and brain regions where multimodal integration seems to occur. Additionally, we find that among the variants of multimodal training techniques we assess, CLIP-style training is the best suited for downstream prediction of the neural activity in these sites.

Generating music that temporally aligns with video events is challenging for existing text-to-music models, which lack fine-grained temporal control. We introduce V2M-Zero, a zero-pair video-to-music generation approach that outputs time-aligned music for video. Our method is motivated by a key observation: temporal synchronization requires matching when and how much change occurs, not what changes. While musical and visual events differ semantically, they exhibit shared temporal structure that can be captured independently within each modality. We capture this structure through event curves computed from intra-modal similarity using pretrained music and video encoders. By measuring temporal change within each modality independently, these curves provide comparable representations across modalities. This enables a simple training strategy: fine-tune a text-to-music model on music-event curves, then substitute video-event curves at inference without cross-modal training or paired data. Across OES-Pub, MovieGenBench-Music, and AIST++, V2M-Zero achieves substantial gains over paired-data baselines: 5-21% higher audio quality, 13-15% better semantic alignment, 21-52% improved temporal synchronization, and 28% higher beat alignment on dance videos. We find similar results via a large crowd-source subjective listening test. Overall, our results validate that temporal alignment through within-modality features, rather than paired cross-modal supervision, is effective for video-to-music generation. Results are available at https://genjib.github.io/v2m_zero/

Joint audio-video generation aims to synthesize temporally synchronized and semantically coherent visual-acoustic content. However, existing open-source methods mainly rely on either dual-tower designs with posterior alignment or fully unified tri-modal designs that mix textual context, audio and video in one shared space. The former weakens fine-grained audio-video co-evolution, while the latter couples semantic conditioning with low-level synchronization. To address these limitations, we propose NAVA, a Native Audio-Visual Alignment framework for joint audio-video generation. NAVA is built upon context-conditioned native audio-visual alignment: it first establishes audio-video correspondence in a dedicated interaction space, and then uses external context to condition the joint denoising process. Specifically, NAVA is instantiated with an Align-then-Fuse MMDiT architecture, which transitions from modality-aware audio-video alignment to modality-shared joint denoising. Furthermore, we introduce Timbre-in-Context Conditioning to associate reference timbre cues with corresponding speech spans to achieve controllable speech timbre. Experiments on Verse-Bench and Seed-TTS, together with a user study, demonstrate that NAVA achieves superior video quality, precise audio-visual synchronization, competitive audio quality, and stronger reference-timbre controllability using only 6.3B parameters.

Multimodal learning aims to build models that can process and relate information from multiple modalities. Despite years of development in this field, it still remains challenging to design a unified network for processing various modalities (e.g. natural language, 2D images, 3D point clouds, audio, video, time series, tabular data) due to the inherent gaps among them. In this work, we propose a framework, named Meta-Transformer, that leverages a frozen encoder to perform multimodal perception without any paired multimodal training data. In Meta-Transformer, the raw input data from various modalities are mapped into a shared token space, allowing a subsequent encoder with frozen parameters to extract high-level semantic features of the input data. Composed of three main components: a unified data tokenizer, a modality-shared encoder, and task-specific heads for downstream tasks, Meta-Transformer is the first framework to perform unified learning across 12 modalities with unpaired data. Experiments on different benchmarks reveal that Meta-Transformer can handle a wide range of tasks including fundamental perception (text, image, point cloud, audio, video), practical application (X-Ray, infrared, hyperspectral, and IMU), and data mining (graph, tabular, and time-series). Meta-Transformer indicates a promising future for developing unified multimodal intelligence with transformers. Code will be available at https://github.com/invictus717/MetaTransformer

Multimodal learning combines multiple data modalities, broadening the types and complexity of data our models can utilize: for example, from plain text to image-caption pairs. Most multimodal learning algorithms focus on modeling simple one-to-one pairs of data from two modalities, such as image-caption pairs, or audio-text pairs. However, in most real-world settings, entities of different modalities interact with each other in more complex and multifaceted ways, going beyond one-to-one mappings. We propose to represent these complex relationships as graphs, allowing us to capture data with any number of modalities, and with complex relationships between modalities that can flexibly vary from one sample to another. Toward this goal, we propose Multimodal Graph Learning (MMGL), a general and systematic framework for capturing information from multiple multimodal neighbors with relational structures among them. In particular, we focus on MMGL for generative tasks, building upon pretrained Language Models (LMs), aiming to augment their text generation with multimodal neighbor contexts. We study three research questions raised by MMGL: (1) how can we infuse multiple neighbor information into the pretrained LMs, while avoiding scalability issues? (2) how can we infuse the graph structure information among multimodal neighbors into the LMs? and (3) how can we finetune the pretrained LMs to learn from the neighbor context in a parameter-efficient manner? We conduct extensive experiments to answer these three questions on MMGL and analyze the empirical results to pave the way for future MMGL research.

