Daily Papers

Key information extraction from document images is of paramount importance in office automation. Conventional template matching based approaches fail to generalize well to document images of unseen templates, and are not robust against text recognition errors. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end Spatial Dual-Modality Graph Reasoning method (SDMG-R) to extract key information from unstructured document images. We model document images as dual-modality graphs, nodes of which encode both the visual and textual features of detected text regions, and edges of which represent the spatial relations between neighboring text regions. The key information extraction is solved by iteratively propagating messages along graph edges and reasoning the categories of graph nodes. In order to roundly evaluate our proposed method as well as boost the future research, we release a new dataset named WildReceipt, which is collected and annotated tailored for the evaluation of key information extraction from document images of unseen templates in the wild. It contains 25 key information categories, a total of about 69000 text boxes, and is about 2 times larger than the existing public datasets. Extensive experiments validate that all information including visual features, textual features and spatial relations can benefit key information extraction. It has been shown that SDMG-R can effectively extract key information from document images of unseen templates, and obtain new state-of-the-art results on the recent popular benchmark SROIE and our WildReceipt. Our code and dataset will be publicly released.

Multimodal recommendation systems have attracted increasing attention for their improved performance by leveraging items' multimodal information. Prior methods often build modality-specific item-item semantic graphs from raw modality features and use them as supplementary structures alongside the user-item interaction graph to enhance user preference learning. However, these semantic graphs suffer from semantic deficiencies, including (1) insufficient modeling of collaborative signals among items and (2) structural distortions introduced by noise in raw modality features, ultimately compromising performance. To address these issues, we first extract collaborative signals from the interaction graph and infuse them into each modality-specific item semantic graph to enhance semantic modeling. Then, we design a modulus-based personalized embedding perturbation mechanism that injects perturbations with modulus-guided personalized intensity into embeddings to generate contrastive views. This enables the model to learn noise-robust representations through contrastive learning, thereby reducing the effect of structural noise in semantic graphs. Besides, we propose a dual representation alignment mechanism that first aligns multiple semantic representations via a designed Anchor-based InfoNCE loss using behavior representations as anchors, and then aligns behavior representations with the fused semantics by standard InfoNCE, to ensure representation consistency. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of our framework.

Recent advances in learning multi-modal representation have witnessed the success in biomedical domains. While established techniques enable handling multi-modal information, the challenges are posed when extended to various clinical modalities and practical modalitymissing setting due to the inherent modality gaps. To tackle these, we propose an innovative Modality-prompted Heterogeneous Graph for Omnimodal Learning (GTP-4o), which embeds the numerous disparate clinical modalities into a unified representation, completes the deficient embedding of missing modality and reformulates the cross-modal learning with a graph-based aggregation. Specially, we establish a heterogeneous graph embedding to explicitly capture the diverse semantic properties on both the modality-specific features (nodes) and the cross-modal relations (edges). Then, we design a modality-prompted completion that enables completing the inadequate graph representation of missing modality through a graph prompting mechanism, which generates hallucination graphic topologies to steer the missing embedding towards the intact representation. Through the completed graph, we meticulously develop a knowledge-guided hierarchical cross-modal aggregation consisting of a global meta-path neighbouring to uncover the potential heterogeneous neighbors along the pathways driven by domain knowledge, and a local multi-relation aggregation module for the comprehensive cross-modal interaction across various heterogeneous relations. We assess the efficacy of our methodology on rigorous benchmarking experiments against prior state-of-the-arts. In a nutshell, GTP-4o presents an initial foray into the intriguing realm of embedding, relating and perceiving the heterogeneous patterns from various clinical modalities holistically via a graph theory. Project page: https://gtp-4-o.github.io/.

Existing foundation models, such as CLIP, aim to learn a unified embedding space for multimodal data, enabling a wide range of downstream web-based applications like search, recommendation, and content classification. However, these models often overlook the inherent graph structures in multimodal datasets, where entities and their relationships are crucial. Multimodal graphs (MMGs) represent such graphs where each node is associated with features from different modalities, while the edges capture the relationships between these entities. On the other hand, existing graph foundation models primarily focus on text-attributed graphs (TAGs) and are not designed to handle the complexities of MMGs. To address these limitations, we propose UniGraph2, a novel cross-domain graph foundation model that enables general representation learning on MMGs, providing a unified embedding space. UniGraph2 employs modality-specific encoders alongside a graph neural network (GNN) to learn a unified low-dimensional embedding space that captures both the multimodal information and the underlying graph structure. We propose a new cross-domain multi-graph pre-training algorithm at scale to ensure effective transfer learning across diverse graph domains and modalities. Additionally, we adopt a Mixture of Experts (MoE) component to align features from different domains and modalities, ensuring coherent and robust embeddings that unify the information across modalities. Extensive experiments on a variety of multimodal graph tasks demonstrate that UniGraph2 significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models in tasks such as representation learning, transfer learning, and multimodal generative tasks, offering a scalable and flexible solution for learning on MMGs.

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.

Multi-modal recommender system focuses on utilizing rich modal information ( i.e., images and textual descriptions) of items to improve recommendation performance. The current methods have achieved remarkable success with the powerful structure modeling capability of graph neural networks. However, these methods are often hindered by sparse data in real-world scenarios. Although contrastive learning and homography ( i.e., homogeneous graphs) are employed to address the data sparsity challenge, existing methods still suffer two main limitations: 1) Simple multi-modal feature contrasts fail to produce effective representations, causing noisy modal-shared features and loss of valuable information in modal-unique features; 2) The lack of exploration of the homograph relations between user interests and item co-occurrence results in incomplete mining of user-item interplay. To address the above limitations, we propose a novel framework for REfining multi-modAl contRastive learning and hoMography relations (REARM). Specifically, we complement multi-modal contrastive learning by employing meta-network and orthogonal constraint strategies, which filter out noise in modal-shared features and retain recommendation-relevant information in modal-unique features. To mine homogeneous relationships effectively, we integrate a newly constructed user interest graph and an item co-occurrence graph with the existing user co-occurrence and item semantic graphs for graph learning. The extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of REARM to various state-of-the-art baselines. Our visualization further shows an improvement made by REARM in distinguishing between modal-shared and modal-unique features. Code is available https://github.com/MrShouxingMa/REARM{here}.

Controllable 3D scene generation has extensive applications in virtual reality and interior design, where the generated scenes should exhibit high levels of realism and controllability in terms of geometry. Scene graphs provide a suitable data representation that facilitates these applications. However, current graph-based methods for scene generation are constrained to text-based inputs and exhibit insufficient adaptability to flexible user inputs, hindering the ability to precisely control object geometry. To address this issue, we propose MMGDreamer, a dual-branch diffusion model for scene generation that incorporates a novel Mixed-Modality Graph, visual enhancement module, and relation predictor. The mixed-modality graph allows object nodes to integrate textual and visual modalities, with optional relationships between nodes. It enhances adaptability to flexible user inputs and enables meticulous control over the geometry of objects in the generated scenes. The visual enhancement module enriches the visual fidelity of text-only nodes by constructing visual representations using text embeddings. Furthermore, our relation predictor leverages node representations to infer absent relationships between nodes, resulting in more coherent scene layouts. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that MMGDreamer exhibits superior control of object geometry, achieving state-of-the-art scene generation performance. Project page: https://yangzhifeio.github.io/project/MMGDreamer.

Associating unstructured data with structured information is crucial for real-world tasks that require relevance search. However, existing graph learning benchmarks often overlook the rich semantic information associate with each node. To bridge such gap, we introduce the Multimodal Graph Benchmark (MM-GRAPH), the first comprehensive multi-modal graph benchmark that incorporates both textual and visual information. MM-GRAPH surpasses previous efforts, which have primarily focused on text-attributed graphs with various connectivity patterns. MM-GRAPH consists of five graph learning datasets of various scales that are appropriate for different learning tasks. Their multimodal node features, enabling a more comprehensive evaluation of graph learning algorithms in real-world scenarios. To facilitate research on multimodal graph learning, we further provide an extensive study on the performance of various graph neural networks in the presence of features from various modalities. MM-GRAPH aims to foster research on multimodal graph learning and drive the development of more advanced and robust graph learning algorithms. By providing a diverse set of datasets and benchmarks, MM-GRAPH enables researchers to evaluate and compare their models in realistic settings, ultimately leading to improved performance on real-world applications that rely on multimodal graph data.

While multi-modal models have successfully integrated information from image, video, and audio modalities, integrating graph modality into large language models (LLMs) remains unexplored. This discrepancy largely stems from the inherent divergence between structured graph data and unstructured text data. Incorporating graph knowledge provides a reliable source of information, enabling potential solutions to address issues in text generation, e.g., hallucination, and lack of domain knowledge. To evaluate the integration of graph knowledge into language models, a dedicated dataset is needed. However, there is currently no benchmark dataset specifically designed for multimodal graph-language models. To address this gap, we propose GraphextQA, a question answering dataset with paired subgraphs, retrieved from Wikidata, to facilitate the evaluation and future development of graph-language models. Additionally, we introduce a baseline model called CrossGNN, which conditions answer generation on the paired graphs by cross-attending question-aware graph features at decoding. The proposed dataset is designed to evaluate graph-language models' ability to understand graphs and make use of it for answer generation. We perform experiments with language-only models and the proposed graph-language model to validate the usefulness of the paired graphs and to demonstrate the difficulty of the task.

Multimodal Attributed Graphs (MAGs) are ubiquitous in real-world applications, encompassing extensive knowledge through multimodal attributes attached to nodes (e.g., texts and images) and topological structure representing node interactions. Despite its potential to advance diverse research fields like social networks and e-commerce, MAG representation learning (MAGRL) remains underexplored due to the lack of standardized datasets and evaluation frameworks. In this paper, we first propose MAGB, a comprehensive MAG benchmark dataset, featuring curated graphs from various domains with both textual and visual attributes. Based on MAGB dataset, we further systematically evaluate two mainstream MAGRL paradigms: GNN-as-Predictor, which integrates multimodal attributes via Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), and VLM-as-Predictor, which harnesses Vision Language Models (VLMs) for zero-shot reasoning. Extensive experiments on MAGB reveal following critical insights: (i) Modality significances fluctuate drastically with specific domain characteristics. (ii) Multimodal embeddings can elevate the performance ceiling of GNNs. However, intrinsic biases among modalities may impede effective training, particularly in low-data scenarios. (iii) VLMs are highly effective at generating multimodal embeddings that alleviate the imbalance between textual and visual attributes. These discoveries, which illuminate the synergy between multimodal attributes and graph topologies, contribute to reliable benchmarks, paving the way for future MAG research. The MAGB dataset and evaluation pipeline are publicly available at https://github.com/sktsherlock/MAGB.

This paper studies the multi-modal recommendation problem, where the item multi-modality information (e.g., images and textual descriptions) is exploited to improve the recommendation accuracy. Besides the user-item interaction graph, existing state-of-the-art methods usually use auxiliary graphs (e.g., user-user or item-item relation graph) to augment the learned representations of users and/or items. These representations are often propagated and aggregated on auxiliary graphs using graph convolutional networks, which can be prohibitively expensive in computation and memory, especially for large graphs. Moreover, existing multi-modal recommendation methods usually leverage randomly sampled negative examples in Bayesian Personalized Ranking (BPR) loss to guide the learning of user/item representations, which increases the computational cost on large graphs and may also bring noisy supervision signals into the training process. To tackle the above issues, we propose a novel self-supervised multi-modal recommendation model, dubbed BM3, which requires neither augmentations from auxiliary graphs nor negative samples. Specifically, BM3 first bootstraps latent contrastive views from the representations of users and items with a simple dropout augmentation. It then jointly optimizes three multi-modal objectives to learn the representations of users and items by reconstructing the user-item interaction graph and aligning modality features under both inter- and intra-modality perspectives. BM3 alleviates both the need for contrasting with negative examples and the complex graph augmentation from an additional target network for contrastive view generation. We show BM3 outperforms prior recommendation models on three datasets with number of nodes ranging from 20K to 200K, while achieving a 2-9X reduction in training time. Our code is available at https://github.com/enoche/BM3.

