Daily Papers

Recently, interactive digital human video generation has attracted widespread attention and achieved remarkable progress. However, building such a practical system that can interact with diverse input signals in real time remains challenging to existing methods, which often struggle with high latency, heavy computational cost, and limited controllability. In this work, we introduce an autoregressive video generation framework that enables interactive multimodal control and low-latency extrapolation in a streaming manner. With minimal modifications to a standard large language model (LLM), our framework accepts multimodal condition encodings including audio, pose, and text, and outputs spatially and semantically coherent representations to guide the denoising process of a diffusion head. To support this, we construct a large-scale dialogue dataset of approximately 20,000 hours from multiple sources, providing rich conversational scenarios for training. We further introduce a deep compression autoencoder with up to 64times reduction ratio, which effectively alleviates the long-horizon inference burden of the autoregressive model. Extensive experiments on duplex conversation, multilingual human synthesis, and interactive world model highlight the advantages of our approach in low latency, high efficiency, and fine-grained multimodal controllability.

World Action Models (WAMs) offer a promising paradigm for robotic manipulation by jointly modeling visual state transitions and robot actions. However, existing WAMs are constrained by limited temporal context, coarse episode-level language supervision, and predominantly text-only conditioning, which hinder task-progress tracking and fine-grained language-video-action grounding while limiting visual-context reasoning and cross-embodiment transfer. In this paper, we introduce WorldScape Policy 2.0, a controllable WAM with reasoning-augmented long short-term memory. Its causal short-term visual memory supplies recent observations as DiT prefill to preserve local interaction dynamics, while its long short-term event memory organizes historical VLM outputs into global-history, local-active, and event-boundary representations for progress-aware retrieval. The retrieved history augments perception and autoregressively generated planning tokens, yielding an implicit subgoal condition for autonomous planning; semantic forcing further transfers event-level instruction semantics into this latent planning pathway. To establish fine-grained multimodal controllability, we construct ManipEvent-5M, an event-grounded embodied pretraining dataset containing nearly 5 million event segments with aligned action trajectories, episode-level task instructions, segment-level subtask captions, goal images, and video demonstrations. These designs provide a unified interface for autonomous planning from high-level instructions and controllable execution from fine-grained text, goal-image, or video-context prompts. Experiments in both simulation and real-world platforms demonstrate superior capabilities in long-horizon autonomous planning, fine-grained instruction following and in-context adaptation.

3D generation, editing, and completion are typically treated as regenerating the complete 3D asset under task-specific constraints, even when only a local region needs modification. This leads to task isolation, inconsistency in content that should remain unchanged, and dependence on task-specific paired data. We address these issues with a key observation: the three tasks all synthesize a designated region while keeping the rest intact---the full region for generation, the target region for editing, and the missing region for completion. We term this paradigm Selective Modeling and build SeMo3D upon it; it naturally unifies the three tasks, preserves unchanged content by construction, and enables training without paired editing or completion data, since any 3D asset can be partitioned into a selected region and its context. For training, we propose region-selective denoising, which randomly selects regions of varying sizes on standard 3D assets and applies noise and loss only to them, jointly learning all three tasks. For architecture, we propose Omni3DiT, a multi-condition 3D diffusion transformer that distinguishes regions to create from those to retain and fuses image, text, and point guidance for fine-grained control. Experiments across three benchmarks show SeMo3D surpasses state-of-the-art methods on all tasks, delivering multimodal controllability in generation and strong consistency and accuracy in editing and completion. SeMo3D further serves as a unified modeling tool for agents, enabling efficient 3D creation through natural-language interaction. Project page: https://xiaokunsun.github.io/SeMo3D.github.io/.

VLM safety is commonly evaluated through input- and output-level classification. Such classification is necessary, but it does not reveal whether a safety state is accessible or controllable inside the model. We argue that multimodal safety evaluation should therefore report a controllability profile alongside behavioral classification, separating representation-level detectability, cross-modal specificity, intervention sensitivity, and benign-preserving selectivity. Using implicit toxicity as a stress case, we instantiate this profile on LlavaGuard and Qwen3.5 with sparse feature decompositions. LlavaGuard admits localized handles with a narrow benign-preserving intervention range and modest downstream safety gains, whereas Qwen3.5 supports strong representation-level readout but no comparable selective-control regime under the tested operators. These results show that internal readout and controllability can diverge. Future multimodal safety benchmarks should therefore report not only behavioral safety metrics, but also whether safety-relevant internal signals can be intervention-tested and controlled within a validated operating range.

As Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) gain widespread applicability, it is becoming increasingly desirable to adapt them for diverse user needs. In this paper, we study the adaptation of MLLMs through controlled decoding. To achieve this, we introduce the first method for reward-guided decoding of MLLMs and demonstrate its application in improving their visual grounding. Our method involves building reward models for visual grounding and using them to guide the MLLM's decoding process. Concretely, we build two separate reward models to independently control the degree of object precision and recall in the model's output. Our approach enables on-the-fly controllability of an MLLM's inference process in two ways: first, by giving control over the relative importance of each reward function during decoding, allowing a user to dynamically trade off object precision for recall in image captioning tasks; second, by giving control over the breadth of the search during decoding, allowing the user to control the trade-off between the amount of test-time compute and the degree of visual grounding. We evaluate our method on standard object hallucination benchmarks, showing that it provides significant controllability over MLLM inference, while consistently outperforming existing hallucination mitigation methods.

Crafting a product display webpage from a source product image, along with layout and visual content instructions, holds significant practical value for domains such as marketing, advertising, and E-commerce. Intuitively, this task demands strict visual consistency across product displays and high-fidelity instruction following to jointly generate renderable HTML code. These requirements on controllability and instruction-following are closely aligned with the core features of advanced multimodal generative models, such as image editing models and unified models. To this end, this paper introduces ProductWebGen to systematically benchmark the product webpage generation capacities of these models. We organize ProductWebGen with 500 test samples covering 13 product categories; each sample consists of a source image, a visual content instruction, and a webpage instruction. The task is to generate a product showcase webpage including multiple consistent images in accordance with the source image and instructions. Given the mixed-modality input-output nature of the task, we design and systematically compare two workflows for evaluation -- one uses large language models and image editing models to separately generate HTML code and images (editing-based), while the other relies on a single UM to generate both, with image generation conditioned on the preceding multimodal context (UM-based). Empirical results show that editing-based approaches achieve leading results in webpage instruction following and content appeal, while UM-based ones may display more advantages in fulfilling visual content instructions. We also construct a supervised fine-tuning dataset, ProductWebGen-1k, with 1,000 groups of real product images and LLM-generated HTML code. We verify its effectiveness on the open-source UM BAGEL. The data and code are available at https://github.com/SJTU-DENG-Lab/ProductWebGen.