The emergence of GPT-4o-like large multimodal models (LMMs) has raised the exploration of integrating text, vision, and speech modalities to support more flexible multimodal interaction. Existing LMMs typically concatenate representation of modalities along the sequence dimension and feed them into a large language model (LLM) backbone. While sequence-dimension concatenation is straightforward for modality integration, it often relies heavily on large-scale data to learn modality alignments. In this paper, we aim to model the relationships between modalities more purposefully, thereby achieving more efficient and flexible modality alignments. To this end, we propose Stream-Omni, a large language-vision-speech model with efficient modality alignments, which can simultaneously support interactions under various modality combinations. Stream-Omni employs LLM as the backbone and aligns the vision and speech to the text based on their relationships. For vision that is semantically complementary to text, Stream-Omni uses sequence-dimension concatenation to achieve vision-text alignment. For speech that is semantically consistent with text, Stream-Omni introduces a CTC-based layer-dimension mapping to achieve speech-text alignment. In this way, Stream-Omni can achieve modality alignments with less data (especially speech), enabling the transfer of text capabilities to other modalities. Experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate that Stream-Omni achieves strong performance on visual understanding, speech interaction, and vision-grounded speech interaction tasks. Owing to the layer-dimensional mapping, Stream-Omni can simultaneously provide intermediate text outputs (such as ASR transcriptions and model responses) during speech interaction, offering users a comprehensive multimodal experience.

In this paper, we introduce Online Multimodal Conversational Response Generation (OMCRG), a novel task that aims to online generate synchronized verbal and non-verbal listener feedback, conditioned on the speaker's multimodal input. OMCRG reflects natural dyadic interactions and poses new challenges in achieving synchronization between the generated audio and facial responses of the listener. To address these challenges, we innovatively introduce text as an intermediate modality to bridge the audio and facial responses. We hence propose OmniResponse, a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) that autoregressively generates high-quality multi-modal listener responses. OmniResponse leverages a pretrained LLM enhanced with two novel components: Chrono-Text, which temporally anchors generated text tokens, and TempoVoice, a controllable online TTS module that produces speech synchronized with facial reactions. To support further OMCRG research, we present ResponseNet, a new dataset comprising 696 high-quality dyadic interactions featuring synchronized split-screen videos, multichannel audio, transcripts, and facial behavior annotations. Comprehensive evaluations conducted on ResponseNet demonstrate that OmniResponse significantly outperforms baseline models in terms of semantic speech content, audio-visual synchronization, and generation quality.

The goal of this work is to enhance balanced multimodal understanding in audio-visual large language models (AV-LLMs) by addressing modality bias without requiring additional training. In current AV-LLMs, audio and video features are typically processed jointly in the decoder. While this strategy facilitates unified multimodal understanding, it may introduce modality bias, where the model tends to over-rely on one modality due to imbalanced training signals. To mitigate this, we propose Fork-Merge Decoding (FMD), a simple yet effective inference-time strategy that requires no additional training or architectural modifications. FMD first performs modality-specific reasoning by processing audio-only and video-only inputs through the early decoder layers (a fork phase), and then merges the resulting hidden states for joint reasoning in the remaining layers (a merge phase). This approach promotes balanced modality contributions and leverages complementary information across modalities. We evaluate our method on two representative AV-LLMs, VideoLLaMA2 and video-SALMONN, using three benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate consistent performance improvements on tasks focused on audio, video, and combined audio-visual reasoning, demonstrating the effectiveness of inference-time interventions for robust multimodal understanding.