We introduce a method for the generation of images from an input scene graph. The method separates between a layout embedding and an appearance embedding. The dual embedding leads to generated images that better match the scene graph, have higher visual quality, and support more complex scene graphs. In addition, the embedding scheme supports multiple and diverse output images per scene graph, which can be further controlled by the user. We demonstrate two modes of per-object control: (i) importing elements from other images, and (ii) navigation in the object space, by selecting an appearance archetype. Our code is publicly available at https://www.github.com/ashual/scene_generation

Building 3D scene graphs has recently emerged as a topic in scene representation for several embodied AI applications to represent the world in a structured and rich manner. With their increased use in solving downstream tasks (eg, navigation and room rearrangement), can we leverage and recycle them for creating 3D maps of environments, a pivotal step in agent operation? We focus on the fundamental problem of aligning pairs of 3D scene graphs whose overlap can range from zero to partial and can contain arbitrary changes. We propose SGAligner, the first method for aligning pairs of 3D scene graphs that is robust to in-the-wild scenarios (ie, unknown overlap -- if any -- and changes in the environment). We get inspired by multi-modality knowledge graphs and use contrastive learning to learn a joint, multi-modal embedding space. We evaluate on the 3RScan dataset and further showcase that our method can be used for estimating the transformation between pairs of 3D scenes. Since benchmarks for these tasks are missing, we create them on this dataset. The code, benchmark, and trained models are available on the project website.

The burgeoning presence of multimodal content-sharing platforms propels the development of personalized recommender systems. Previous works usually suffer from data sparsity and cold-start problems, and may fail to adequately explore semantic user-product associations from multimodal data. To address these issues, we propose a novel Multi-Modal Hypergraph Contrastive Learning (MMHCL) framework for user recommendation. For a comprehensive information exploration from user-product relations, we construct two hypergraphs, i.e. a user-to-user (u2u) hypergraph and an item-to-item (i2i) hypergraph, to mine shared preferences among users and intricate multimodal semantic resemblance among items, respectively. This process yields denser second-order semantics that are fused with first-order user-item interaction as complementary to alleviate the data sparsity issue. Then, we design a contrastive feature enhancement paradigm by applying synergistic contrastive learning. By maximizing/minimizing the mutual information between second-order (e.g. shared preference pattern for users) and first-order (information of selected items for users) embeddings of the same/different users and items, the feature distinguishability can be effectively enhanced. Compared with using sparse primary user-item interaction only, our MMHCL obtains denser second-order hypergraphs and excavates more abundant shared attributes to explore the user-product associations, which to a certain extent alleviates the problems of data sparsity and cold-start. Extensive experiments have comprehensively demonstrated the effectiveness of our method. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/Xu107/MMHCL.

Multimodal recommender systems utilizing multimodal features (e.g., images and textual descriptions) typically show better recommendation accuracy than general recommendation models based solely on user-item interactions. Generally, prior work fuses multimodal features into item ID embeddings to enrich item representations, thus failing to capture the latent semantic item-item structures. In this context, LATTICE proposes to learn the latent structure between items explicitly and achieves state-of-the-art performance for multimodal recommendations. However, we argue the latent graph structure learning of LATTICE is both inefficient and unnecessary. Experimentally, we demonstrate that freezing its item-item structure before training can also achieve competitive performance. Based on this finding, we propose a simple yet effective model, dubbed as FREEDOM, that FREEzes the item-item graph and DenOises the user-item interaction graph simultaneously for Multimodal recommendation. Theoretically, we examine the design of FREEDOM through a graph spectral perspective and demonstrate that it possesses a tighter upper bound on the graph spectrum. In denoising the user-item interaction graph, we devise a degree-sensitive edge pruning method, which rejects possibly noisy edges with a high probability when sampling the graph. We evaluate the proposed model on three real-world datasets and show that FREEDOM can significantly outperform current strongest baselines. Compared with LATTICE, FREEDOM achieves an average improvement of 19.07% in recommendation accuracy while reducing its memory cost up to 6times on large graphs. The source code is available at: https://github.com/enoche/FREEDOM.

Knowledge Graphs, such as Wikidata, comprise structural and textual knowledge in order to represent knowledge. For each of the two modalities dedicated approaches for graph embedding and language models learn patterns that allow for predicting novel structural knowledge. Few approaches have integrated learning and inference with both modalities and these existing ones could only partially exploit the interaction of structural and textual knowledge. In our approach, we build on existing strong representations of single modalities and we use hypercomplex algebra to represent both, (i), single-modality embedding as well as, (ii), the interaction between different modalities and their complementary means of knowledge representation. More specifically, we suggest Dihedron and Quaternion representations of 4D hypercomplex numbers to integrate four modalities namely structural knowledge graph embedding, word-level representations (e.g.\ Word2vec, Fasttext), sentence-level representations (Sentence transformer), and document-level representations (sentence transformer, Doc2vec). Our unified vector representation scores the plausibility of labelled edges via Hamilton and Dihedron products, thus modeling pairwise interactions between different modalities. Extensive experimental evaluation on standard benchmark datasets shows the superiority of our two new models using abundant textual information besides sparse structural knowledge to enhance performance in link prediction tasks.

The multifaceted nature of human perception and comprehension indicates that, when we think, our body can naturally take any combination of senses, a.k.a., modalities and form a beautiful picture in our brain. For example, when we see a cattery and simultaneously perceive the cat's purring sound, our brain can construct a picture of a cat in the cattery. Intuitively, generative AI models should hold the versatility of humans and be capable of generating images from any combination of modalities efficiently and collaboratively. This paper presents ImgAny, a novel end-to-end multi-modal generative model that can mimic human reasoning and generate high-quality images. Our method serves as the first attempt in its capacity of efficiently and flexibly taking any combination of seven modalities, ranging from language, audio to vision modalities, including image, point cloud, thermal, depth, and event data. Our key idea is inspired by human-level cognitive processes and involves the integration and harmonization of multiple input modalities at both the entity and attribute levels without specific tuning across modalities. Accordingly, our method brings two novel training-free technical branches: 1) Entity Fusion Branch ensures the coherence between inputs and outputs. It extracts entity features from the multi-modal representations powered by our specially constructed entity knowledge graph; 2) Attribute Fusion Branch adeptly preserves and processes the attributes. It efficiently amalgamates distinct attributes from diverse input modalities via our proposed attribute knowledge graph. Lastly, the entity and attribute features are adaptively fused as the conditional inputs to the pre-trained Stable Diffusion model for image generation. Extensive experiments under diverse modality combinations demonstrate its exceptional capability for visual content creation.

We introduce a novel problem, i.e., the localization of an input image within a multi-modal reference map represented by a database of 3D scene graphs. These graphs comprise multiple modalities, including object-level point clouds, images, attributes, and relationships between objects, offering a lightweight and efficient alternative to conventional methods that rely on extensive image databases. Given the available modalities, the proposed method SceneGraphLoc learns a fixed-sized embedding for each node (i.e., representing an object instance) in the scene graph, enabling effective matching with the objects visible in the input query image. This strategy significantly outperforms other cross-modal methods, even without incorporating images into the map embeddings. When images are leveraged, SceneGraphLoc achieves performance close to that of state-of-the-art techniques depending on large image databases, while requiring three orders-of-magnitude less storage and operating orders-of-magnitude faster. The code will be made public.

In this paper, we approach an overlooked yet critical task Graph2Image: generating images from multimodal attributed graphs (MMAGs). This task poses significant challenges due to the explosion in graph size, dependencies among graph entities, and the need for controllability in graph conditions. To address these challenges, we propose a graph context-conditioned diffusion model called InstructG2I. InstructG2I first exploits the graph structure and multimodal information to conduct informative neighbor sampling by combining personalized page rank and re-ranking based on vision-language features. Then, a Graph-QFormer encoder adaptively encodes the graph nodes into an auxiliary set of graph prompts to guide the denoising process of diffusion. Finally, we propose graph classifier-free guidance, enabling controllable generation by varying the strength of graph guidance and multiple connected edges to a node. Extensive experiments conducted on three datasets from different domains demonstrate the effectiveness and controllability of our approach. The code is available at https://github.com/PeterGriffinJin/InstructG2I.

Multimodal reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs) struggles with incomplete knowledge and hallucination artifacts, challenges that textual Knowledge Graphs (KGs) only partially mitigate due to their modality isolation. While Multimodal Knowledge Graphs (MMKGs) promise enhanced cross-modal understanding, their practical construction is impeded by semantic narrowness of manual text annotations and inherent noise in visual-semantic entity linkages. In this paper, we propose Vision-align-to-Language integrated Knowledge Graph (VaLiK), a novel approach for constructing MMKGs that enhances LLMs reasoning through cross-modal information supplementation. Specifically, we cascade pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to align image features with text, transforming them into descriptions that encapsulate image-specific information. Furthermore, we developed a cross-modal similarity verification mechanism to quantify semantic consistency, effectively filtering out noise introduced during feature alignment. Even without manually annotated image captions, the refined descriptions alone suffice to construct the MMKG. Compared to conventional MMKGs construction paradigms, our approach achieves substantial storage efficiency gains while maintaining direct entity-to-image linkage capability. Experimental results on multimodal reasoning tasks demonstrate that LLMs augmented with VaLiK outperform previous state-of-the-art models. Our code is published at https://github.com/Wings-Of-Disaster/VaLiK.

Real-world tasks consist of multiple inter-dependent subtasks (e.g., a dirty pan needs to be washed before it can be used for cooking). In this work, we aim to model the causal dependencies between such subtasks from instructional videos describing the task. This is a challenging problem since complete information about the world is often inaccessible from videos, which demands robust learning mechanisms to understand the causal structure of events. We present Multimodal Subtask Graph Generation (MSG2), an approach that constructs a Subtask Graph defining the dependency between a task's subtasks relevant to a task from noisy web videos. Graphs generated by our multimodal approach are closer to human-annotated graphs compared to prior approaches. MSG2 further performs the downstream task of next subtask prediction 85% and 30% more accurately than recent video transformer models in the ProceL and CrossTask datasets, respectively.

Traditional multimodal learners find unified representations for tasks like visual question answering, but rely heavily on paired datasets. However, an overlooked yet potentially powerful question is: can one leverage auxiliary unpaired multimodal data to directly enhance representation learning in a target modality? We introduce UML: Unpaired Multimodal Learner, a modality-agnostic training paradigm in which a single model alternately processes inputs from different modalities while sharing parameters across them. This design exploits the assumption that different modalities are projections of a shared underlying reality, allowing the model to benefit from cross-modal structure without requiring explicit pairs. Theoretically, under linear data-generating assumptions, we show that unpaired auxiliary data can yield representations strictly more informative about the data-generating process than unimodal training. Empirically, we show that using unpaired data from auxiliary modalities -- such as text, audio, or images -- consistently improves downstream performance across diverse unimodal targets such as image and audio. Our project page: https://unpaired-multimodal.github.io/

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a fundamental paradigm for expanding Large Language Models beyond their static training limitations. However, a critical misalignment exists between current RAG capabilities and real-world information environments. Modern knowledge repositories are inherently multimodal, containing rich combinations of textual content, visual elements, structured tables, and mathematical expressions. Yet existing RAG frameworks are limited to textual content, creating fundamental gaps when processing multimodal documents. We present RAG-Anything, a unified framework that enables comprehensive knowledge retrieval across all modalities. Our approach reconceptualizes multimodal content as interconnected knowledge entities rather than isolated data types. The framework introduces dual-graph construction to capture both cross-modal relationships and textual semantics within a unified representation. We develop cross-modal hybrid retrieval that combines structural knowledge navigation with semantic matching. This enables effective reasoning over heterogeneous content where relevant evidence spans multiple modalities. RAG-Anything demonstrates superior performance on challenging multimodal benchmarks, achieving significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods. Performance gains become particularly pronounced on long documents where traditional approaches fail. Our framework establishes a new paradigm for multimodal knowledge access, eliminating the architectural fragmentation that constrains current systems. Our framework is open-sourced at: https://github.com/HKUDS/RAG-Anything.

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.

This book is the result of a seminar in which we reviewed multimodal approaches and attempted to create a solid overview of the field, starting with the current state-of-the-art approaches in the two subfields of Deep Learning individually. Further, modeling frameworks are discussed where one modality is transformed into the other, as well as models in which one modality is utilized to enhance representation learning for the other. To conclude the second part, architectures with a focus on handling both modalities simultaneously are introduced. Finally, we also cover other modalities as well as general-purpose multi-modal models, which are able to handle different tasks on different modalities within one unified architecture. One interesting application (Generative Art) eventually caps off this booklet.