The ability to provide fine-grained control for generating and editing visual imagery has profound implications for computer vision and its applications. Previous works have explored extending controllability in two directions: instruction tuning with text-based prompts and multi-modal conditioning. However, these works make one or more unnatural assumptions on the number and/or type of modality inputs used to express controllability. We propose InstructAny2Pix, a flexible multi-modal instruction-following system that enables users to edit an input image using instructions involving audio, images, and text. InstructAny2Pix consists of three building blocks that facilitate this capability: a multi-modal encoder that encodes different modalities such as images and audio into a unified latent space, a diffusion model that learns to decode representations in this latent space into images, and a multi-modal LLM that can understand instructions involving multiple images and audio pieces and generate a conditional embedding of the desired output, which can be used by the diffusion decoder. Additionally, to facilitate training efficiency and improve generation quality, we include an additional refinement prior module that enhances the visual quality of LLM outputs. These designs are critical to the performance of our system. We demonstrate that our system can perform a series of novel instruction-guided editing tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/jacklishufan/InstructAny2Pix.git

To address key limitations in human-object interaction (HOI) video generation -- specifically the reliance on curated motion data, limited generalization to novel objects/scenarios, and restricted accessibility -- we introduce HunyuanVideo-HOMA, a weakly conditioned multimodal-driven framework. HunyuanVideo-HOMA enhances controllability and reduces dependency on precise inputs through sparse, decoupled motion guidance. It encodes appearance and motion signals into the dual input space of a multimodal diffusion transformer (MMDiT), fusing them within a shared context space to synthesize temporally consistent and physically plausible interactions. To optimize training, we integrate a parameter-space HOI adapter initialized from pretrained MMDiT weights, preserving prior knowledge while enabling efficient adaptation, and a facial cross-attention adapter for anatomically accurate audio-driven lip synchronization. Extensive experiments confirm state-of-the-art performance in interaction naturalness and generalization under weak supervision. Finally, HunyuanVideo-HOMA demonstrates versatility in text-conditioned generation and interactive object manipulation, supported by a user-friendly demo interface. The project page is at https://anonymous.4open.science/w/homa-page-0FBE/.

Building video world models upon pretrained video generation systems represents an important yet challenging step toward general spatiotemporal intelligence. A world model should possess three essential properties: controllability, long-term visual quality, and temporal consistency. To this end, we take a progressive approach-first enhancing controllability and then extending toward long-term, high-quality generation. We present LongVie 2, an end-to-end autoregressive framework trained in three stages: (1) Multi-modal guidance, which integrates dense and sparse control signals to provide implicit world-level supervision and improve controllability; (2) Degradation-aware training on the input frame, bridging the gap between training and long-term inference to maintain high visual quality; and (3) History-context guidance, which aligns contextual information across adjacent clips to ensure temporal consistency. We further introduce LongVGenBench, a comprehensive benchmark comprising 100 high-resolution one-minute videos covering diverse real-world and synthetic environments. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LongVie 2 achieves state-of-the-art performance in long-range controllability, temporal coherence, and visual fidelity, and supports continuous video generation lasting up to five minutes, marking a significant step toward unified video world modeling.

Scene generation has extensive industrial applications, demanding both high realism and precise control over geometry and appearance. Language-driven retrieval methods compose plausible scenes from a large object database, but overlook object-level control and often fail to enforce scene-level style coherence. Graph-based formulations offer higher controllability over objects and inform holistic consistency by explicitly modeling relations, yet existing methods struggle to produce high-fidelity textured results, thereby limiting their practical utility. We present FlowScene, a tri-branch scene generative model conditioned on multimodal graphs that collaboratively generates scene layouts, object shapes, and object textures. At its core lies a tight-coupled rectified flow model that exchanges object information during generation, enabling collaborative reasoning across the graph. This enables fine-grained control of objects' shapes, textures, and relations while enforcing scene-level style coherence across structure and appearance. Extensive experiments show that FlowScene outperforms both language-conditioned and graph-conditioned baselines in terms of generation realism, style consistency, and alignment with human preferences.

In this work, we study Human-Object Interaction Video Generation (HOIVG), which aims to synthesize high-quality human-object interaction videos conditioned on text, reference images, audio, and pose. This task holds significant practical value for automating content creation in real-world applications, such as e-commerce demonstrations, short video production, and interactive entertainment. However, existing approaches fail to accommodate all these requisite conditions. We present OmniShow, an end-to-end framework tailored for this practical yet challenging task, capable of harmonizing multimodal conditions and delivering industry-grade performance. To overcome the trade-off between controllability and quality, we introduce Unified Channel-wise Conditioning for efficient image and pose injection, and Gated Local-Context Attention to ensure precise audio-visual synchronization. To effectively address data scarcity, we develop a Decoupled-Then-Joint Training strategy that leverages a multi-stage training process with model merging to efficiently harness heterogeneous sub-task datasets. Furthermore, to fill the evaluation gap in this field, we establish HOIVG-Bench, a dedicated and comprehensive benchmark for HOIVG. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OmniShow achieves overall state-of-the-art performance across various multimodal conditioning settings, setting a solid standard for the emerging HOIVG task.

Instruction-based image editing improves the controllability and flexibility of image manipulation via natural commands without elaborate descriptions or regional masks. However, human instructions are sometimes too brief for current methods to capture and follow. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) show promising capabilities in cross-modal understanding and visual-aware response generation via LMs. We investigate how MLLMs facilitate edit instructions and present MLLM-Guided Image Editing (MGIE). MGIE learns to derive expressive instructions and provides explicit guidance. The editing model jointly captures this visual imagination and performs manipulation through end-to-end training. We evaluate various aspects of Photoshop-style modification, global photo optimization, and local editing. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that expressive instructions are crucial to instruction-based image editing, and our MGIE can lead to a notable improvement in automatic metrics and human evaluation while maintaining competitive inference efficiency.

Recent virtual try-on approaches have advanced by fine-tuning the pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models to leverage their powerful generative ability. However, the use of text prompts in virtual try-on is still underexplored. This paper tackles a text-editable virtual try-on task that changes the clothing item based on the provided clothing image while editing the wearing style (e.g., tucking style, fit) according to the text descriptions. In the text-editable virtual try-on, three key aspects exist: (i) designing rich text descriptions for paired person-clothing data to train the model, (ii) addressing the conflicts where textual information of the existing person's clothing interferes the generation of the new clothing, and (iii) adaptively adjust the inpainting mask aligned with the text descriptions, ensuring proper editing areas while preserving the original person's appearance irrelevant to the new clothing. To address these aspects, we propose PromptDresser, a text-editable virtual try-on model that leverages large multimodal model (LMM) assistance to enable high-quality and versatile manipulation based on generative text prompts. Our approach utilizes LMMs via in-context learning to generate detailed text descriptions for person and clothing images independently, including pose details and editing attributes using minimal human cost. Moreover, to ensure the editing areas, we adjust the inpainting mask depending on the text prompts adaptively. We found that our approach, utilizing detailed text prompts, not only enhances text editability but also effectively conveys clothing details that are difficult to capture through images alone, thereby enhancing image quality. Our code is available at https://github.com/rlawjdghek/PromptDresser.