Health conditions among patients in intensive care units (ICUs) are monitored via electronic health records (EHRs), composed of numerical time series and lengthy clinical note sequences, both taken at irregular time intervals. Dealing with such irregularity in every modality, and integrating irregularity into multimodal representations to improve medical predictions, is a challenging problem. Our method first addresses irregularity in each single modality by (1) modeling irregular time series by dynamically incorporating hand-crafted imputation embeddings into learned interpolation embeddings via a gating mechanism, and (2) casting a series of clinical note representations as multivariate irregular time series and tackling irregularity via a time attention mechanism. We further integrate irregularity in multimodal fusion with an interleaved attention mechanism across temporal steps. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to thoroughly model irregularity in multimodalities for improving medical predictions. Our proposed methods for two medical prediction tasks consistently outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines in each single modality and multimodal fusion scenarios. Specifically, we observe relative improvements of 6.5\%, 3.6\%, and 4.3\% in F1 for time series, clinical notes, and multimodal fusion, respectively. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods and the importance of considering irregularity in multimodal EHRs.

Recent years have witnessed a big convergence of language, vision, and multi-modal pretraining. In this work, we present mPLUG-2, a new unified paradigm with modularized design for multi-modal pretraining, which can benefit from modality collaboration while addressing the problem of modality entanglement. In contrast to predominant paradigms of solely relying on sequence-to-sequence generation or encoder-based instance discrimination, mPLUG-2 introduces a multi-module composition network by sharing common universal modules for modality collaboration and disentangling different modality modules to deal with modality entanglement. It is flexible to select different modules for different understanding and generation tasks across all modalities including text, image, and video. Empirical study shows that mPLUG-2 achieves state-of-the-art or competitive results on a broad range of over 30 downstream tasks, spanning multi-modal tasks of image-text and video-text understanding and generation, and uni-modal tasks of text-only, image-only, and video-only understanding. Notably, mPLUG-2 shows new state-of-the-art results of 48.0 top-1 accuracy and 80.3 CIDEr on the challenging MSRVTT video QA and video caption tasks with a far smaller model size and data scale. It also demonstrates strong zero-shot transferability on vision-language and video-language tasks. Code and models will be released in https://github.com/alibaba/AliceMind.

Large Multimodal Models (LMM) are built across modalities and the misalignment between two modalities can result in "hallucination", generating textual outputs that are not grounded by the multimodal information in context. To address the multimodal misalignment issue, we adapt the Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) from the text domain to the task of vision-language alignment, where human annotators are asked to compare two responses and pinpoint the more hallucinated one, and the vision-language model is trained to maximize the simulated human rewards. We propose a new alignment algorithm called Factually Augmented RLHF that augments the reward model with additional factual information such as image captions and ground-truth multi-choice options, which alleviates the reward hacking phenomenon in RLHF and further improves the performance. We also enhance the GPT-4-generated training data (for vision instruction tuning) with previously available human-written image-text pairs to improve the general capabilities of our model. To evaluate the proposed approach in real-world scenarios, we develop a new evaluation benchmark MMHAL-BENCH with a special focus on penalizing hallucinations. As the first LMM trained with RLHF, our approach achieves remarkable improvement on the LLaVA-Bench dataset with the 94% performance level of the text-only GPT-4 (while previous best methods can only achieve the 87% level), and an improvement by 60% on MMHAL-BENCH over other baselines. We opensource our code, model, data at https://llava-rlhf.github.io.

Unified multimodal models (UMMs) achieve strong performance in both understanding and generation by learning a shared latent space, yet they often exhibit functional inconsistency between these two capabilities. We observe that this issue does not stem from a lack of shared representations, but from the absence of explicit alignment between the transformations that map into and out of the latent space. As a result, generation and re-encoding can follow inconsistent trajectories, leading to semantic drift under modality transitions. In this work, we propose LatentUMM, a framework that constructs an enhanced shared latent space to explicitly align these transformations and improve cross-modal consistency. LatentUMM consists of two stages. First, dual latent alignment enforces consistency at both the modality and capacity levels: cross-modal alignment uses a stronger embedding model to impose structured cross-modal semantics, while dual capacity alignment enforces bidirectional consistency under generation and re-encoding. Second, latent dynamics stabilization improves robustness via stochastic latent rollouts and preference optimization, favoring trajectories that better preserve semantic consistency. Experiments show that LatentUMM consistently improves multimodal consistency across diverse architectures. Code is available at: https://github.com/AIFrontierLab/TorchUMM/tree/main/src/umm/post_training/LatentUMM.