Multimodal relation extraction (MRE) is a crucial task in the fields of Knowledge Graph and Multimedia, playing a pivotal role in multimodal knowledge graph construction. However, existing methods are typically limited to extracting a single type of relational triplet, which restricts their ability to extract triplets beyond the specified types. Directly combining these methods fails to capture dynamic cross-modal interactions and introduces significant computational redundancy. Therefore, we propose a novel unified multimodal Relation Extraction framework with Multilevel Optimal Transport and mixture-of-Experts, termed REMOTE, which can simultaneously extract intra-modal and inter-modal relations between textual entities and visual objects. To dynamically select optimal interaction features for different types of relational triplets, we introduce mixture-of-experts mechanism, ensuring the most relevant modality information is utilized. Additionally, considering that the inherent property of multilayer sequential encoding in existing encoders often leads to the loss of low-level information, we adopt a multilevel optimal transport fusion module to preserve low-level features while maintaining multilayer encoding, yielding more expressive representations. Correspondingly, we also create a Unified Multimodal Relation Extraction (UMRE) dataset to evaluate the effectiveness of our framework, encompassing diverse cases where the head and tail entities can originate from either text or image. Extensive experiments show that REMOTE effectively extracts various types of relational triplets and achieves state-of-the-art performanc on almost all metrics across two other public MRE datasets. We release our resources at https://github.com/Nikol-coder/REMOTE.

Image modality is not perfect as it often fails in certain conditions, e.g., night and fast motion. This significantly limits the robustness and versatility of existing multi-modal (i.e., Image+X) semantic segmentation methods when confronting modality absence or failure, as often occurred in real-world applications. Inspired by the open-world learning capability of multi-modal vision-language models (MVLMs), we explore a new direction in learning the modality-agnostic representation via knowledge distillation (KD) from MVLMs. Intuitively, we propose Any2Seg, a novel framework that can achieve robust segmentation from any combination of modalities in any visual conditions. Specifically, we first introduce a novel language-guided semantic correlation distillation (LSCD) module to transfer both inter-modal and intra-modal semantic knowledge in the embedding space from MVLMs, e.g., LanguageBind. This enables us to minimize the modality gap and alleviate semantic ambiguity to combine any modalities in any visual conditions. Then, we introduce a modality-agnostic feature fusion (MFF) module that reweights the multi-modal features based on the inter-modal correlation and selects the fine-grained feature. This way, our Any2Seg finally yields an optimal modality-agnostic representation. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks with four modalities demonstrate that Any2Seg achieves the state-of-the-art under the multi-modal setting (+3.54 mIoU) and excels in the challenging modality-incomplete setting(+19.79 mIoU).

Operating rooms (ORs) are complex, high-stakes environments requiring precise understanding of interactions among medical staff, tools, and equipment for enhancing surgical assistance, situational awareness, and patient safety. Current datasets fall short in scale, realism and do not capture the multimodal nature of OR scenes, limiting progress in OR modeling. To this end, we introduce MM-OR, a realistic and large-scale multimodal spatiotemporal OR dataset, and the first dataset to enable multimodal scene graph generation. MM-OR captures comprehensive OR scenes containing RGB-D data, detail views, audio, speech transcripts, robotic logs, and tracking data and is annotated with panoptic segmentations, semantic scene graphs, and downstream task labels. Further, we propose MM2SG, the first multimodal large vision-language model for scene graph generation, and through extensive experiments, demonstrate its ability to effectively leverage multimodal inputs. Together, MM-OR and MM2SG establish a new benchmark for holistic OR understanding, and open the path towards multimodal scene analysis in complex, high-stakes environments. Our code, and data is available at https://github.com/egeozsoy/MM-OR.

Graph neural networks have recently achieved remarkable success in representing graph-structured data, with rapid progress in both the node embedding and graph pooling methods. Yet, they mostly focus on capturing information from the nodes considering their connectivity, and not much work has been done in representing the edges, which are essential components of a graph. However, for tasks such as graph reconstruction and generation, as well as graph classification tasks for which the edges are important for discrimination, accurately representing edges of a given graph is crucial to the success of the graph representation learning. To this end, we propose a novel edge representation learning framework based on Dual Hypergraph Transformation (DHT), which transforms the edges of a graph into the nodes of a hypergraph. This dual hypergraph construction allows us to apply message-passing techniques for node representations to edges. After obtaining edge representations from the hypergraphs, we then cluster or drop edges to obtain holistic graph-level edge representations. We validate our edge representation learning method with hypergraphs on diverse graph datasets for graph representation and generation performance, on which our method largely outperforms existing graph representation learning methods. Moreover, our edge representation learning and pooling method also largely outperforms state-of-the-art graph pooling methods on graph classification, not only because of its accurate edge representation learning, but also due to its lossless compression of the nodes and removal of irrelevant edges for effective message-passing.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance in text understanding and have become an essential tool for building smart assistants. Originally focusing on text, they have been enhanced with multimodal capabilities in recent works that successfully built visual instruction following assistants. As far as the graph modality goes, however, no such assistants have yet been developed. Graph structures are complex in that they represent relation between different features and are permutation invariant. Moreover, representing them in purely textual form does not always lead to good LLM performance even for finetuned models. As a result, there is a need to develop a new method to integrate graphs in LLMs for general graph understanding. This work explores the integration of the graph modality in LLM for general graph instruction following tasks. It aims at producing a deep learning model that enhances an underlying LLM with graph embeddings and trains it to understand them and to produce, given an instruction, an answer grounded in the graph representation. The approach performs significantly better than a graph to text approach and remains consistent even for larger graphs.

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) incorporate heterogeneous modalities into LLMs, enabling a comprehensive understanding of diverse scenarios and objects. Despite the proliferation of evaluation benchmarks and leaderboards for MLLMs, they predominantly overlook the critical capacity of MLLMs to comprehend world knowledge with structured abstractions that appear in visual form. To address this gap, we propose a novel evaluation paradigm and devise M3STR, an innovative benchmark grounded in the Multi-Modal Map for STRuctured understanding. This benchmark leverages multi-modal knowledge graphs to synthesize images encapsulating subgraph architectures enriched with multi-modal entities. M3STR necessitates that MLLMs not only recognize the multi-modal entities within the visual inputs but also decipher intricate relational topologies among them. We delineate the benchmark's statistical profiles and automated construction pipeline, accompanied by an extensive empirical analysis of 26 state-of-the-art MLLMs. Our findings reveal persistent deficiencies in processing abstractive visual information with structured knowledge, thereby charting a pivotal trajectory for advancing MLLMs' holistic reasoning capacities. Our code and data are released at https://github.com/zjukg/M3STR

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

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

The application of video captioning models aims at translating the content of videos by using accurate natural language. Due to the complex nature inbetween object interaction in the video, the comprehensive understanding of spatio-temporal relations of objects remains a challenging task. Existing methods often fail in generating sufficient feature representations of video content. In this paper, we propose a video captioning model based on dual graphs and gated fusion: we adapt two types of graphs to generate feature representations of video content and utilize gated fusion to further understand these different levels of information. Using a dual-graphs model to generate appearance features and motion features respectively can utilize the content correlation in frames to generate various features from multiple perspectives. Among them, dual-graphs reasoning can enhance the content correlation in frame sequences to generate advanced semantic features; The gated fusion, on the other hand, aggregates the information in multiple feature representations for comprehensive video content understanding. The experiments conducted on worldly used datasets MSVD and MSR-VTT demonstrate state-of-the-art performance of our proposed approach.

Vision-Language Pretraining (VLP) has achieved remarkable success across various downstream tasks, but such gains are largely driven by scaling up on training data. Yet, literature methods treat image-text pairs as isolated training examples; this neglects the rich relational structure naturally present in many domains, such as e-commerce product co-purchase graphs and social recommendation networks. Inspired by neuroscientific evidence that human encodes knowledge as relationship cognitive maps, we introduce Structure-aware Language-Image Pretraining (SLIP). SLIP integrates a structural contrastive loss to align modalities while also modeling relationships between neighboring entities in a structured graph. To support this paradigm, we construct a large-scale Amazon Product Co-purchase Multimodal Graph Dataset, enabling structured cross-modality supervision at scale. Experiment results show that SLIP consistently outperforms CLIP on cross-modal retrieval and classification tasks in both zero-shot and few-shot settings, showing the value of relational supervision for cross-modal alignment.

Multimodal recommendation systems are increasingly becoming foundational technologies for e-commerce and content platforms, enabling personalized services by jointly modeling users' historical behaviors and the multimodal features of items (e.g., visual and textual). However, most existing methods rely on either static fusion strategies or graph-based local interaction modeling, facing two critical limitations: (1) insufficient ability to model fine-grained cross-modal associations, leading to suboptimal fusion quality; and (2) a lack of global distribution-level consistency, causing representational bias. To address these, we propose MambaRec, a novel framework that integrates local feature alignment and global distribution regularization via attention-guided learning. At its core, we introduce the Dilated Refinement Attention Module (DREAM), which uses multi-scale dilated convolutions with channel-wise and spatial attention to align fine-grained semantic patterns between visual and textual modalities. This module captures hierarchical relationships and context-aware associations, improving cross-modal semantic modeling. Additionally, we apply Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) and contrastive loss functions to constrain global modality alignment, enhancing semantic consistency. This dual regularization reduces mode-specific deviations and boosts robustness. To improve scalability, MambaRec employs a dimensionality reduction strategy to lower the computational cost of high-dimensional multimodal features. Extensive experiments on real-world e-commerce datasets show that MambaRec outperforms existing methods in fusion quality, generalization, and efficiency. Our code has been made publicly available at https://github.com/rkl71/MambaRec.

Connecting text and visual modalities plays an essential role in generative intelligence. For this reason, inspired by the success of large language models, significant research efforts are being devoted to the development of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). These models can seamlessly integrate visual and textual modalities, both as input and output, while providing a dialogue-based interface and instruction-following capabilities. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of recent visual-based MLLMs, analyzing their architectural choices, multimodal alignment strategies, and training techniques. We also conduct a detailed analysis of these models across a wide range of tasks, including visual grounding, image generation and editing, visual understanding, and domain-specific applications. Additionally, we compile and describe training datasets and evaluation benchmarks, conducting comparisons among existing models in terms of performance and computational requirements. Overall, this survey offers a comprehensive overview of the current state of the art, laying the groundwork for future MLLMs.

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.

Effective root cause analysis (RCA) is vital for swiftly restoring services, minimizing losses, and ensuring the smooth operation and management of complex systems. Previous data-driven RCA methods, particularly those employing causal discovery techniques, have primarily focused on constructing dependency or causal graphs for backtracking the root causes. However, these methods often fall short as they rely solely on data from a single modality, thereby resulting in suboptimal solutions. In this work, we propose Mulan, a unified multi-modal causal structure learning method for root cause localization. We leverage a log-tailored language model to facilitate log representation learning, converting log sequences into time-series data. To explore intricate relationships across different modalities, we propose a contrastive learning-based approach to extract modality-invariant and modality-specific representations within a shared latent space. Additionally, we introduce a novel key performance indicator-aware attention mechanism for assessing modality reliability and co-learning a final causal graph. Finally, we employ random walk with restart to simulate system fault propagation and identify potential root causes. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed framework.

Recent years have seen significant advancements in multi-modal knowledge graph completion (MMKGC). MMKGC enhances knowledge graph completion (KGC) by integrating multi-modal entity information, thereby facilitating the discovery of unobserved triples in the large-scale knowledge graphs (KGs). Nevertheless, existing methods emphasize the design of elegant KGC models to facilitate modality interaction, neglecting the real-life problem of missing modalities in KGs. The missing modality information impedes modal interaction, consequently undermining the model's performance. In this paper, we propose a modality adversarial and contrastive framework (MACO) to solve the modality-missing problem in MMKGC. MACO trains a generator and discriminator adversarially to generate missing modality features that can be incorporated into the MMKGC model. Meanwhile, we design a cross-modal contrastive loss to improve the performance of the generator. Experiments on public benchmarks with further explorations demonstrate that MACO could achieve state-of-the-art results and serve as a versatile framework to bolster various MMKGC models. Our code and benchmark data are available at https://github.com/zjukg/MACO.