Recent advancements in autoregressive and diffusion models have led to strong performance in image generation with short scene text words. However, generating coherent, long-form text in images, such as paragraphs in slides or documents, remains a major challenge for current generative models. We present the first work specifically focused on long text image generation, addressing a critical gap in existing text-to-image systems that typically handle only brief phrases or single sentences. Through comprehensive analysis of state-of-the-art autoregressive generation models, we identify the image tokenizer as a critical bottleneck in text generating quality. To address this, we introduce a novel text-focused, binary tokenizer optimized for capturing detailed scene text features. Leveraging our tokenizer, we develop \ModelName, a multimodal autoregressive model that excels in generating high-quality long-text images with unprecedented fidelity. Our model offers robust controllability, enabling customization of text properties such as font style, size, color, and alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that \ModelName~significantly outperforms SD3.5 Large~sd3 and GPT4o~gpt4o with DALL-E 3~dalle3 in generating long text accurately, consistently, and flexibly. Beyond its technical achievements, \ModelName~opens up exciting opportunities for innovative applications like interleaved document and PowerPoint generation, establishing a new frontier in long-text image generating.

Controllable ultra-long video generation is a fundamental yet challenging task. Although existing methods are effective for short clips, they struggle to scale due to issues such as temporal inconsistency and visual degradation. In this paper, we initially investigate and identify three key factors: separate noise initialization, independent control signal normalization, and the limitations of single-modality guidance. To address these issues, we propose LongVie, an end-to-end autoregressive framework for controllable long video generation. LongVie introduces two core designs to ensure temporal consistency: 1) a unified noise initialization strategy that maintains consistent generation across clips, and 2) global control signal normalization that enforces alignment in the control space throughout the entire video. To mitigate visual degradation, LongVie employs 3) a multi-modal control framework that integrates both dense (e.g., depth maps) and sparse (e.g., keypoints) control signals, complemented by 4) a degradation-aware training strategy that adaptively balances modality contributions over time to preserve visual quality. We also introduce LongVGenBench, a comprehensive benchmark consisting of 100 high-resolution videos spanning diverse real-world and synthetic environments, each lasting over one minute. Extensive experiments show that LongVie achieves state-of-the-art performance in long-range controllability, consistency, and quality.

Recent progress in video generative models has enabled the creation of high-quality videos from multimodal prompts that combine text and images. While these systems offer enhanced controllability, they also introduce new safety risks, as harmful content can emerge from individual modalities or their interaction. Existing safety methods are often text-only, require prior knowledge of the risk category, or operate as post-generation auditors, struggling to proactively mitigate such compositional, multimodal risks. To address this challenge, we present ConceptGuard, a unified safeguard framework for proactively detecting and mitigating unsafe semantics in multimodal video generation. ConceptGuard operates in two stages: First, a contrastive detection module identifies latent safety risks by projecting fused image-text inputs into a structured concept space; Second, a semantic suppression mechanism steers the generative process away from unsafe concepts by intervening in the prompt's multimodal conditioning. To support the development and rigorous evaluation of this framework, we introduce two novel benchmarks: ConceptRisk, a large-scale dataset for training on multimodal risks, and T2VSafetyBench-TI2V, the first benchmark adapted from T2VSafetyBench for the Text-and-Image-to-Video (TI2V) safety setting. Comprehensive experiments on both benchmarks show that ConceptGuard consistently outperforms existing baselines, achieving state-of-the-art results in both risk detection and safe video generation. Our code is available at https://github.com/Ruize-Ma/ConceptGuard.

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.

With the rise of multimodal applications, instruction data has become critical for training multimodal language models capable of understanding complex image-based queries. Existing practices rely on powerful but costly large language models (LLMs) or multimodal language models (MLMs) to produce instruction data. These are often prone to hallucinations, licensing issues and the generation process is often hard to scale and interpret. In this work, we present a programmatic approach that employs scene graphs as symbolic representations of images and human-written programs to systematically synthesize vision-centric instruction data. Our approach ensures the interpretability and controllability of the data generation process and scales efficiently while maintaining factual accuracy. By implementing a suite of 24 single-image, 14 multi-image instruction generators, and a scene graph generation pipeline, we build a scalable, cost-effective system: ProVision which produces diverse question-answer pairs concerning objects, attributes, relations, depth, etc., for any given image. Applied to Visual Genome and DataComp datasets, we generate over 10 million instruction data points, ProVision-10M, and leverage them in both pretraining and instruction tuning stages of MLMs. When adopted in the instruction tuning stage, our single-image instruction data yields up to a 7% improvement on the 2D split and 8% on the 3D split of CVBench, along with a 3% increase in performance on QBench2, RealWorldQA, and MMMU. Our multi-image instruction data leads to an 8% improvement on Mantis-Eval. Incorporation of our data in both pre-training and fine-tuning stages of xGen-MM-4B leads to an averaged improvement of 1.6% across 11 benchmarks.

Traditional and neural video codecs commonly encounter limitations in controllability and generality under ultra-low-bitrate coding scenarios. To overcome these challenges, we propose M3-CVC, a controllable video compression framework incorporating multimodal generative models. The framework utilizes a semantic-motion composite strategy for keyframe selection to retain critical information. For each keyframe and its corresponding video clip, a dialogue-based large multimodal model (LMM) approach extracts hierarchical spatiotemporal details, enabling both inter-frame and intra-frame representations for improved video fidelity while enhancing encoding interpretability. M3-CVC further employs a conditional diffusion-based, text-guided keyframe compression method, achieving high fidelity in frame reconstruction. During decoding, textual descriptions derived from LMMs guide the diffusion process to restore the original video's content accurately. Experimental results demonstrate that M3-CVC significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art VVC standard in ultra-low bitrate scenarios, particularly in preserving semantic and perceptual fidelity.

In this work, we provide a systematic survey of Discrete Diffusion Language Models (dLLMs) and Discrete Diffusion Multimodal Language Models (dMLLMs). Unlike autoregressive (AR) models, dLLMs and dMLLMs adopt a multi-token, parallel decoding paradigm using full attention and a denoising-based generation strategy. This paradigm naturally enables parallel generation, fine-grained output controllability, and dynamic, response-aware perception. These capabilities are previously difficult to achieve with AR models. Recently, a growing number of industrial-scale proprietary d(M)LLMs, as well as a large number of open-source academic d(M)LLMs, have demonstrated performance comparable to their autoregressive counterparts, while achieving up to 10x acceleration in inference speed. The advancement of discrete diffusion LLMs and MLLMs has been largely driven by progress in two domains. The first is the development of autoregressive LLMs and MLLMs, which has accumulated vast amounts of data, benchmarks, and foundational infrastructure for training and inference. The second contributing domain is the evolution of the mathematical models underlying discrete diffusion. Together, these advancements have catalyzed a surge in dLLMs and dMLLMs research in early 2025. In this work, we present a comprehensive overview of the research in the dLLM and dMLLM domains. We trace the historical development of dLLMs and dMLLMs, formalize the underlying mathematical frameworks, and categorize representative models. We further analyze key techniques for training and inference, and summarize emerging applications across language, vision-language, and biological domains. We conclude by discussing future directions for research and deployment. Paper collection: https://github.com/LiQiiiii/DLLM-Survey