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.

There is increasing interest in the use of multimodal data in various web applications, such as digital advertising and e-commerce. Typical methods for extracting important information from multimodal data rely on a mid-fusion architecture that combines the feature representations from multiple encoders. However, as the number of modalities increases, several potential problems with the mid-fusion model structure arise, such as an increase in the dimensionality of the concatenated multimodal features and missing modalities. To address these problems, we propose a new concept that considers multimodal inputs as a set of sequences, namely, deep multimodal sequence sets (DM^2S^2). Our set-aware concept consists of three components that capture the relationships among multiple modalities: (a) a BERT-based encoder to handle the inter- and intra-order of elements in the sequences, (b) intra-modality residual attention (IntraMRA) to capture the importance of the elements in a modality, and (c) inter-modality residual attention (InterMRA) to enhance the importance of elements with modality-level granularity further. Our concept exhibits performance that is comparable to or better than the previous set-aware models. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the visualization of the learned InterMRA and IntraMRA weights can provide an interpretation of the prediction results.

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.

There has been a long-standing quest for a unified audio-visual-text model to enable various multimodal understanding tasks, which mimics the listening, seeing and reading process of human beings. Humans tends to represent knowledge using two separate systems: one for representing verbal (textual) information and one for representing non-verbal (visual and auditory) information. These two systems can operate independently but can also interact with each other. Motivated by this understanding of human cognition, in this paper, we introduce CoAVT -- a novel cognition-inspired Correlated Audio-Visual-Text pre-training model to connect the three modalities. It contains a joint audio-visual encoder that learns to encode audio-visual synchronization information together with the audio and visual content for non-verbal information, and a text encoder to handle textual input for verbal information. To bridge the gap between modalities, CoAVT employs a query encoder, which contains a set of learnable query embeddings, and extracts the most informative audiovisual features of the corresponding text. Additionally, to leverage the correspondences between audio and vision with language respectively, we also establish the audio-text and visual-text bi-modal alignments upon the foundational audiovisual-text tri-modal alignment to enhance the multimodal representation learning. Finally, we jointly optimize CoAVT model with three multimodal objectives: contrastive loss, matching loss and language modeling loss. Extensive experiments show that CoAVT can learn strong multimodal correlations and be generalized to various downstream tasks. CoAVT establishes new state-of-the-art performance on text-video retrieval task on AudioCaps for both zero-shot and fine-tuning settings, audio-visual event classification and audio-visual retrieval tasks on AudioSet and VGGSound.

Multimodal learning is a rapidly growing research field that has revolutionized multitasking and generative modeling in AI. While much of the research has focused on dealing with unstructured data (e.g., language, images, audio, or video), structured data (e.g., tabular data, time series, or signals) has received less attention. However, many industry-relevant use cases involve or can be benefited from both types of data. In this work, we propose a modular, end-to-end multimodal learning method called MAGNUM, which can natively handle both structured and unstructured data. MAGNUM is flexible enough to employ any specialized unimodal module to extract, compress, and fuse information from all available modalities.

Audio-driven portrait animation aims to synthesize portrait videos that are conditioned by given audio. Animating high-fidelity and multimodal video portraits has a variety of applications. Previous methods have attempted to capture different motion modes and generate high-fidelity portrait videos by training different models or sampling signals from given videos. However, lacking correlation learning between lip-sync and other movements (e.g., head pose/eye blinking) usually leads to unnatural results. In this paper, we propose a unified system for multi-person, diverse, and high-fidelity talking portrait generation. Our method contains three stages, i.e., 1) Mapping-Once network with Dual Attentions (MODA) generates talking representation from given audio. In MODA, we design a dual-attention module to encode accurate mouth movements and diverse modalities. 2) Facial composer network generates dense and detailed face landmarks, and 3) temporal-guided renderer syntheses stable videos. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that the proposed system produces more natural and realistic video portraits compared to previous methods.