Over recent decades, significant advancements in cross-modal retrieval are mainly driven by breakthroughs in visual and linguistic modeling. However, a recent study shows that multi-modal data representations tend to cluster within a limited convex cone (as representation degeneration problem), which hinders retrieval performance due to the inseparability of these representations. In our study, we first empirically validate the presence of the representation degeneration problem across multiple cross-modal benchmarks and methods. Next, to address it, we introduce a novel method, called InvGC, a post-processing technique inspired by graph convolution and average pooling. Specifically, InvGC defines the graph topology within the datasets and then applies graph convolution in a subtractive manner. This method effectively separates representations by increasing the distances between data points. To improve the efficiency and effectiveness of InvGC, we propose an advanced graph topology, LocalAdj, which only aims to increase the distances between each data point and its nearest neighbors. To understand why InvGC works, we present a detailed theoretical analysis, proving that the lower bound of recall will be improved after deploying InvGC. Extensive empirical results show that InvGC and InvGC w/LocalAdj significantly mitigate the representation degeneration problem, thereby enhancing retrieval performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/yimuwangcs/Better_Cross_Modal_Retrieval

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) play a pivotal role in advancing various AI applications, with the semantic web community's exploration into multi-modal dimensions unlocking new avenues for innovation. In this survey, we carefully review over 300 articles, focusing on KG-aware research in two principal aspects: KG-driven Multi-Modal (KG4MM) learning, where KGs support multi-modal tasks, and Multi-Modal Knowledge Graph (MM4KG), which extends KG studies into the MMKG realm. We begin by defining KGs and MMKGs, then explore their construction progress. Our review includes two primary task categories: KG-aware multi-modal learning tasks, such as Image Classification and Visual Question Answering, and intrinsic MMKG tasks like Multi-modal Knowledge Graph Completion and Entity Alignment, highlighting specific research trajectories. For most of these tasks, we provide definitions, evaluation benchmarks, and additionally outline essential insights for conducting relevant research. Finally, we discuss current challenges and identify emerging trends, such as progress in Large Language Modeling and Multi-modal Pre-training strategies. This survey aims to serve as a comprehensive reference for researchers already involved in or considering delving into KG and multi-modal learning research, offering insights into the evolving landscape of MMKG research and supporting future work.

Due to the convenience of mobile devices, the online games have become an important part for user entertainments in reality, creating a demand for friend recommendation in online games. However, none of existing approaches can effectively incorporate the multi-modal user features (e.g., images and texts) with the structural information in the friendship graph, due to the following limitations: (1) some of them ignore the high-order structural proximity between users, (2) some fail to learn the pairwise relevance between users at modality-specific level, and (3) some cannot capture both the local and global user preferences on different modalities. By addressing these issues, in this paper, we propose an end-to-end model FROG that better models the user preferences on potential friends. Comprehensive experiments on both offline evaluation and online deployment at Tencent have demonstrated the superiority of FROG over existing approaches.

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

With the emergence of data marketplaces, the demand for methods to assess the value of data has increased significantly. While numerous techniques have been proposed for this purpose, none have specifically addressed graphs as the main data modality. Graphs are widely used across various fields, ranging from chemical molecules to social networks. In this study, we break down graphs into two main components: structural and featural, and we focus on evaluating data without relying on specific task-related metrics, making it applicable in practical scenarios where validation requirements may be lacking. We introduce a novel framework called blind message passing, which aligns the seller's and buyer's graphs using a shared node permutation based on graph matching. This allows us to utilize the graph Wasserstein distance to quantify the differences in the structural distribution of graph datasets, called the structural disparities. We then consider featural aspects of buyers' and sellers' graphs for data valuation and capture their statistical similarities and differences, referred to as relevance and diversity, respectively. Our approach ensures that buyers and sellers remain unaware of each other's datasets. Our experiments on real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in capturing the relevance, diversity, and structural disparities of seller data for buyers, particularly in graph-based data valuation scenarios.

The recent advent of self-supervised pre-training techniques has led to a surge in the use of multimodal learning in form document understanding. However, existing approaches that extend the mask language modeling to other modalities require careful multi-task tuning, complex reconstruction target designs, or additional pre-training data. In FormNetV2, we introduce a centralized multimodal graph contrastive learning strategy to unify self-supervised pre-training for all modalities in one loss. The graph contrastive objective maximizes the agreement of multimodal representations, providing a natural interplay for all modalities without special customization. In addition, we extract image features within the bounding box that joins a pair of tokens connected by a graph edge, capturing more targeted visual cues without loading a sophisticated and separately pre-trained image embedder. FormNetV2 establishes new state-of-the-art performance on FUNSD, CORD, SROIE and Payment benchmarks with a more compact model size.

Recently, many versatile Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have emerged continuously. However, their capacity to query information depicted in visual charts and engage in reasoning based on the queried contents remains under-explored. In this paper, to comprehensively and rigorously benchmark the ability of the off-the-shelf MLLMs in the chart domain, we construct ChartX, a multi-modal evaluation set covering 18 chart types, 7 chart tasks, 22 disciplinary topics, and high-quality chart data. Besides, we develop ChartVLM to offer a new perspective on handling multi-modal tasks that strongly depend on interpretable patterns, such as reasoning tasks in the field of charts or geometric images. We evaluate the chart-related ability of mainstream MLLMs and our ChartVLM on the proposed ChartX evaluation set. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ChartVLM surpasses both versatile and chart-related large models, achieving results comparable to GPT-4V. We believe that our study can pave the way for further exploration in creating a more comprehensive chart evaluation set and developing more interpretable multi-modal models. Both ChartX and ChartVLM are available at: https://github.com/UniModal4Reasoning/ChartVLM

Relational reasoning lies at the core of many NLP tasks, drawing on complementary signals from text and graphs. While prior research has investigated how to leverage this dual complementarity, a detailed and systematic understanding of text-graph interplay and its effect on hybrid models remains underexplored. We take an analysis-driven approach to investigate text-graph representation complementarity via a unified architecture that supports knowledge co-distillation (CoD). We explore five tasks involving relational reasoning that differ in how text and graph structures encode the information needed to solve that task. By tracking how these dual representations evolve during training, we uncover interpretable patterns of alignment and divergence, and provide insights into when and why their integration is beneficial.

Sequential recommendations have drawn significant attention in modeling the user's historical behaviors to predict the next item. With the booming development of multimodal data (e.g., image, text) on internet platforms, sequential recommendation also benefits from the incorporation of multimodal data. Most methods introduce modal features of items as side information and simply concatenates them to learn unified user interests. Nevertheless, these methods encounter the limitation in modeling multimodal differences. We argue that user interests and item relationships vary across different modalities. To address this problem, we propose a novel Multimodal Difference Learning framework for Sequential Recommendation, MDSRec for brevity. Specifically, we first explore the differences in item relationships by constructing modal-aware item relation graphs with behavior signal to enhance item representations. Then, to capture the differences in user interests across modalities, we design a interest-centralized attention mechanism to independently model user sequence representations in different modalities. Finally, we fuse the user embeddings from multiple modalities to achieve accurate item recommendation. Experimental results on five real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of MDSRec over state-of-the-art baselines and the efficacy of multimodal difference learning.

This paper presents improved native unified multimodal models, i.e., Show-o2, that leverage autoregressive modeling and flow matching. Built upon a 3D causal variational autoencoder space, unified visual representations are constructed through a dual-path of spatial (-temporal) fusion, enabling scalability across image and video modalities while ensuring effective multimodal understanding and generation. Based on a language model, autoregressive modeling and flow matching are natively applied to the language head and flow head, respectively, to facilitate text token prediction and image/video generation. A two-stage training recipe is designed to effectively learn and scale to larger models. The resulting Show-o2 models demonstrate versatility in handling a wide range of multimodal understanding and generation tasks across diverse modalities, including text, images, and videos. Code and models are released at https://github.com/showlab/Show-o.

Recently, the newly emerged multimodal models, which leverage both visual and linguistic modalities to train powerful encoders, have gained increasing attention. However, learning from a large-scale unlabeled dataset also exposes the model to the risk of potential poisoning attacks, whereby the adversary aims to perturb the model's training data to trigger malicious behaviors in it. In contrast to previous work, only poisoning visual modality, in this work, we take the first step to studying poisoning attacks against multimodal models in both visual and linguistic modalities. Specially, we focus on answering two questions: (1) Is the linguistic modality also vulnerable to poisoning attacks? and (2) Which modality is most vulnerable? To answer the two questions, we propose three types of poisoning attacks against multimodal models. Extensive evaluations on different datasets and model architectures show that all three attacks can achieve significant attack performance while maintaining model utility in both visual and linguistic modalities. Furthermore, we observe that the poisoning effect differs between different modalities. To mitigate the attacks, we propose both pre-training and post-training defenses. We empirically show that both defenses can significantly reduce the attack performance while preserving the model's utility.

In medical imaging, vision-language models face a critical duality: pretrained networks offer broad robustness but lack subtle, modality-specific characteristics, while fine-tuned expert models achieve high in-distribution accuracy yet falter under modality shift. Existing model-merging techniques, designed for natural-image benchmarks, are simple and efficient but fail to deliver consistent gains across diverse medical modalities; their static interpolation limits reliability in varied clinical tasks. To address this, we introduce Test-Time Task adaptive merging (T^3), a backpropagation-free framework that computes per-sample interpolation coefficients via the Jensen-Shannon divergence between the two models' output distributions. T^3 dynamically preserves local precision when models agree and defers to generalist robustness under drift. To overcome the inference costs of sample-wise merging, we further propose a batch-wise extension, T^3_B, that computes a merging coefficient across a batch of samples, dramatically reducing computational bottleneck. Recognizing the lack of a standardized medical-merging benchmark, we present a rigorous cross-evaluation protocol spanning in-domain, base-to-novel, and corruptions across four modalities. Empirically, T^3 sets new state-of-the-art in Top-1 accuracy and error reduction, outperforming strong baselines while maintaining efficiency, paving the way for adaptive MVLM deployment in clinical settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/Razaimam45/TCube.

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive instruction abilities across various open-ended tasks. However, previous methods primarily focus on enhancing multi-modal capabilities. In this work, we introduce a versatile multi-modal large language model, mPLUG-Owl2, which effectively leverages modality collaboration to improve performance in both text and multi-modal tasks. mPLUG-Owl2 utilizes a modularized network design, with the language decoder acting as a universal interface for managing different modalities. Specifically, mPLUG-Owl2 incorporates shared functional modules to facilitate modality collaboration and introduces a modality-adaptive module that preserves modality-specific features. Extensive experiments reveal that mPLUG-Owl2 is capable of generalizing both text tasks and multi-modal tasks and achieving state-of-the-art performances with a single generic model. Notably, mPLUG-Owl2 is the first MLLM model that demonstrates the modality collaboration phenomenon in both pure-text and multi-modal scenarios, setting a pioneering path in the development of future multi-modal foundation models.

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

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.

We present DualFocus, a novel framework for integrating macro and micro perspectives within multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) to enhance vision-language task performance. Current MLLMs typically singularly focus on inputs at a predefined resolution, resulting in deficiencies in detailed questions involving local regions. We introduced a DualFocus mechanism where the model concentrates on the image from a macro perspective, responses to the question, and identifies suitable sub-regions to zoom in for subsequent micro perspective analysis. Via the integration of answers from both macro and micro perspectives, the model is adept at addressing tasks that encompass global, detailed, and combined considerations. To endows the DualFocus mechanism in MLLMs, we curated a tailored dataset derived from the Visual Genome (VG) and adapted it to align with the training regimen of DualFocus. Through comparative studies across different model sizes and benchmarks, we demonstrate DualFocus's superiority in balancing detailed examination with holistic insight, significantly reducing hallucination instances in MLLMs and improving their performance in various vision-language tasks.

Multi-modal semantic segmentation (MMSS) addresses the limitations of single-modality data by integrating complementary information across modalities. Despite notable progress, a significant gap persists between research and real-world deployment due to variability and uncertainty in multi-modal data quality. Robustness has thus become essential for practical MMSS applications. However, the absence of standardized benchmarks for evaluating robustness hinders further advancement. To address this, we first survey existing MMSS literature and categorize representative methods to provide a structured overview. We then introduce a robustness benchmark that evaluates MMSS models under three scenarios: Entire-Missing Modality (EMM), Random-Missing Modality (RMM), and Noisy Modality (NM). From a probabilistic standpoint, we model modality failure under two conditions: (1) all damaged combinations are equally probable; (2) each modality fails independently following a Bernoulli distribution. Based on these, we propose four metrics-mIoU^{Avg}_{EMM}, mIoU^{E}_{EMM}, mIoU^{Avg}_{RMM}, and mIoU^{E}_{RMM}-to assess model robustness under EMM and RMM. This work provides the first dedicated benchmark for MMSS robustness, offering new insights and tools to advance the field. Source code is available at https://github.com/Chenfei-Liao/Multi-Modal-Semantic-Segmentation-Robustness-Benchmark.