Multimodal music generation aims to produce music from diverse input modalities, including text, videos, and images. Existing methods use a common embedding space for multimodal fusion. Despite their effectiveness in other modalities, their application in multimodal music generation faces challenges of data scarcity, weak cross-modal alignment, and limited controllability. This paper addresses these issues by using explicit bridges of text and music for multimodal alignment. We introduce a novel method named Visuals Music Bridge (VMB). Specifically, a Multimodal Music Description Model converts visual inputs into detailed textual descriptions to provide the text bridge; a Dual-track Music Retrieval module that combines broad and targeted retrieval strategies to provide the music bridge and enable user control. Finally, we design an Explicitly Conditioned Music Generation framework to generate music based on the two bridges. We conduct experiments on video-to-music, image-to-music, text-to-music, and controllable music generation tasks, along with experiments on controllability. The results demonstrate that VMB significantly enhances music quality, modality, and customization alignment compared to previous methods. VMB sets a new standard for interpretable and expressive multimodal music generation with applications in various multimedia fields. Demos and code are available at https://github.com/wbs2788/VMB.

Diffusion models have become the mainstream architecture for text-to-image generation, achieving remarkable progress in visual quality and prompt controllability. However, current inference pipelines generally lack interpretable semantic supervision and correction mechanisms throughout the denoising process. Most existing approaches rely solely on post-hoc scoring of the final image, prompt filtering, or heuristic resampling strategies-making them ineffective in providing actionable guidance for correcting the generative trajectory. As a result, models often suffer from object confusion, spatial errors, inaccurate counts, and missing semantic elements, severely compromising prompt-image alignment and image quality. To tackle these challenges, we propose MLLM Semantic-Corrected Ping-Pong-Ahead Diffusion (PPAD), a novel framework that, for the first time, introduces a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) as a semantic observer during inference. PPAD performs real-time analysis on intermediate generations, identifies latent semantic inconsistencies, and translates feedback into controllable signals that actively guide the remaining denoising steps. The framework supports both inference-only and training-enhanced settings, and performs semantic correction at only extremely few diffusion steps, offering strong generality and scalability. Extensive experiments demonstrate PPAD's significant improvements.

Existing multimodal conditional image synthesis (MCIS) methods generate images conditioned on any combinations of various modalities that require all of them must be exactly conformed, hindering the synthesis controllability and leaving the potential of cross-modality under-exploited. To this end, we propose to generate images conditioned on the compositions of multimodal control signals, where modalities are imperfectly complementary, i.e., composed multimodal conditional image synthesis (CMCIS). Specifically, we observe two challenging issues of the proposed CMCIS task, i.e., the modality coordination problem and the modality imbalance problem. To tackle these issues, we introduce a Mixture-of-Modality-Tokens Transformer (MMoT) that adaptively fuses fine-grained multimodal control signals, a multimodal balanced training loss to stabilize the optimization of each modality, and a multimodal sampling guidance to balance the strength of each modality control signal. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that MMoT achieves superior performance on both unimodal conditional image synthesis (UCIS) and MCIS tasks with high-quality and faithful image synthesis on complex multimodal conditions. The project website is available at https://jabir-zheng.github.io/MMoT.

Multimodal generative models that can understand and generate across multiple modalities are dominated by autoregressive (AR) approaches, which process tokens sequentially from left to right, or top to bottom. These models jointly handle images, text, video, and audio for various tasks such as image captioning, question answering, and image generation. In this work, we explore discrete diffusion models as a unified generative formulation in the joint text and image domain, building upon their recent success in text generation. Discrete diffusion models offer several advantages over AR models, including improved control over quality versus diversity of generated samples, the ability to perform joint multimodal inpainting (across both text and image domains), and greater controllability in generation through guidance. Leveraging these benefits, we present the first Unified Multimodal Discrete Diffusion (UniDisc) model which is capable of jointly understanding and generating text and images for a variety of downstream tasks. We compare UniDisc to multimodal AR models, performing a scaling analysis and demonstrating that UniDisc outperforms them in terms of both performance and inference-time compute, enhanced controllability, editability, inpainting, and flexible trade-off between inference time and generation quality. Code and additional visualizations are available at https://unidisc.github.io.

Autonomous driving systems rely heavily on multimodal perception data to understand complex environments. However, the long-tailed distribution of real-world data hinders generalization, especially for rare but safety-critical vehicle categories. To address this challenge, we propose MultiEditor, a dual-branch latent diffusion framework designed to edit images and LiDAR point clouds in driving scenarios jointly. At the core of our approach is introducing 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) as a structural and appearance prior for target objects. Leveraging this prior, we design a multi-level appearance control mechanism--comprising pixel-level pasting, semantic-level guidance, and multi-branch refinement--to achieve high-fidelity reconstruction across modalities. We further propose a depth-guided deformable cross-modality condition module that adaptively enables mutual guidance between modalities using 3DGS-rendered depth, significantly enhancing cross-modality consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MultiEditor achieves superior performance in visual and geometric fidelity, editing controllability, and cross-modality consistency. Furthermore, generating rare-category vehicle data with MultiEditor substantially enhances the detection accuracy of perception models on underrepresented classes.

We tackle the dual challenges of video understanding and controllable video generation within a unified diffusion framework. Our key insights are two-fold: geometry-only cues (e.g., depth, edges) are insufficient: they specify layout but under-constrain appearance, materials, and illumination, limiting physically meaningful edits such as relighting or material swaps and often causing temporal drift. Enriching the model with additional graphics-based modalities (intrinsics and semantics) provides complementary constraints that both disambiguate understanding and enable precise, predictable control during generation. However, building a single model that uses many heterogeneous cues introduces two core difficulties. Architecturally, the model must accept any subset of modalities, remain robust to missing inputs, and inject control signals without sacrificing temporal consistency. Data-wise, training demands large-scale, temporally aligned supervision that ties real videos to per-pixel multimodal annotations. We then propose CtrlVDiff, a unified diffusion model trained with a Hybrid Modality Control Strategy (HMCS) that routes and fuses features from depth, normals, segmentation, edges, and graphics-based intrinsics (albedo, roughness, metallic), and re-renders videos from any chosen subset with strong temporal coherence. To enable this, we build MMVideo, a hybrid real-and-synthetic dataset aligned across modalities and captions. Across understanding and generation benchmarks, CtrlVDiff delivers superior controllability and fidelity, enabling layer-wise edits (relighting, material adjustment, object insertion) and surpassing state-of-the-art baselines while remaining robust when some modalities are unavailable.

Current unified multimodal models typically rely on discrete visual tokenizers to bridge the modality gap. However, discretization inevitably discards fine-grained semantic information, leading to suboptimal performance in visual understanding tasks. Conversely, directly modeling continuous semantic representations (e.g., CLIP, SigLIP) poses significant challenges in high-dimensional generative modeling, resulting in slow convergence and training instability. To resolve this dilemma, we introduce UniCom, a unified framework that harmonizes multimodal understanding and generation via compressed continuous representation. We empirically demonstrate that reducing channel dimension is significantly more effective than spatial downsampling for both reconstruction and generation. Accordingly, we design an attention-based semantic compressor to distill dense features into a compact unified representation. Furthermore, we validate that the transfusion architecture surpasses query-based designs in convergence and consistency. Experiments demonstrate that UniCom achieves state-of-the-art generation performance among unified models. Notably, by preserving rich semantic priors, it delivers exceptional controllability in image editing and maintains image consistency even without relying on VAE.