Information retrieval is an ever-evolving and crucial research domain. The substantial demand for high-quality human motion data especially in online acquirement has led to a surge in human motion research works. Prior works have mainly concentrated on dual-modality learning, such as text and motion tasks, but three-modality learning has been rarely explored. Intuitively, an extra introduced modality can enrich a model's application scenario, and more importantly, an adequate choice of the extra modality can also act as an intermediary and enhance the alignment between the other two disparate modalities. In this work, we introduce LAVIMO (LAnguage-VIdeo-MOtion alignment), a novel framework for three-modality learning integrating human-centric videos as an additional modality, thereby effectively bridging the gap between text and motion. Moreover, our approach leverages a specially designed attention mechanism to foster enhanced alignment and synergistic effects among text, video, and motion modalities. Empirically, our results on the HumanML3D and KIT-ML datasets show that LAVIMO achieves state-of-the-art performance in various motion-related cross-modal retrieval tasks, including text-to-motion, motion-to-text, video-to-motion and motion-to-video.

Recent generative models are moving beyond silent video or standalone audio synthesis toward the joint generation of synchronized audio and video. Despite this progress, jointly generating audio and video with fine-grained cross-modal correspondence remains challenging due to their fundamental structural differences. Most existing methods use audio and video VAEs trained separately. As a result, the two latent spaces lack cross-modal alignment, leaving the downstream generative model to learn cross-modal synchronization from scratch. We present OmniVAE, a jointly trained audio-video VAE that learns fine-grained semantic alignment between audio and video latent representations. Beyond reconstruction, OmniVAE uses a segment-level audio-video contrastive objective to capture temporal-semantic correspondence and align the two latent spaces. In parallel, it distills features from pretrained modality-specific semantic encoders into each modality, improving the downstream learnability of both latent spaces. Extensive experiments show that both objectives consistently improve the learnability of the latent spaces, translating into higher generation quality and more accurate cross-modal synchronization in downstream text-to-audio-video generation. These findings underscore the importance of learning unified representations as a foundation for omnimodal modeling.1

Human language processing relies on the brain's capacity for predictive inference. We present a machine learning framework for decoding neural (EEG) responses to dynamic visual language stimuli in Deaf signers. Using coherence between neural signals and optical flow-derived motion features, we construct spatiotemporal representations of predictive neural dynamics. Through entropy-based feature selection, we identify frequency-specific neural signatures that differentiate interpretable linguistic input from linguistically disrupted (time-reversed) stimuli. Our results reveal distributed left-hemispheric and frontal low-frequency coherence as key features in language comprehension, with experience-dependent neural signatures correlating with age. This work demonstrates a novel multimodal approach for probing experience-driven generative models of perception in the brain.

Online video web content is richly multimodal: a single video blends vision, speech, ambient audio, and on-screen text. Retrieval systems typically treat these modalities as independent retrieval sources, which can lead to noisy and subpar retrieval. We explore multimodal video content retrieval, where relevance can be scored from one particular modality or jointly across multiple modalities simultaneously. Consequently, an effective retriever must dynamically choose which modality (or set of modalities) best addresses the query. We introduce CLaMR, a multimodal, late-interaction retriever that jointly indexes 4 modalities: video frames, transcribed speech, on-screen text, and metadata. CLaMR jointly encodes all modalities with a unified multimodal backbone for improved contextualization and is trained to enhance dynamic modality selection via two key innovations. First, given the lack of training data for multimodal retrieval, we introduce MultiVENT 2.0++, a large-scale synthetic training dataset built on MultiVENT 2.0 (event-centric videos in various languages paired with queries) with modality-targeted queries. Next, we propose a modality-aware loss that jointly trains according to a standard contrastive objective alongside an objective for learning correct modality usage. On the test sets of MultiVENT 2.0++ and MSRVTT, conventional aggregation strategies, such as averaging similarities for baseline retrievers, degrade performance by introducing noise from irrelevant modalities. In contrast, CLaMR consistently outperforms existing retrievers: on MultiVENT 2.0++, CLaMR improves nDCG@10 by 25.6 over the best single-modality retriever and by 35.4 over the best multi-modality retriever. We illustrate CLaMR's downstream utility on long-video QA, retrieving relevant frames and obtaining a 3.50% boost over LanguageBind on Video-MME and 1.42% over dense sampling on LongVideoBench.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have advanced the integration of visual and linguistic modalities, establishing themselves as the dominant paradigm for visual-language tasks. Current approaches like chain of thought (CoT) reasoning have augmented the cognitive capabilities of large language models (LLMs), yet their adaptation to MLLMs is hindered by heightened risks of hallucination in cross-modality comprehension. In this paper, we find that the thinking while looking paradigm in current multimodal CoT approaches--where reasoning chains are generated alongside visual input--fails to mitigate hallucinations caused by misleading images. To address these limitations, we propose the Visual Inference Chain (VIC) framework, a novel approach that constructs reasoning chains using textual context alone before introducing visual input, effectively reducing cross-modal biases and enhancing multimodal reasoning accuracy. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that VIC significantly improves zero-shot performance across various vision-related tasks, mitigating hallucinations while refining the reasoning capabilities of MLLMs. Our code repository can be found at https://github.com/Terry-Xu-666/visual_inference_chain.