Analogical reasoning is fundamental to human cognition and holds an important place in various fields. However, previous studies mainly focus on single-modal analogical reasoning and ignore taking advantage of structure knowledge. Notably, the research in cognitive psychology has demonstrated that information from multimodal sources always brings more powerful cognitive transfer than single modality sources. To this end, we introduce the new task of multimodal analogical reasoning over knowledge graphs, which requires multimodal reasoning ability with the help of background knowledge. Specifically, we construct a Multimodal Analogical Reasoning dataSet (MARS) and a multimodal knowledge graph MarKG. We evaluate with multimodal knowledge graph embedding and pre-trained Transformer baselines, illustrating the potential challenges of the proposed task. We further propose a novel model-agnostic Multimodal analogical reasoning framework with Transformer (MarT) motivated by the structure mapping theory, which can obtain better performance. Code and datasets are available in https://github.com/zjunlp/MKG_Analogy.

Diffusion-based generative modeling has been achieving state-of-the-art results on various generation tasks. Most diffusion models, however, are limited to a single-generation modeling. Can we generalize diffusion models with the ability of multi-modal generative training for more generalizable modeling? In this paper, we propose a principled way to define a diffusion model by constructing a unified multi-modal diffusion model in a common diffusion space. We define the forward diffusion process to be driven by an information aggregation from multiple types of task-data, e.g., images for a generation task and labels for a classification task. In the reverse process, we enforce information sharing by parameterizing a shared backbone denoising network with additional modality-specific decoder heads. Such a structure can simultaneously learn to generate different types of multi-modal data with a multi-task loss, which is derived from a new multi-modal variational lower bound that generalizes the standard diffusion model. We propose several multimodal generation settings to verify our framework, including image transition, masked-image training, joint image-label and joint image-representation generative modeling. Extensive experimental results on ImageNet indicate the effectiveness of our framework for various multi-modal generative modeling, which we believe is an important research direction worthy of more future explorations.

We present a method for simultaneously localizing multiple sound sources within a visual scene. This task requires a model to both group a sound mixture into individual sources, and to associate them with a visual signal. Our method jointly solves both tasks at once, using a formulation inspired by the contrastive random walk of Jabri et al. We create a graph in which images and separated sounds correspond to nodes, and train a random walker to transition between nodes from different modalities with high return probability. The transition probabilities for this walk are determined by an audio-visual similarity metric that is learned by our model. We show through experiments with musical instruments and human speech that our model can successfully localize multiple sounds, outperforming other self-supervised methods. Project site: https://hxixixh.github.io/mix-and-localize

Human perception integrates multiple modalities, such as vision, hearing, and language, into a unified understanding of the surrounding reality. While recent multimodal models have achieved significant progress by aligning pairs of modalities via contrastive learning, their solutions are unsuitable when scaling to multiple modalities. These models typically align each modality to a designated anchor without ensuring the alignment of all modalities with each other, leading to suboptimal performance in tasks requiring a joint understanding of multiple modalities. In this paper, we structurally rethink the pairwise conventional approach to multimodal learning and we present the novel Gramian Representation Alignment Measure (GRAM), which overcomes the above-mentioned limitations. GRAM learns and then aligns n modalities directly in the higher-dimensional space in which modality embeddings lie by minimizing the Gramian volume of the k-dimensional parallelotope spanned by the modality vectors, ensuring the geometric alignment of all modalities simultaneously. GRAM can replace cosine similarity in any downstream method, holding for 2 to n modalities and providing more meaningful alignment with respect to previous similarity measures. The novel GRAM-based contrastive loss function enhances the alignment of multimodal models in the higher-dimensional embedding space, leading to new state-of-the-art performance in downstream tasks such as video-audio-text retrieval and audio-video classification. The project page, the code, and the pretrained models are available at https://ispamm.github.io/GRAM/.

Integrating heterogeneous biomedical data including imaging, omics, and clinical records supports accurate diagnosis and personalised care. Graph-based models fuse such non-Euclidean data by capturing spatial and relational structure, yet clinical uptake requires regulator-ready interpretability. We present the first technical survey of interpretable graph based models for multimodal biomedical data, covering 26 studies published between Jan 2019 and Sep 2024. Most target disease classification, notably cancer and rely on static graphs from simple similarity measures, while graph-native explainers are rare; post-hoc methods adapted from non-graph domains such as gradient saliency, and SHAP predominate. We group existing approaches into four interpretability families, outline trends such as graph-in-graph hierarchies, knowledge-graph edges, and dynamic topology learning, and perform a practical benchmark. Using an Alzheimer disease cohort, we compare Sensitivity Analysis, Gradient Saliency, SHAP and Graph Masking. SHAP and Sensitivity Analysis recover the broadest set of known AD pathways and Gene-Ontology terms, whereas Gradient Saliency and Graph Masking surface complementary metabolic and transport signatures. Permutation tests show all four beat random gene sets, but with distinct trade-offs: SHAP and Graph Masking offer deeper biology at higher compute cost, while Gradient Saliency and Sensitivity Analysis are quicker though coarser. We also provide a step-by-step flowchart covering graph construction, explainer choice and resource budgeting to help researchers balance transparency and performance. This review synthesises the state of interpretable graph learning for multimodal medicine, benchmarks leading techniques, and charts future directions, from advanced XAI tools to under-studied diseases, serving as a concise reference for method developers and translational scientists.

This work studies a central extremal graph theory problem inspired by a 1975 conjecture of Erdos, which aims to find graphs with a given size (number of nodes) that maximize the number of edges without having 3- or 4-cycles. We formulate this problem as a sequential decision-making problem and compare AlphaZero, a neural network-guided tree search, with tabu search, a heuristic local search method. Using either method, by introducing a curriculum -- jump-starting the search for larger graphs using good graphs found at smaller sizes -- we improve the state-of-the-art lower bounds for several sizes. We also propose a flexible graph-generation environment and a permutation-invariant network architecture for learning to search in the space of graphs.

Generative language models define distributions over sequences of tokens that can represent essentially any combination of data modalities (e.g., any permutation of image tokens from VQ-VAEs, speech tokens from HuBERT, BPE tokens for language or code, and so on). To better understand the scaling properties of such mixed-modal models, we conducted over 250 experiments using seven different modalities and model sizes ranging from 8 million to 30 billion, trained on 5-100 billion tokens. We report new mixed-modal scaling laws that unify the contributions of individual modalities and the interactions between them. Specifically, we explicitly model the optimal synergy and competition due to data and model size as an additive term to previous uni-modal scaling laws. We also find four empirical phenomena observed during the training, such as emergent coordinate-ascent style training that naturally alternates between modalities, guidelines for selecting critical hyper-parameters, and connections between mixed-modal competition and training stability. Finally, we test our scaling law by training a 30B speech-text model, which significantly outperforms the corresponding unimodal models. Overall, our research provides valuable insights into the design and training of mixed-modal generative models, an important new class of unified models that have unique distributional properties.

Multimodal knowledge graph completion (MMKGC) aims to predict missing links in multimodal knowledge graphs (MMKGs) by leveraging information from various modalities alongside structural data. Existing MMKGC approaches primarily extend traditional knowledge graph embedding (KGE) models, which often require creating an embedding for every entity. This results in large model sizes and inefficiencies in integrating multimodal information, particularly for real-world graphs. Meanwhile, Transformer-based models have demonstrated competitive performance in knowledge graph completion (KGC). However, their focus on single-modal knowledge limits their capacity to utilize cross-modal information. Recently, Large vision-language models (VLMs) have shown potential in cross-modal tasks but are constrained by the high cost of training. In this work, we propose a novel approach that integrates Transformer-based KGE models with cross-modal context generated by pre-trained VLMs, thereby extending their applicability to MMKGC. Specifically, we employ a pre-trained VLM to transform relevant visual information from entities and their neighbors into textual sequences. We then frame KGC as a sequence-to-sequence task, fine-tuning the model with the generated cross-modal context. This simple yet effective method significantly reduces model size compared to traditional KGE approaches while achieving competitive performance across multiple large-scale datasets with minimal hyperparameter tuning.

Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) have emerged as an extension of Large Language Models (LLMs), enabling the integration of various modalities. However, Any-to-Any MLLMs are limited to generating pairwise modalities 'Text + X' within a single response, such as Text + {Image or Audio or Video}. To address this limitation, we introduce Spider, a novel efficient Any-to-Many Modalities Generation (AMMG) framework, which can generate an arbitrary combination of modalities 'Text + Xs', such as Text + {Image and Audio and Video}. To achieve efficient AMMG, our Spider integrates three core components: a Base Model for basic X-to-X (i.e., Any-to-Any) modality processing, a novel Efficient Decoders-Controller for controlling multimodal Decoders to generate Xs (many-modal) contents, and an Any-to-Many Instruction Template designed for producing Xs signal prompts. To train Spider, we constructed a novel Text-formatted Many-Modal (TMM) dataset, which facilitates the learning of the X-to-Xs (i.e., Any-to-Many) capability necessary for AMMG. Ultimately, the well-trained Spider generates a pseudo X-to-Xs dataset, the first-ever X-to-Xs many-modal dataset, enhancing the potential for AMMG task in future research. Overall, this work not only pushes the boundary of multimodal interaction but also provides rich data support for advancing the field.

Biomedical Knowledge Graphs (BKGs) integrate diverse datasets to elucidate complex relationships within the biomedical field. Effective link prediction on these graphs can uncover valuable connections, such as potential novel drug-disease relations. We introduce a novel multimodal approach that unifies embeddings from specialized Language Models (LMs) with Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) to enhance intra-entity relationships while employing a Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE) model to capture inter-entity relationships for effective link prediction. To address limitations in existing BKGs, we present PrimeKG++, an enriched knowledge graph incorporating multimodal data, including biological sequences and textual descriptions for each entity type. By combining semantic and relational information in a unified representation, our approach demonstrates strong generalizability, enabling accurate link predictions even for unseen nodes. Experimental results on PrimeKG++ and the DrugBank drug-target interaction dataset demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our method across diverse biomedical datasets. Our source code, pre-trained models, and data are publicly available at https://github.com/HySonLab/BioMedKG

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

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

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

Contrastive Learning (CL), a leading paradigm in Self-Supervised Learning (SSL), typically relies on pairs of data views generated through augmentation. While multiple augmentations per instance (more than two) improve generalization in supervised learning, current CL methods handle additional views suboptimally by simply aggregating different pairwise objectives. This approach suffers from four critical limitations: (L1) it utilizes multiple optimization terms per data point resulting to conflicting objectives, (L2) it fails to model all interactions across views and data points, (L3) it inherits fundamental limitations (e.g. alignment-uniformity coupling) from pairwise CL losses, and (L4) it prevents fully realizing the benefits of increased view multiplicity observed in supervised settings. We address these limitations through two novel loss functions: MV-InfoNCE, which extends InfoNCE to incorporate all possible view interactions simultaneously in one term per data point, and MV-DHEL, which decouples alignment from uniformity across views while scaling interaction complexity with view multiplicity. Both approaches are theoretically grounded - we prove they asymptotically optimize for alignment of all views and uniformity, providing principled extensions to multi-view contrastive learning. Our empirical results on ImageNet1K and three other datasets demonstrate that our methods consistently outperform existing multi-view approaches and effectively scale with increasing view multiplicity. We also apply our objectives to multimodal data and show that, in contrast to other contrastive objectives, they can scale beyond just two modalities. Most significantly, ablation studies reveal that MV-DHEL with five or more views effectively mitigates dimensionality collapse by fully utilizing the embedding space, thereby delivering multi-view benefits observed in supervised learning.

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

Representation learning on text-attributed graphs (TAGs) integrates structural connectivity with rich textual semantics, enabling applications in diverse domains. Current methods largely rely on contrastive learning to maximize cross-modal similarity, assuming tighter coupling between graph and text representations improves transfer performance. However, our empirical analysis reveals that both natural gap expansion and forced gap reduction result in performance degradation by disrupting pre-trained knowledge structures and impairing generalization. This arises from the geometric incompatibility between encoders, where graph encoders capture topological patterns, while text encoders capture semantic structures. Over-alignment compresses these distinct spaces into shared subspaces, causing structure collapse that diminishes both topological reasoning and semantic understanding. We propose LLM4GTA, a gap-aware alignment framework that preserves representation gaps as geometric necessities for maintaining modality-specific knowledge and improving transfer performance. LLM4GTA includes an adaptive gap preservation module to prevent over-alignment by monitoring similarity evolution and an intra-modal compensation mechanism that boosts discriminative power using auxiliary classifiers in graph space. Extensive experiments show significant improvements over existing methods in zero-shot and few-shot scenarios.