Safety-critical applications, such as autonomous driving, require extensive multimodal data for rigorous testing. Methods based on synthetic data are gaining prominence due to the cost and complexity of gathering real-world data but require a high degree of realism and controllability in order to be useful. This paper introduces MObI, a novel framework for Multimodal Object Inpainting that leverages a diffusion model to create realistic and controllable object inpaintings across perceptual modalities, demonstrated for both camera and lidar simultaneously. Using a single reference RGB image, MObI enables objects to be seamlessly inserted into existing multimodal scenes at a 3D location specified by a bounding box, while maintaining semantic consistency and multimodal coherence. Unlike traditional inpainting methods that rely solely on edit masks, our 3D bounding box conditioning gives objects accurate spatial positioning and realistic scaling. As a result, our approach can be used to insert novel objects flexibly into multimodal scenes, providing significant advantages for testing perception models.

Music-driven dance video generation aims to synthesize expressive human motion that is temporally aligned with music while maintaining high visual fidelity. Despite recent progress, existing methods still face two key limitations: the lack of large-scale, high-quality dance video datasets, and the absence of principled frameworks for integrating music as a complementary conditioning signal into Video Generation Foundation Models. To address these limitations, we introduce CIPE-Dance, a large-scale Internet-sourced dance video dataset with choreography-informed text annotations, constructed via a progressive expert pipeline. To the best of our knowledge, CIPE-Dance is the largest dataset for dance video generation to date, comprising 300k high-quality clips over 400 hours and covering diverse dancers, environments, and dance genres. We further propose OmniDance, a framework-level recipe for integrating music into a TI2V foundation model without sacrificing its original controllability or visual fidelity. Motivated by the complementary roles of text as low-frequency semantics and music as high-frequency temporal dynamics, OmniDance co-designs a depth-aware specialization architecture, an anchored easy-to-hard curriculum learning strategy, and a modality-specialized time-dependent CFG strategy, enabling unified TI2V, MI2V, and MTI2V generation. Extensive experiments on CIPE-Dance demonstrate that OmniDance achieves state-of-the-art performance across all three tasks and exhibits robust multimodal integration capability. Project is available at https://github.com/AMAP-ML/OmniDance.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) achieve strong performance by integrating visual inputs with the rich priors of pretrained language models. However, they often fail on vision-centric tasks, especially when visual evidence conflicts with pretrained knowledge. We explore these failures separately using two diagnostic paradigms: (1) probing whether visual information is available, via image reconstruction, and (2) measuring multimodal context sensitivity, the extent to which the model follows visual context versus the language prior. To support the second, we introduce the WhatIfVis, a benchmark spanning five coarse-grained dimensions (spatial-temporal, color, count, size, and weight) whose questions admit answers from either the image or the prior. Our analysis yields three findings: (i) Coarse-grained visual evidence is preserved, as these attributes can be reconstructed from the final-layer image tokens of frozen MLLMs. Failures on questions about these attributes therefore point to post-perceptual utilization, rather than to degraded visual encoding during perception. (ii) Even when explicitly instructed to use or ignore visual evidence, vanilla models (without supervised fine-tuning on the WhatIfVis) show unstable visual context sensitivity. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) improves this controllability and generalizes across domains, and activation patching further localizes the vision-versus-prior trade-off at architecture-specific depths across all six models. (iii) The vision-versus-prior trade-off is controllable along a learned vector. Applying this steering vector, even without any intent instruction, improves controllability over the vanilla model. Together, these results relocate the bottleneck, indicating that for the coarse attributes we study, MLLMs encode the visual evidence but cannot reliably control their reliance on it.

The rapid evolution of video generation has shifted the paradigm from pure text-driven to multi-conditional controllable generation, with reference images now widely adopted as conditional inputs to achieve superior spatiotemporal consistency. While these reference images serve as powerful visual anchors that significantly enhance controllability, their impact on safety remains largely unexplored. In this work, we reveal the visual anchoring effect: by enforcing consistency, the mechanism prevents the generated content from drifting away from the original harmful intent, thereby eliminating the model's natural safety escape route from harmful to benign content. Consequently, visual anchors inherently increase the safety risk---this is the price of consistency. Building on this insight, we propose Decoupling Intent via Visual Anchors (DIVA), a training-free multimodal jailbreak framework for video generation that exploits this vulnerability. DIVA decouples harmful intent into a static visual anchor image and a dynamic motion text prompt, and employs dual-criteria selection to balance attack stealthiness with semantic preservation. Extensive experiments across various leading commercial platforms and mainstream open-source video generation models demonstrate that DIVA achieves a substantially higher Attack Success Rate than existing text-only methods. To facilitate future research, we additionally contribute TI2VSafetyBench, the first safety benchmark for multi-conditional video generation.

In this work, we propose Dimple, the first Discrete Diffusion Multimodal Large Language Model (DMLLM). We observe that training with a purely discrete diffusion approach leads to significant training instability, suboptimal performance, and severe length bias issues. To address these challenges, we design a novel training paradigm that combines an initial autoregressive phase with a subsequent diffusion phase. This approach yields the Dimple-7B model, trained on the same dataset and using a similar training pipeline as LLaVA-NEXT. Dimple-7B ultimately surpasses LLaVA-NEXT in performance by 3.9%, demonstrating that DMLLM can achieve performance comparable to that of autoregressive models. To improve inference efficiency, we propose a decoding strategy termed confident decoding, which dynamically adjusts the number of tokens generated at each step, significantly reducing the number of generation iterations. In autoregressive models, the number of forward iterations during generation equals the response length. With confident decoding, however, the number of iterations needed by Dimple is even only text{response length}{3}. We also re-implement the prefilling technique in autoregressive models and demonstrate that it does not significantly impact performance on most benchmark evaluations, while offering a speedup of 1.5x to 7x. Additionally, we explore Dimple's capability to precisely control its response using structure priors. These priors enable structured responses in a manner distinct from instruction-based or chain-of-thought prompting, and allow fine-grained control over response format and length, which is difficult to achieve in autoregressive models. Overall, this work validates the feasibility and advantages of DMLLM and enhances its inference efficiency and controllability. Code and models are available at https://github.com/yu-rp/Dimple.