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.

Understanding multimodal signals in egocentric vision, such as RGB video, depth, camera poses, and gaze, is essential for applications in augmented reality, robotics, and human-computer interaction, enabling systems to better interpret the camera wearer's actions, intentions, and surrounding environment. However, building large-scale egocentric multimodal and multitask models presents unique challenges. Egocentric data are inherently heterogeneous, with large variations in modality coverage across devices and settings. Generating pseudo-labels for missing modalities, such as gaze or head-mounted camera trajectories, is often infeasible, making standard supervised learning approaches difficult to scale. Furthermore, dynamic camera motion and the complex temporal and spatial structure of first-person video pose additional challenges for the direct application of existing multimodal foundation models. To address these challenges, we introduce a set of efficient temporal tokenizers and propose EgoM2P, a masked modeling framework that learns from temporally-aware multimodal tokens to train a large, general-purpose model for egocentric 4D understanding. This unified design supports multitasking across diverse egocentric perception and synthesis tasks, including gaze prediction, egocentric camera tracking, and monocular depth estimation from egocentric video, and also serves as a generative model for conditional egocentric video synthesis. Across these tasks, EgoM2P matches or outperforms specialist models while being an order of magnitude faster. We will fully open-source EgoM2P to support the community and advance egocentric vision research. Project page: https://egom2p.github.io/.

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

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

Accurate recognition of sign language in healthcare communication poses a significant challenge, requiring frameworks that can accurately interpret complex multimodal gestures. To deal with this, we propose FusionEnsemble-Net, a novel attention-based ensemble of spatiotemporal networks that dynamically fuses visual and motion data to enhance recognition accuracy. The proposed approach processes RGB video and range Doppler map radar modalities synchronously through four different spatiotemporal networks. For each network, features from both modalities are continuously fused using an attention-based fusion module before being fed into an ensemble of classifiers. Finally, the outputs of these four different fused channels are combined in an ensemble classification head, thereby enhancing the model's robustness. Experiments demonstrate that FusionEnsemble-Net outperforms state-of-the-art approaches with a test accuracy of 99.44% on the large-scale MultiMeDaLIS dataset for Italian Sign Language. Our findings indicate that an ensemble of diverse spatiotemporal networks, unified by attention-based fusion, yields a robust and accurate framework for complex, multimodal isolated gesture recognition tasks. The source code is available at: https://github.com/rezwanh001/Multimodal-Isolated-Italian-Sign-Language-Recognition.

Hallucinations in large vision-language models (LVLMs) pose significant challenges for real-world applications, as LVLMs may generate responses that appear plausible yet remain inconsistent with the associated visual content. This issue rarely occurs in human cognition. We argue that this discrepancy arises from humans' ability to effectively leverage multimodal interaction information in data samples. Specifically, humans typically first gather multimodal information, analyze the interactions across modalities for understanding, and then express their understanding through language. Motivated by this observation, we conduct extensive experiments on popular LVLMs and obtained insights that surprisingly reveal human-like, though less pronounced, cognitive behavior of LVLMs on multimodal samples. Building on these findings, we further propose INTER: Interaction Guidance Sampling, a novel training-free algorithm that mitigate hallucinations without requiring additional data. Specifically, INTER explicitly guides LVLMs to effectively reapply their understanding of multimodal interaction information when generating responses, thereby reducing potential hallucinations. On six benchmarks including VQA and image captioning tasks, INTER achieves an average improvement of up to 3.4\% on five LVLMs compared to the state-of-the-art decoding strategy. The code will be released when the paper is accepted.

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

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