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

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across multi-modal tasks by scaling model size and training data. However, these dense LVLMs incur significant computational costs and motivate the exploration of sparse Mixture of Experts (MoE) architectures. While MoE improve parameter efficiency, effectively applying MoE to simultaneously model modality-specific features and cross-modal associations in LVLMs remains challenging. In this work, we propose to incorporate Mixture of Intra- and Inter-Modality Experts (MoIIE) to LVLMs. For each token, expert routing is guided by its modality, directing tokens to their respective intra-modality experts as well as a shared pool of inter-modality experts, enabling the model to jointly learn rich intra-modal features and cross-modal interactions. We further introduce an effective and straightforward two-stage training strategy, which facilitates the direct activation of both MoE and multi-modal capabilities. Extensive experiments across different data scales and LLM backbone demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency and generality of our approach. Notably, our MoIIE models with 5.5B and 11.3B activated parameters match or even surpass the performance of existing advanced open-source MoE-LLMs based multi-modal models that involve more activated parameters. The code is available at https://github.com/AlenjandroWang/MoIIE.

Mixed modality search -- retrieving information across a heterogeneous corpus composed of images, texts, and multimodal documents -- is an important yet underexplored real-world application. In this work, we investigate how contrastive vision-language models, such as CLIP, perform on the mixed modality search task. Our analysis reveals a critical limitation: these models exhibit a pronounced modality gap in the embedding space, where image and text embeddings form distinct clusters, leading to intra-modal ranking bias and inter-modal fusion failure. To address this issue, we propose GR-CLIP, a lightweight post-hoc calibration method that removes the modality gap in CLIP's embedding space. Evaluated on MixBench -- the first benchmark specifically designed for mixed modality search -- GR-CLIP improves NDCG@10 by up to 26 percentage points over CLIP, surpasses recent vision-language generative embedding models by 4 percentage points, while using 75x less compute.

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

Graph neural networks (GNNs) based methods have achieved impressive performance on node clustering task. However, they are designed on the homophilic assumption of graph and clustering on heterophilic graph is overlooked. Due to the lack of labels, it is impossible to first identify a graph as homophilic or heterophilic before a suitable GNN model can be found. Hence, clustering on real-world graph with various levels of homophily poses a new challenge to the graph research community. To fill this gap, we propose a novel graph clustering method, which contains three key components: graph reconstruction, a mixed filter, and dual graph clustering network. To be graph-agnostic, we empirically construct two graphs which are high homophily and heterophily from each data. The mixed filter based on the new graphs extracts both low-frequency and high-frequency information. To reduce the adverse coupling between node attribute and topological structure, we separately map them into two subspaces in dual graph clustering network. Extensive experiments on 11 benchmark graphs demonstrate our promising performance. In particular, our method dominates others on heterophilic graphs.

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.

Contrastive learning methods, such as CLIP, leverage naturally paired data-for example, images and their corresponding text captions-to learn general representations that transfer efficiently to downstream tasks. While such approaches are generally applied to two modalities, domains such as robotics, healthcare, and video need to support many types of data at once. We show that the pairwise application of CLIP fails to capture joint information between modalities, thereby limiting the quality of the learned representations. To address this issue, we present Symile, a simple contrastive learning approach that captures higher-order information between any number of modalities. Symile provides a flexible, architecture-agnostic objective for learning modality-specific representations. To develop Symile's objective, we derive a lower bound on total correlation, and show that Symile representations for any set of modalities form a sufficient statistic for predicting the remaining modalities. Symile outperforms pairwise CLIP, even with modalities missing in the data, on cross-modal classification and retrieval across several experiments including on an original multilingual dataset of 33M image, text and audio samples and a clinical dataset of chest X-rays, electrocardiograms, and laboratory measurements. All datasets and code used in this work are publicly available at https://github.com/rajesh-lab/symile.

Cross-modal metric learning is a prominent research topic that bridges the semantic heterogeneity between vision and language. Existing methods frequently utilize simple cosine or complex distance metrics to transform the pairwise features into a similarity score, which suffers from an inadequate or inefficient capability for distance measurements. Consequently, we propose a Generalized Structural Sparse Function to dynamically capture thorough and powerful relationships across modalities for pair-wise similarity learning while remaining concise but efficient. Specifically, the distance metric delicately encapsulates two formats of diagonal and block-diagonal terms, automatically distinguishing and highlighting the cross-channel relevancy and dependency inside a structured and organized topology. Hence, it thereby empowers itself to adapt to the optimal matching patterns between the paired features and reaches a sweet spot between model complexity and capability. Extensive experiments on cross-modal and two extra uni-modal retrieval tasks (image-text retrieval, person re-identification, fine-grained image retrieval) have validated its superiority and flexibility over various popular retrieval frameworks. More importantly, we further discover that it can be seamlessly incorporated into multiple application scenarios, and demonstrates promising prospects from Attention Mechanism to Knowledge Distillation in a plug-and-play manner. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/Paranioar/GSSF.

While many EDA tasks already involve graph-based data, existing LLMs in EDA primarily either represent graphs as sequential text, or simply ignore graph-structured data that might be beneficial like dataflow graphs of RTL code. Recent studies have found that LLM performance suffers when graphs are represented as sequential text, and using additional graph information significantly boosts performance. To address these challenges, we introduce BRIDGES, a framework designed to incorporate graph modality into LLMs for EDA tasks. BRIDGES integrates an automated data generation workflow, a solution that combines graph modality with LLM, and a comprehensive evaluation suite. First, we establish an LLM-driven workflow to generate RTL and netlist-level data, converting them into dataflow and netlist graphs with function descriptions. This workflow yields a large-scale dataset comprising over 500,000 graph instances and more than 1.5 billion tokens. Second, we propose a lightweight cross-modal projector that encodes graph representations into text-compatible prompts, enabling LLMs to effectively utilize graph data without architectural modifications. Experimental results demonstrate 2x to 10x improvements across multiple tasks compared to text-only baselines, including accuracy in design retrieval, type prediction and perplexity in function description, with negligible computational overhead (<1% model weights increase and <30% additional runtime overhead). Even without additional LLM finetuning, our results outperform text-only by a large margin. We plan to release BRIDGES, including the dataset, models, and training flow.

Embodied agents have achieved prominent performance in following human instructions to complete tasks. However, the potential of providing instructions informed by texts and images to assist humans in completing tasks remains underexplored. To uncover this capability, we present the multimodal procedural planning (MPP) task, in which models are given a high-level goal and generate plans of paired text-image steps, providing more complementary and informative guidance than unimodal plans. The key challenges of MPP are to ensure the informativeness, temporal coherence,and accuracy of plans across modalities. To tackle this, we propose Text-Image Prompting (TIP), a dual-modality prompting method that jointly leverages zero-shot reasoning ability in large language models (LLMs) and compelling text-to-image generation ability from diffusion-based models. TIP improves the interaction in the dual modalities using Text-to-Image Bridge and Image-to-Text Bridge, allowing LLMs to guide the textual-grounded image plan generation and leveraging the descriptions of image plans to ground the textual plan reversely. To address the lack of relevant datasets, we collect WIKIPLAN and RECIPEPLAN as a testbed for MPP. Our results show compelling human preferences and automatic scores against unimodal and multimodal baselines on WIKIPLAN and RECIPEPLAN in terms of informativeness, temporal coherence, and plan accuracy. Our code and data: https://github.com/YujieLu10/MPP.

In-context learning (ICL) involves reasoning from given contextual examples. As more modalities comes, this procedure is becoming more challenging as the interleaved input modalities convolutes the understanding process. This is exemplified by the observation that multimodal models often struggle to effectively extrapolate from contextual examples to perform ICL. To address these challenges, we introduce MultiModal In-conteXt Tuning (M^2IXT), a lightweight module to enhance the ICL capabilities of multimodal unified models. The proposed M^2IXT module perceives an expandable context window to incorporate various labeled examples of multiple modalities (e.g., text, image, and coordinates). It can be prepended to various multimodal unified models (e.g., OFA, Unival, LLaVA) of different architectures and trained via a mixed-tasks strategy to enable rapid few-shot adaption on multiple tasks and datasets. When tuned on as little as 50K multimodal data, M^2IXT can boost the few-shot ICL performance significantly (e.g., 18\% relative increase for OFA), and obtained state-of-the-art results across an array of tasks including visual question answering, image captioning, visual grounding, and visual entailment, while being considerably small in terms of model parameters (e.g., sim20times smaller than Flamingo or MMICL), highlighting the flexibility and effectiveness of M^2IXT as a multimodal in-context learner.

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

Recently, an audio-visual segmentation (AVS) task has been introduced, aiming to group pixels with sounding objects within a given video. This task necessitates a first-ever audio-driven pixel-level understanding of the scene, posing significant challenges. In this paper, we propose an innovative audio-visual transformer framework, termed COMBO, an acronym for COoperation of Multi-order Bilateral relatiOns. For the first time, our framework explores three types of bilateral entanglements within AVS: pixel entanglement, modality entanglement, and temporal entanglement. Regarding pixel entanglement, we employ a Siam-Encoder Module (SEM) that leverages prior knowledge to generate more precise visual features from the foundational model. For modality entanglement, we design a Bilateral-Fusion Module (BFM), enabling COMBO to align corresponding visual and auditory signals bi-directionally. As for temporal entanglement, we introduce an innovative adaptive inter-frame consistency loss according to the inherent rules of temporal. Comprehensive experiments and ablation studies on AVSBench-object (84.7 mIoU on S4, 59.2 mIou on MS3) and AVSBench-semantic (42.1 mIoU on AVSS) datasets demonstrate that COMBO surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods. Code and more results will be publicly available at https://combo-avs.github.io/.

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

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) like LLaVA and GPT-4(V) enable general-purpose conversations about images with the language modality. As off-the-shelf MLLMs may have limited capabilities on images from domains like dermatology and agriculture, they must be fine-tuned to unlock domain-specific applications. The prevalent architecture of current open-source MLLMs comprises two major modules: an image-language (cross-modal) projection network and a large language model. It is desirable to understand the roles of these two modules in modeling domain-specific visual attributes to inform the design of future models and streamline the interpretability efforts on the current models. To this end, via experiments on 4 datasets and under 2 fine-tuning settings, we find that as the MLLM is fine-tuned, it indeed gains domain-specific visual capabilities, but the updates do not lead to the projection extracting relevant domain-specific visual attributes. Our results indicate that the domain-specific visual attributes are modeled by the LLM, even when only the projection is fine-tuned. Through this study, we offer a potential reinterpretation of the role of cross-modal projections in MLLM architectures. Projection webpage: https://claws-lab.github.io/projection-in-MLLMs/

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

Cross-modal embeddings form the foundation for multi-modal models. However, visualization methods for interpreting cross-modal embeddings have been primarily confined to traditional dimensionality reduction (DR) techniques like PCA and t-SNE. These DR methods primarily focus on feature distributions within a single modality, whilst failing to incorporate metrics (e.g., CLIPScore) across multiple modalities. This paper introduces AKRMap, a new DR technique designed to visualize cross-modal embeddings metric with enhanced accuracy by learning kernel regression of the metric landscape in the projection space. Specifically, AKRMap constructs a supervised projection network guided by a post-projection kernel regression loss, and employs adaptive generalized kernels that can be jointly optimized with the projection. This approach enables AKRMap to efficiently generate visualizations that capture complex metric distributions, while also supporting interactive features such as zoom and overlay for deeper exploration. Quantitative experiments demonstrate that AKRMap outperforms existing DR methods in generating more accurate and trustworthy visualizations. We further showcase the effectiveness of AKRMap in visualizing and comparing cross-modal embeddings for text-to-image models. Code and demo are available at https://github.com/yilinye/AKRMap.