Recent advancements in video generation have significantly impacted various downstream applications, particularly in identity-preserving video generation (IPT2V). However, existing methods struggle with "copy-paste" artifacts and low similarity issues, primarily due to their reliance on low-level facial image information. This dependence can result in rigid facial appearances and artifacts reflecting irrelevant details. To address these challenges, we propose EchoVideo, which employs two key strategies: (1) an Identity Image-Text Fusion Module (IITF) that integrates high-level semantic features from text, capturing clean facial identity representations while discarding occlusions, poses, and lighting variations to avoid the introduction of artifacts; (2) a two-stage training strategy, incorporating a stochastic method in the second phase to randomly utilize shallow facial information. The objective is to balance the enhancements in fidelity provided by shallow features while mitigating excessive reliance on them. This strategy encourages the model to utilize high-level features during training, ultimately fostering a more robust representation of facial identities. EchoVideo effectively preserves facial identities and maintains full-body integrity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that it achieves excellent results in generating high-quality, controllability and fidelity videos.

Recent advances in audio-driven avatar video generation have significantly enhanced audio-visual realism. However, existing methods treat instruction conditioning merely as low-level tracking driven by acoustic or visual cues, without modeling the communicative purpose conveyed by the instructions. This limitation compromises their narrative coherence and character expressiveness. To bridge this gap, we introduce Kling-Avatar, a novel cascaded framework that unifies multimodal instruction understanding with photorealistic portrait generation. Our approach adopts a two-stage pipeline. In the first stage, we design a multimodal large language model (MLLM) director that produces a blueprint video conditioned on diverse instruction signals, thereby governing high-level semantics such as character motion and emotions. In the second stage, guided by blueprint keyframes, we generate multiple sub-clips in parallel using a first-last frame strategy. This global-to-local framework preserves fine-grained details while faithfully encoding the high-level intent behind multimodal instructions. Our parallel architecture also enables fast and stable generation of long-duration videos, making it suitable for real-world applications such as digital human livestreaming and vlogging. To comprehensively evaluate our method, we construct a benchmark of 375 curated samples covering diverse instructions and challenging scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Kling-Avatar is capable of generating vivid, fluent, long-duration videos at up to 1080p and 48 fps, achieving superior performance in lip synchronization accuracy, emotion and dynamic expressiveness, instruction controllability, identity preservation, and cross-domain generalization. These results establish Kling-Avatar as a new benchmark for semantically grounded, high-fidelity audio-driven avatar synthesis.

While recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have attained significant strides in multimodal reasoning, their reasoning processes remain predominantly text-centric, leading to suboptimal performance in complex long-horizon, vision-centric tasks. In this paper, we establish a novel Generative Multimodal Reasoning paradigm and introduce DiffThinker, a diffusion-based reasoning framework. Conceptually, DiffThinker reformulates multimodal reasoning as a native generative image-to-image task, achieving superior logical consistency and spatial precision in vision-centric tasks. We perform a systematic comparison between DiffThinker and MLLMs, providing the first in-depth investigation into the intrinsic characteristics of this paradigm, revealing four core properties: efficiency, controllability, native parallelism, and collaboration. Extensive experiments across four domains (sequential planning, combinatorial optimization, constraint satisfaction, and spatial configuration) demonstrate that DiffThinker significantly outperforms leading closed source models including GPT-5 (+314.2\%) and Gemini-3-Flash (+111.6\%), as well as the fine-tuned Qwen3-VL-32B baseline (+39.0\%), highlighting generative multimodal reasoning as a promising approach for vision-centric reasoning.

With the development of diffusion models, enhancing spatial controllability in text-to-image generation has become a vital challenge. As a representative task for addressing this challenge, layout-to-image generation aims to generate images that are spatially consistent with the given layout condition. Existing layout-to-image methods typically introduce the layout condition by integrating adapter modules into the base generative model. However, the generated images often exhibit low visual quality and stylistic inconsistency with the base model, indicating a loss of pretrained knowledge. To alleviate this issue, we construct the Layout Synthesis (LaySyn) dataset, which leverages images synthesized by the base model itself to mitigate the distribution shift from the pretraining data. Moreover, we propose the Layout Control (Laytrol) Network, in which parameters are inherited from MM-DiT to preserve the pretrained knowledge of the base model. To effectively activate the copied parameters and avoid disturbance from unstable control conditions, we adopt a dedicated initialization scheme for Laytrol. In this scheme, the layout encoder is initialized as a pure text encoder to ensure that its output tokens remain within the data domain of MM-DiT. Meanwhile, the outputs of the layout control network are initialized to zero. In addition, we apply Object-level Rotary Position Embedding to the layout tokens to provide coarse positional information. Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

We propose UniDFlow, a unified discrete flow-matching framework for multimodal understanding, generation, and editing. It decouples understanding and generation via task-specific low-rank adapters, avoiding objective interference and representation entanglement, while a novel reference-based multimodal preference alignment optimizes relative outcomes under identical conditioning, improving faithfulness and controllability without large-scale retraining. UniDFlpw achieves SOTA performance across eight benchmarks and exhibits strong zero-shot generalization to tasks including inpainting, in-context image generation, reference-based editing, and compositional generation, despite no explicit task-specific training.

Recent text-to-image models produce high-quality results but still struggle with precise visual control, balancing multimodal inputs, and requiring extensive training for complex multimodal image generation. To address these limitations, we propose MENTOR, a novel autoregressive (AR) framework for efficient Multimodal-conditioned Tuning for Autoregressive multimodal image generation. MENTOR combines an AR image generator with a two-stage training paradigm, enabling fine-grained, token-level alignment between multimodal inputs and image outputs without relying on auxiliary adapters or cross-attention modules. The two-stage training consists of: (1) a multimodal alignment stage that establishes robust pixel- and semantic-level alignment, followed by (2) a multimodal instruction tuning stage that balances the integration of multimodal inputs and enhances generation controllability. Despite modest model size, suboptimal base components, and limited training resources, MENTOR achieves strong performance on the DreamBench++ benchmark, outperforming competitive baselines in concept preservation and prompt following. Additionally, our method delivers superior image reconstruction fidelity, broad task adaptability, and improved training efficiency compared to diffusion-based methods. Dataset, code, and models are available at: https://github.com/HaozheZhao/MENTOR

Recent advances in diffusion-based controllable visual generation have led to remarkable improvements in image quality. However, these powerful models are typically deployed on cloud servers due to their large computational demands, raising serious concerns about user data privacy. To enable secure and efficient on-device generation, we explore in this paper controllable diffusion models built upon linear attention architectures, which offer superior scalability and efficiency, even on edge devices. Yet, our experiments reveal that existing controllable generation frameworks, such as ControlNet and OminiControl, either lack the flexibility to support multiple heterogeneous condition types or suffer from slow convergence on such linear-attention models. To address these limitations, we propose a novel controllable diffusion framework tailored for linear attention backbones like SANA. The core of our method lies in a unified gated conditioning module working in a dual-path pipeline, which effectively integrates multi-type conditional inputs, such as spatially aligned and non-aligned cues. Extensive experiments on multiple tasks and benchmarks demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art controllable generation performance based on linear-attention models, surpassing existing methods in terms of fidelity and controllability.

Modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can solve a wide range of tasks requiring visual reasoning. In real-world scenarios, desirable properties for VLMs include fast inference and controllable generation (e.g., constraining outputs to adhere to a desired format). However, existing autoregressive (AR) VLMs like LLaVA struggle in these aspects. Discrete diffusion models (DMs) offer a promising alternative, enabling parallel decoding for faster inference and bidirectional context for controllable generation through text-infilling. While effective in language-only settings, DMs' potential for multimodal tasks is underexplored. We introduce LaViDa, a family of VLMs built on DMs. We build LaViDa by equipping DMs with a vision encoder and jointly fine-tune the combined parts for multimodal instruction following. To address challenges encountered, LaViDa incorporates novel techniques such as complementary masking for effective training, prefix KV cache for efficient inference, and timestep shifting for high-quality sampling. Experiments show that LaViDa achieves competitive or superior performance to AR VLMs on multi-modal benchmarks such as MMMU, while offering unique advantages of DMs, including flexible speed-quality tradeoff, controllability, and bidirectional reasoning. On COCO captioning, LaViDa surpasses Open-LLaVa-Next-8B by +4.1 CIDEr with 1.92x speedup. On bidirectional tasks, it achieves +59% improvement on Constrained Poem Completion. These results demonstrate LaViDa as a strong alternative to AR VLMs. Code and models will be released in the camera-ready version.

Short-form videos have become a primary medium for digital advertising, requiring scalable and efficient content creation. However, current workflows and AI tools remain disjoint and modality-specific, leading to high production costs and low overall efficiency. To address this issue, we propose AutoCut, an end-to-end advertisement video editing framework based on multimodal discretization and controllable editing. AutoCut employs dedicated encoders to extract video and audio features, then applies residual vector quantization to discretize them into unified tokens aligned with textual representations, constructing a shared video-audio-text token space. Built upon a foundation model, we further develop a multimodal large language model for video editing through combined multimodal alignment and supervised fine-tuning, supporting tasks covering video selection and ordering, script generation, and background music selection within a unified editing framework. Finally, a complete production pipeline converts the predicted token sequences into deployable long video outputs. Experiments on real-world advertisement datasets show that AutoCut reduces production cost and iteration time while substantially improving consistency and controllability, paving the way for scalable video creation.

Human-object centric video personalization (HOCVP) is a core task within subject-driven video generation. However, existing methods suffer from two key limitations. First, most approaches focusing on inter-subject personalization still struggle to strike a balance between high subject fidelity and accurate interaction patterns between humans and diverse objects, especially when objects represent abstract concepts such as logos. Second, while intra-subject references (e.g., OCR maps, multi-view inputs) are expected to enhance subject fidelity, most existing works lack mechanisms to understand such latent correspondence. To address both challenges, we propose HOMIE, an HOCVP framework that tackles both inter- and intra-subject input settings in a unified manner. Compared to previous approaches, HOMIE proposes a better MLLM integration strategy to extract knowledge of reference-level relationships without compromising the controllability of text encoders or incurring costly re-alignment. Specifically, we introduce global multimodal guidance within self-attention to better align MLLM-derived semantic features with VAE tokens. Furthermore, we propose modality-reference embedding to differentiate tokens from MLLM features and VAE tokens and associate intra-subject reference image tokens. Extensive experiments validate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across various HOCVP tasks. Project Page: https://yiyangcai.github.io/homie-page.github.io/

Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) achieve remarkable success on diverse multimodal understanding and generation tasks, yet they still struggle to effectively leverage language-based chain-of-thought reasoning for image generation. As a result, existing reasoning-augmented UMMs often fail to inherit the test-time scaling and fine-grained controllability observed in large language models. We attribute this failure to a fundamental modality mismatch: reasoning is performed in a discrete token space, whereas image generation operates in a continuous space. To bridge this gap, we introduce a Latent Reasoning framework in Continuous space (LARC), which alleviates the token-level bottleneck by reasoning over continuous hidden states. Specifically, the training framework consists of two stages: (i) curriculum supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and (ii) information-gain reinforcement learning (RL). First, the curriculum SFT stage gradually converts token-level reasoning into latent reasoning. Subsequently, the information-gain RL stage self-evolves latent reasoning without ground truth supervision. Experiments across diverse text-to-image generation benchmarks show that LARC consistently improves generation quality, prompt following, and compositional fidelity. Notably, LARC achieves state-of-the-art performance on GenEval with a 7%p gain over BAGEL and demonstrates clear test-time scaling behavior, outperforming token-based generation under both parallel and sequential test-time scaling strategies.

We present GEM, a Generalizable Ego-vision Multimodal world model that predicts future frames using a reference frame, sparse features, human poses, and ego-trajectories. Hence, our model has precise control over object dynamics, ego-agent motion and human poses. GEM generates paired RGB and depth outputs for richer spatial understanding. We introduce autoregressive noise schedules to enable stable long-horizon generations. Our dataset is comprised of 4000+ hours of multimodal data across domains like autonomous driving, egocentric human activities, and drone flights. Pseudo-labels are used to get depth maps, ego-trajectories, and human poses. We use a comprehensive evaluation framework, including a new Control of Object Manipulation (COM) metric, to assess controllability. Experiments show GEM excels at generating diverse, controllable scenarios and temporal consistency over long generations. Code, models, and datasets are fully open-sourced.

Recent advances in AI-driven storytelling have enhanced video generation and story visualization. However, translating dialogue-centric scripts into coherent storyboards remains a significant challenge due to limited script detail, inadequate physical context understanding, and the complexity of integrating cinematic principles. To address these challenges, we propose Dialogue Visualization, a novel task that transforms dialogue scripts into dynamic, multi-view storyboards. We introduce Dialogue Director, a training-free multimodal framework comprising a Script Director, Cinematographer, and Storyboard Maker. This framework leverages large multimodal models and diffusion-based architectures, employing techniques such as Chain-of-Thought reasoning, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, and multi-view synthesis to improve script understanding, physical context comprehension, and cinematic knowledge integration. Experimental results demonstrate that Dialogue Director outperforms state-of-the-art methods in script interpretation, physical world understanding, and cinematic principle application, significantly advancing the quality and controllability of dialogue-based story visualization.

Recent breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to the emergence of agentic AI systems that extend beyond the capabilities of standalone models. By empowering LLMs to perceive external environments, integrate multimodal information, and interact with various tools, these agentic systems exhibit greater autonomy and adaptability across complex tasks. This evolution brings new opportunities to recommender systems (RS): LLM-based Agentic RS (LLM-ARS) can offer more interactive, context-aware, and proactive recommendations, potentially reshaping the user experience and broadening the application scope of RS. Despite promising early results, fundamental challenges remain, including how to effectively incorporate external knowledge, balance autonomy with controllability, and evaluate performance in dynamic, multimodal settings. In this perspective paper, we first present a systematic analysis of LLM-ARS: (1) clarifying core concepts and architectures; (2) highlighting how agentic capabilities -- such as planning, memory, and multimodal reasoning -- can enhance recommendation quality; and (3) outlining key research questions in areas such as safety, efficiency, and lifelong personalization. We also discuss open problems and future directions, arguing that LLM-ARS will drive the next wave of RS innovation. Ultimately, we foresee a paradigm shift toward intelligent, autonomous, and collaborative recommendation experiences that more closely align with users' evolving needs and complex decision-making processes.