Multimodal recommender systems amalgamate multimodal information (e.g., textual descriptions, images) into a collaborative filtering framework to provide more accurate recommendations. While the incorporation of multimodal information could enhance the interpretability of these systems, current multimodal models represent users and items utilizing entangled numerical vectors, rendering them arduous to interpret. To address this, we propose a Disentangled Graph Variational Auto-Encoder (DGVAE) that aims to enhance both model and recommendation interpretability. DGVAE initially projects multimodal information into textual contents, such as converting images to text, by harnessing state-of-the-art multimodal pre-training technologies. It then constructs a frozen item-item graph and encodes the contents and interactions into two sets of disentangled representations utilizing a simplified residual graph convolutional network. DGVAE further regularizes these disentangled representations through mutual information maximization, aligning the representations derived from the interactions between users and items with those learned from textual content. This alignment facilitates the interpretation of user binary interactions via text. Our empirical analysis conducted on three real-world datasets demonstrates that DGVAE significantly surpasses the performance of state-of-the-art baselines by a margin of 10.02%. We also furnish a case study from a real-world dataset to illustrate the interpretability of DGVAE. Code is available at: https://github.com/enoche/DGVAE.

Multi-view graph clustering (MGC) methods are increasingly being studied due to the explosion of multi-view data with graph structural information. The critical point of MGC is to better utilize view-specific and view-common information in features and graphs of multiple views. However, existing works have an inherent limitation that they are unable to concurrently utilize the consensus graph information across multiple graphs and the view-specific feature information. To address this issue, we propose Variational Graph Generator for Multi-View Graph Clustering (VGMGC). Specifically, a novel variational graph generator is proposed to extract common information among multiple graphs. This generator infers a reliable variational consensus graph based on a priori assumption over multiple graphs. Then a simple yet effective graph encoder in conjunction with the multi-view clustering objective is presented to learn the desired graph embeddings for clustering, which embeds the inferred view-common graph and view-specific graphs together with features. Finally, theoretical results illustrate the rationality of the VGMGC by analyzing the uncertainty of the inferred consensus graph with the information bottleneck principle.Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our VGMGC over SOTAs. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/cjpcool/VGMGC.

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.

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

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

Multi-modal contrastive learning (MMCL) has recently garnered considerable interest due to its superior performance in visual tasks, achieved by embedding multi-modal data, such as visual-language pairs. However, there still lack theoretical understandings of how MMCL extracts useful visual representation from multi-modal pairs, and particularly, how MMCL outperforms previous approaches like self-supervised contrastive learning (SSCL). In this paper, by drawing an intrinsic connection between MMCL and asymmetric matrix factorization, we establish the first generalization guarantees of MMCL for visual downstream tasks. Based on this framework, we further unify MMCL and SSCL by showing that MMCL implicitly performs SSCL with (pseudo) positive pairs induced by text pairs. Through this unified perspective, we characterize the advantage of MMCL by showing that text pairs induce more semantically consistent and diverse positive pairs, which, according to our analysis, provably benefit downstream generalization. Inspired by this finding, we propose CLIP-guided resampling methods to significantly improve the downstream performance of SSCL on ImageNet by leveraging multi-modal information. Code is available at https://github.com/PKU-ML/CLIP-Help-SimCLR.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT4 have displayed exceptional multi-modal capabilities in following open-ended instructions given images. However, the performance of these models heavily relies on design choices such as network structures, training data, and training strategies, and these choices have not been extensively discussed in the literature, making it difficult to quantify progress in this field. To address this issue, this paper presents a systematic and comprehensive study, quantitatively and qualitatively, on training such models. We implement over 20 variants with controlled settings. Concretely, for network structures, we compare different LLM backbones and model designs. For training data, we investigate the impact of data and sampling strategies. For instructions, we explore the influence of diversified prompts on the instruction-following ability of the trained models. For benchmarks, we contribute the first, to our best knowledge, comprehensive evaluation set including both image and video tasks through crowd-sourcing. Based on our findings, we present Lynx, which performs the most accurate multi-modal understanding while keeping the best multi-modal generation ability compared to existing open-sourced GPT4-style models.

Recent advances such as LLaVA and Mini-GPT4 have successfully integrated visual information into LLMs, yielding inspiring outcomes and giving rise to a new generation of multi-modal LLMs, or MLLMs. Nevertheless, these methods struggle with hallucinations and the mutual interference between tasks. To tackle these problems, we propose an efficient and accurate approach to adapt to downstream tasks by utilizing LLM as a bridge to connect multiple expert models, namely u-LLaVA. Firstly, we incorporate the modality alignment module and multi-task modules into LLM. Then, we reorganize or rebuild multi-type public datasets to enable efficient modality alignment and instruction following. Finally, task-specific information is extracted from the trained LLM and provided to different modules for solving downstream tasks. The overall framework is simple, effective, and achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks. We also release our model, the generated data, and the code base publicly available.

Despite remarkable advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), a fundamental question remains: are MLLMs robust to contradicting modalities? To rigorously study this, we introduce MMA-Bench comprising videos and tasks that probe a model's reliance on specific modalities. Using black-box and white-box interpretability techniques, we provide a critical analysis of the brittleness of both open- and closed-sourced MLLMs. We show that current MLLMs struggle under misaligned audio-visual pairs and simple misleading text, thereby lacking robust multi-modal reasoning. Building on these findings, we propose a modality alignment tuning strategy to teach the model when to prioritize, leverage, or ignore specific modality cues. Through extensive experiments and analysis, we show that our alignment tuning yields demonstrably stronger multimodal grounding. This work provides both interpretability tools and a clear path toward developing MLLMs with intrinsically reliable cross-modal reasoning. Code and dataset will be publicly available.

Language Models (LMs) have demonstrated impressive molecule understanding ability on various 1D text-related tasks. However, they inherently lack 2D graph perception - a critical ability of human professionals in comprehending molecules' topological structures. To bridge this gap, we propose MolCA: Molecular Graph-Language Modeling with Cross-Modal Projector and Uni-Modal Adapter. MolCA enables an LM (e.g., Galactica) to understand both text- and graph-based molecular contents via the cross-modal projector. Specifically, the cross-modal projector is implemented as a Q-Former to connect a graph encoder's representation space and an LM's text space. Further, MolCA employs a uni-modal adapter (i.e., LoRA) for the LM's efficient adaptation to downstream tasks. Unlike previous studies that couple an LM with a graph encoder via cross-modal contrastive learning, MolCA retains the LM's ability of open-ended text generation and augments it with 2D graph information. To showcase its effectiveness, we extensively benchmark MolCA on tasks of molecule captioning, IUPAC name prediction, and molecule-text retrieval, on which MolCA significantly outperforms the baselines. Our codes and checkpoints can be found at https://github.com/acharkq/MolCA.

Recent advancements in image generation have enabled the creation of high-quality images from text conditions. However, when facing multi-modal conditions, such as text combined with reference appearances, existing methods struggle to balance multiple conditions effectively, typically showing a preference for one modality over others. To address this challenge, we introduce EMMA, a novel image generation model accepting multi-modal prompts built upon the state-of-the-art text-to-image (T2I) diffusion model, ELLA. EMMA seamlessly incorporates additional modalities alongside text to guide image generation through an innovative Multi-modal Feature Connector design, which effectively integrates textual and supplementary modal information using a special attention mechanism. By freezing all parameters in the original T2I diffusion model and only adjusting some additional layers, we reveal an interesting finding that the pre-trained T2I diffusion model can secretly accept multi-modal prompts. This interesting property facilitates easy adaptation to different existing frameworks, making EMMA a flexible and effective tool for producing personalized and context-aware images and even videos. Additionally, we introduce a strategy to assemble learned EMMA modules to produce images conditioned on multiple modalities simultaneously, eliminating the need for additional training with mixed multi-modal prompts. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of EMMA in maintaining high fidelity and detail in generated images, showcasing its potential as a robust solution for advanced multi-modal conditional image generation tasks.

We introduce X-VILA, an omni-modality model designed to extend the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by incorporating image, video, and audio modalities. By aligning modality-specific encoders with LLM inputs and diffusion decoders with LLM outputs, X-VILA achieves cross-modality understanding, reasoning, and generation. To facilitate this cross-modality alignment, we curate an effective interleaved any-to-any modality instruction-following dataset. Furthermore, we identify a significant problem with the current cross-modality alignment method, which results in visual information loss. To address the issue, we propose a visual alignment mechanism with a visual embedding highway module. We then introduce a resource-efficient recipe for training X-VILA, that exhibits proficiency in any-to-any modality conversation, surpassing previous approaches by large margins. X-VILA also showcases emergent properties across modalities even in the absence of similar training data. The project will be made open-source.

In real-world scenarios, achieving domain generalization (DG) presents significant challenges as models are required to generalize to unknown target distributions. Generalizing to unseen multi-modal distributions poses even greater difficulties due to the distinct properties exhibited by different modalities. To overcome the challenges of achieving domain generalization in multi-modal scenarios, we propose SimMMDG, a simple yet effective multi-modal DG framework. We argue that mapping features from different modalities into the same embedding space impedes model generalization. To address this, we propose splitting the features within each modality into modality-specific and modality-shared components. We employ supervised contrastive learning on the modality-shared features to ensure they possess joint properties and impose distance constraints on modality-specific features to promote diversity. In addition, we introduce a cross-modal translation module to regularize the learned features, which can also be used for missing-modality generalization. We demonstrate that our framework is theoretically well-supported and achieves strong performance in multi-modal DG on the EPIC-Kitchens dataset and the novel Human-Animal-Cartoon (HAC) dataset introduced in this paper. Our source code and HAC dataset are available at https://github.com/donghao51/SimMMDG.

In real-world scenarios, using multiple modalities like visible (RGB) and infrared (IR) can greatly improve the performance of a predictive task such as object detection (OD). Multimodal learning is a common way to leverage these modalities, where multiple modality-specific encoders and a fusion module are used to improve performance. In this paper, we tackle a different way to employ RGB and IR modalities, where only one modality or the other is observed by a single shared vision encoder. This realistic setting requires a lower memory footprint and is more suitable for applications such as autonomous driving and surveillance, which commonly rely on RGB and IR data. However, when learning a single encoder on multiple modalities, one modality can dominate the other, producing uneven recognition results. This work investigates how to efficiently leverage RGB and IR modalities to train a common transformer-based OD vision encoder, while countering the effects of modality imbalance. For this, we introduce a novel training technique to Mix Patches (MiPa) from the two modalities, in conjunction with a patch-wise modality agnostic module, for learning a common representation of both modalities. Our experiments show that MiPa can learn a representation to reach competitive results on traditional RGB/IR benchmarks while only requiring a single modality during inference. Our code is available at: https://github.com/heitorrapela/MiPa.

Reasoning ability is one of the most crucial capabilities of a foundation model, signifying its capacity to address complex reasoning tasks. Chain-of-Thought (CoT) technique is widely regarded as one of the effective methods for enhancing the reasoning ability of foundation models and has garnered significant attention. However, the reasoning process of CoT is linear, step-by-step, similar to personal logical reasoning, suitable for solving general and slightly complicated problems. On the contrary, the thinking pattern of an expert owns two prominent characteristics that cannot be handled appropriately in CoT, i.e., high-order multi-hop reasoning and multimodal comparative judgement. Therefore, the core motivation of this paper is transcending CoT to construct a reasoning paradigm that can think like an expert. The hyperedge of a hypergraph could connect various vertices, making it naturally suitable for modelling high-order relationships. Inspired by this, this paper innovatively proposes a multimodal Hypergraph-of-Thought (HoT) reasoning paradigm, which enables the foundation models to possess the expert-level ability of high-order multi-hop reasoning and multimodal comparative judgement. Specifically, a textual hypergraph-of-thought is constructed utilizing triple as the primary thought to model higher-order relationships, and a hyperedge-of-thought is generated through multi-hop walking paths to achieve multi-hop inference. Furthermore, we devise a visual hypergraph-of-thought to interact with the textual hypergraph-of-thought via Cross-modal Co-Attention Graph Learning for multimodal comparative verification. Experimentations on the ScienceQA benchmark demonstrate the proposed HoT-based T5 outperforms CoT-based GPT3.5 and chatGPT, which is on par with CoT-based GPT4 with a lower model size.

Graph generation is integral to various engineering and scientific disciplines. Nevertheless, existing methodologies tend to overlook the generation of edge attributes. However, we identify critical applications where edge attributes are essential, making prior methods potentially unsuitable in such contexts. Moreover, while trivial adaptations are available, empirical investigations reveal their limited efficacy as they do not properly model the interplay among graph components. To address this, we propose a joint score-based model of nodes and edges for graph generation that considers all graph components. Our approach offers two key novelties: (i) node and edge attributes are combined in an attention module that generates samples based on the two ingredients; and (ii) node, edge and adjacency information are mutually dependent during the graph diffusion process. We evaluate our method on challenging benchmarks involving real-world and synthetic datasets in which edge features are crucial. Additionally, we introduce a new synthetic dataset that incorporates edge values. Furthermore, we propose a novel application that greatly benefits from the method due to its nature: the generation of traffic scenes represented as graphs. Our method outperforms other graph generation methods, demonstrating a significant advantage in edge-related measures.

Visible-infrared person re-identification (VIReID) primarily deals with matching identities across person images from different modalities. Due to the modality gap between visible and infrared images, cross-modality identity matching poses significant challenges. Recognizing that high-level semantics of pedestrian appearance, such as gender, shape, and clothing style, remain consistent across modalities, this paper intends to bridge the modality gap by infusing visual features with high-level semantics. Given the capability of CLIP to sense high-level semantic information corresponding to visual representations, we explore the application of CLIP within the domain of VIReID. Consequently, we propose a CLIP-Driven Semantic Discovery Network (CSDN) that consists of Modality-specific Prompt Learner, Semantic Information Integration (SII), and High-level Semantic Embedding (HSE). Specifically, considering the diversity stemming from modality discrepancies in language descriptions, we devise bimodal learnable text tokens to capture modality-private semantic information for visible and infrared images, respectively. Additionally, acknowledging the complementary nature of semantic details across different modalities, we integrate text features from the bimodal language descriptions to achieve comprehensive semantics. Finally, we establish a connection between the integrated text features and the visual features across modalities. This process embed rich high-level semantic information into visual representations, thereby promoting the modality invariance of visual representations. The effectiveness and superiority of our proposed CSDN over existing methods have been substantiated through experimental evaluations on multiple widely used benchmarks. The code will be released at https://github.com/nengdong96/CSDN.

The concept of 3D scene graphs is increasingly recognized as a powerful semantic and hierarchical representation of the environment. Current approaches often address this at a coarse, object-level resolution. In contrast, our goal is to develop a representation that enables robots to directly interact with their environment by identifying both the location of functional interactive elements and how these can be used. To achieve this, we focus on detecting and storing objects at a finer resolution, focusing on affordance-relevant parts. The primary challenge lies in the scarcity of data that extends beyond instance-level detection and the inherent difficulty of capturing detailed object features using robotic sensors. We leverage currently available 3D resources to generate 2D data and train a detector, which is then used to augment the standard 3D scene graph generation pipeline. Through our experiments, we demonstrate that our approach achieves functional element segmentation comparable to state-of-the-art 3D models and that our augmentation enables task-driven affordance grounding with higher accuracy than the current solutions. See our project page at https://fungraph.github.io.

We present a unified representation for actionable spatial perception: 3D Dynamic Scene Graphs. Scene graphs are directed graphs where nodes represent entities in the scene (e.g. objects, walls, rooms), and edges represent relations (e.g. inclusion, adjacency) among nodes. Dynamic scene graphs (DSGs) extend this notion to represent dynamic scenes with moving agents (e.g. humans, robots), and to include actionable information that supports planning and decision-making (e.g. spatio-temporal relations, topology at different levels of abstraction). Our second contribution is to provide the first fully automatic Spatial PerceptIon eNgine(SPIN) to build a DSG from visual-inertial data. We integrate state-of-the-art techniques for object and human detection and pose estimation, and we describe how to robustly infer object, robot, and human nodes in crowded scenes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that reconciles visual-inertial SLAM and dense human mesh tracking. Moreover, we provide algorithms to obtain hierarchical representations of indoor environments (e.g. places, structures, rooms) and their relations. Our third contribution is to demonstrate the proposed spatial perception engine in a photo-realistic Unity-based simulator, where we assess its robustness and expressiveness. Finally, we discuss the implications of our proposal on modern robotics applications. 3D Dynamic Scene Graphs can have a profound impact on planning and decision-making, human-robot interaction, long-term autonomy, and scene prediction. A video abstract is available at https://youtu.be/SWbofjhyPzI

In recent years, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have made significant advances in processing structured data. However, most of them primarily adopted a model-centric approach, which simplifies graphs by converting them into undirected formats and emphasizes model designs. This approach is inherently limited in real-world applications due to the unavoidable information loss in simple undirected graphs and the model optimization challenges that arise when exceeding the upper bounds of this sub-optimal data representational capacity. As a result, there has been a shift toward data-centric methods that prioritize improving graph quality and representation. Specifically, various types of graphs can be derived from naturally structured data, including heterogeneous graphs, hypergraphs, and directed graphs. Among these, directed graphs offer distinct advantages in topological systems by modeling causal relationships, and directed GNNs have been extensively studied in recent years. However, a comprehensive survey of this emerging topic is still lacking. Therefore, we aim to provide a comprehensive review of directed graph learning, with a particular focus on a data-centric perspective. Specifically, we first introduce a novel taxonomy for existing studies. Subsequently, we re-examine these methods from the data-centric perspective, with an emphasis on understanding and improving data representation. It demonstrates that a deep understanding of directed graphs and their quality plays a crucial role in model performance. Additionally, we explore the diverse applications of directed GNNs across 10+ domains, highlighting their broad applicability. Finally, we identify key opportunities and challenges within the field, offering insights that can guide future research and development in directed graph learning.

This paper introduces layout-aware graph modeling for multimodal RAG. Different from traditional RAG methods that mostly deal with flat text chunks, the proposed method takes into account the relationship of multimodalities by using a graph structure. To do that, a graph modeling structure is defined based on document layout parsing. The structure of an input document is retained with the connection of text chunks, tables, and figures. This representation allows the method to handle complex questions that require information from multimodalities. To confirm the efficiency of the graph modeling, a flexible RAG pipeline is developed using robust components. Experimental results on four benchmark test sets confirm the contribution of the layout-aware modeling for performance improvement of the RAG pipeline.

Multimodal contrastive learning aims to train a general-purpose feature extractor, such as CLIP, on vast amounts of raw, unlabeled paired image-text data. This can greatly benefit various complex downstream tasks, including cross-modal image-text retrieval and image classification. Despite its promising prospect, the security issue of cross-modal pre-trained encoder has not been fully explored yet, especially when the pre-trained encoder is publicly available for commercial use. In this work, we propose AdvCLIP, the first attack framework for generating downstream-agnostic adversarial examples based on cross-modal pre-trained encoders. AdvCLIP aims to construct a universal adversarial patch for a set of natural images that can fool all the downstream tasks inheriting the victim cross-modal pre-trained encoder. To address the challenges of heterogeneity between different modalities and unknown downstream tasks, we first build a topological graph structure to capture the relevant positions between target samples and their neighbors. Then, we design a topology-deviation based generative adversarial network to generate a universal adversarial patch. By adding the patch to images, we minimize their embeddings similarity to different modality and perturb the sample distribution in the feature space, achieving unviersal non-targeted attacks. Our results demonstrate the excellent attack performance of AdvCLIP on two types of downstream tasks across eight datasets. We also tailor three popular defenses to mitigate AdvCLIP, highlighting the need for new defense mechanisms to defend cross-modal pre-trained encoders.

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

3D content inherently encompasses multi-modal characteristics and can be projected into different modalities (e.g., RGB images, RGBD, and point clouds). Each modality exhibits distinct advantages in 3D asset modeling: RGB images contain vivid 3D textures, whereas point clouds define fine-grained 3D geometries. However, most existing 3D-native generative architectures either operate predominantly within single-modality paradigms-thus overlooking the complementary benefits of multi-modality data-or restrict themselves to 3D structures, thereby limiting the scope of available training datasets. To holistically harness multi-modalities for 3D modeling, we present TriMM, the first feed-forward 3D-native generative model that learns from basic multi-modalities (e.g., RGB, RGBD, and point cloud). Specifically, 1) TriMM first introduces collaborative multi-modal coding, which integrates modality-specific features while preserving their unique representational strengths. 2) Furthermore, auxiliary 2D and 3D supervision are introduced to raise the robustness and performance of multi-modal coding. 3) Based on the embedded multi-modal code, TriMM employs a triplane latent diffusion model to generate 3D assets of superior quality, enhancing both the texture and the geometric detail. Extensive experiments on multiple well-known datasets demonstrate that TriMM, by effectively leveraging multi-modality, achieves competitive performance with models trained on large-scale datasets, despite utilizing a small amount of training data. Furthermore, we conduct additional experiments on recent RGB-D datasets, verifying the feasibility of incorporating other multi-modal datasets into 3D generation.

In the diverse field of medical imaging, automatic segmentation has numerous applications and must handle a wide variety of input domains, such as different types of Computed Tomography (CT) scans and Magnetic Resonance (MR) images. This heterogeneity challenges automatic segmentation algorithms to maintain consistent performance across different modalities due to the requirement for spatially aligned and paired images. Typically, segmentation models are trained using a single modality, which limits their ability to generalize to other types of input data without employing transfer learning techniques. Additionally, leveraging complementary information from different modalities to enhance segmentation precision often necessitates substantial modifications to popular encoder-decoder designs, such as introducing multiple branched encoding or decoding paths for each modality. In this work, we propose a simple Multi-Modal Segmentation (MulModSeg) strategy to enhance medical image segmentation across multiple modalities, specifically CT and MR. It incorporates two key designs: a modality-conditioned text embedding framework via a frozen text encoder that adds modality awareness to existing segmentation frameworks without significant structural modifications or computational overhead, and an alternating training procedure that facilitates the integration of essential features from unpaired CT and MR inputs. Through extensive experiments with both Fully Convolutional Network and Transformer-based backbones, MulModSeg consistently outperforms previous methods in segmenting abdominal multi-organ and cardiac substructures for both CT and MR modalities. The code is available in this {https://github.com/ChengyinLee/MulModSeg_2024{link}}.

Embodied navigation is a fundamental capability for robotic agents operating. Real-world deployment requires open vocabulary generalization and low training overhead, motivating zero-shot methods rather than task-specific RL training. However, existing zero-shot methods that build explicit 3D scene graphs often compress rich visual observations into text-only relations, leading to high construction cost, irreversible loss of visual evidence, and constrained vocabularies. To address these limitations, we introduce the Multi-modal 3D Scene Graph (M3DSG), which preserves visual cues by replacing textual relation

Although most current large multimodal models (LMMs) can already understand photos of natural scenes and portraits, their understanding of abstract images, e.g., charts, maps, or layouts, and visual reasoning capabilities remains quite rudimentary. They often struggle with simple daily tasks, such as reading time from a clock, understanding a flowchart, or planning a route using a road map. In light of this, we design a multi-modal self-instruct, utilizing large language models and their code capabilities to synthesize massive abstract images and visual reasoning instructions across daily scenarios. Our strategy effortlessly creates a multimodal benchmark with 11,193 instructions for eight visual scenarios: charts, tables, simulated maps, dashboards, flowcharts, relation graphs, floor plans, and visual puzzles. This benchmark, constructed with simple lines and geometric elements, exposes the shortcomings of most advanced LMMs like Claude-3.5-Sonnet and GPT-4o in abstract image understanding, spatial relations reasoning, and visual element induction. Besides, to verify the quality of our synthetic data, we fine-tune an LMM using 62,476 synthetic chart, table and road map instructions. The results demonstrate improved chart understanding and map navigation performance, and also demonstrate potential benefits for other visual reasoning tasks. Our code is available at: https://github.com/zwq2018/Multi-modal-Self-instruct.

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

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

Building general-purpose models that can perceive diverse real-world modalities and solve various tasks is an appealing target in artificial intelligence. In this paper, we present ChatBridge, a novel multimodal language model that leverages the expressive capabilities of language as the catalyst to bridge the gap between various modalities. We show that only language-paired two-modality data is sufficient to connect all modalities. ChatBridge leverages recent large language models (LLM) and extends their zero-shot capabilities to incorporate diverse multimodal inputs. ChatBridge undergoes a two-stage training. The first stage aligns each modality with language, which brings emergent multimodal correlation and collaboration abilities. The second stage instruction-finetunes ChatBridge to align it with user intent with our newly proposed multimodal instruction tuning dataset, named MULTIS, which covers a wide range of 16 multimodal tasks of text, image, video, and audio modalities. We show strong quantitative and qualitative results on zero-shot multimodal tasks covering text, image, video, and audio modalities. All codes, data, and models of ChatBridge will be open-sourced.