Automatically evaluating multimodal generation presents a significant challenge, as automated metrics often struggle to align reliably with human evaluation, especially for complex tasks that involve multiple modalities. To address this, we present MMMG, a comprehensive and human-aligned benchmark for multimodal generation across 4 modality combinations (image, audio, interleaved text and image, interleaved text and audio), with a focus on tasks that present significant challenges for generation models, while still enabling reliable automatic evaluation through a combination of models and programs. MMMG encompasses 49 tasks (including 29 newly developed ones), each with a carefully designed evaluation pipeline, and 937 instructions to systematically assess reasoning, controllability, and other key capabilities of multimodal generation models. Extensive validation demonstrates that MMMG is highly aligned with human evaluation, achieving an average agreement of 94.3%. Benchmarking results on 24 multimodal generation models reveal that even though the state-of-the-art model, GPT Image, achieves 78.3% accuracy for image generation, it falls short on multimodal reasoning and interleaved generation. Furthermore, results suggest considerable headroom for improvement in audio generation, highlighting an important direction for future research.

Recent work has shown that inference-time reasoning and reflection can improve text-to-image generation without retraining. However, existing approaches often rely on implicit, holistic critiques or unconstrained prompt rewrites, making their behavior difficult to interpret, control, or stop reliably. In contrast, large language models have benefited from explicit, structured forms of **thinking** based on verification, targeted correction, and early stopping. We introduce CRAFT (Continuous Reasoning and Agentic Feedback Tuning), a training-free and model-agnostic framework for multimodal image generation. CRAFT transforms a user prompt into a set of explicit, dependency-structured visual constraints, verifies generated images using a vision-language model, and performs targeted prompt updates only when specific constraints are violated. This iterative process includes an explicit stopping criterion, resulting in an interpretable and controllable inference-time refinement loop. Across multiple model families and challenging benchmarks, CRAFT consistently improves compositional accuracy, text rendering, and preference-based evaluations, with particularly strong gains for lightweight generators. Importantly, these improvements incur only a negligible inference-time overhead, allowing smaller or cheaper models to approach the quality of substantially more expensive systems. Our results suggest that explicitly structured, constraint-driven inference-time reasoning is a key ingredient for improving the reliability of multimodal generative models.

Multimodal recommendation enhances ranking by integrating user-item interactions with item content, which is particularly effective under sparse feedback and long-tail distributions. However, multimodal signals are inherently heterogeneous and can conflict in specific contexts, making effective fusion both crucial and challenging. Existing approaches often rely on shared fusion pathways, leading to entangled representations and modality imbalance. To address these issues, we propose MAGNET, a Modality-Guided Mixture of Adaptive Graph Experts Network with Progressive Entropy-Triggered Routing for Multimodal Recommendation, designed to enhance controllability, stability, and interpretability in multimodal fusion. MAGNET couples interaction-conditioned expert routing with structure-aware graph augmentation, so that both what to fuse and how to fuse are explicitly controlled and interpretable. At the representation level, a dual-view graph learning module augments the interaction graph with content-induced edges, improving coverage for sparse and long-tail items while preserving collaborative structure via parallel encoding and lightweight fusion. At the fusion level, MAGNET employs structured experts with explicit modality roles-dominant, balanced, and complementary-enabling a more interpretable and adaptive combination of behavioral, visual, and textual cues. To further stabilize sparse routing and prevent expert collapse, we introduce a two-stage entropy-weighting mechanism that monitors routing entropy. This mechanism automatically transitions training from an early coverage-oriented regime to a later specialization-oriented regime, progressively balancing expert utilization and routing confidence. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements over strong baselines.

Building on the success of diffusion models, significant advancements have been made in multimodal image generation tasks. Among these, human image generation has emerged as a promising technique, offering the potential to revolutionize the fashion design process. However, existing methods often focus solely on text-to-image or image reference-based human generation, which fails to satisfy the increasingly sophisticated demands. To address the limitations of flexibility and precision in human generation, we introduce ComposeAnyone, a controllable layout-to-human generation method with decoupled multimodal conditions. Specifically, our method allows decoupled control of any part in hand-drawn human layouts using text or reference images, seamlessly integrating them during the generation process. The hand-drawn layout, which utilizes color-blocked geometric shapes such as ellipses and rectangles, can be easily drawn, offering a more flexible and accessible way to define spatial layouts. Additionally, we introduce the ComposeHuman dataset, which provides decoupled text and reference image annotations for different components of each human image, enabling broader applications in human image generation tasks. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that ComposeAnyone generates human images with better alignment to given layouts, text descriptions, and reference images, showcasing its multi-task capability and controllability.

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

To address the bottleneck of accurate user intent interpretation within the current video generation community, we present Any2Caption, a novel framework for controllable video generation under any condition. The key idea is to decouple various condition interpretation steps from the video synthesis step. By leveraging modern multimodal large language models (MLLMs), Any2Caption interprets diverse inputs--text, images, videos, and specialized cues such as region, motion, and camera poses--into dense, structured captions that offer backbone video generators with better guidance. We also introduce Any2CapIns, a large-scale dataset with 337K instances and 407K conditions for any-condition-to-caption instruction tuning. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate significant improvements of our system in controllability and video quality across various aspects of existing video generation models. Project Page: https://sqwu.top/Any2Cap/

Conditional motion generation has been extensively studied in computer vision, yet two critical challenges remain. First, while masked autoregressive methods have recently outperformed diffusion-based approaches, existing masking models lack a mechanism to prioritize dynamic frames and body parts based on given conditions. Second, existing methods for different conditioning modalities often fail to integrate multiple modalities effectively, limiting control and coherence in generated motion. To address these challenges, we propose Motion Anything, a multimodal motion generation framework that introduces an Attention-based Mask Modeling approach, enabling fine-grained spatial and temporal control over key frames and actions. Our model adaptively encodes multimodal conditions, including text and music, improving controllability. Additionally, we introduce Text-Music-Dance (TMD), a new motion dataset consisting of 2,153 pairs of text, music, and dance, making it twice the size of AIST++, thereby filling a critical gap in the community. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Motion Anything surpasses state-of-the-art methods across multiple benchmarks, achieving a 15% improvement in FID on HumanML3D and showing consistent performance gains on AIST++ and TMD. See our project website https://steve-zeyu-zhang.github.io/MotionAnything

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs) have shown significant progress in mathematical reasoning, yet they still face a critical bottleneck with problems requiring visual assistance, such as drawing auxiliary lines or plotting functions to solve the problems. Most LLMs and VLMs are constrained to text-only reasoning chains, while multimodal unified models that can generate interleaved text and images lack the necessary precision and controllability for such tasks. To address this, we propose CodePlot-CoT, a code-driven Chain-of-Thought paradigm for "thinking with images" in mathematics. Our approach leverages the VLM to generate text reasoning as well as executable plotting code, which is then rendered into images as "visual thought", to solve mathematical problems. To achieve this, we first construct Math-VR, the first large-scale, bilingual dataset and benchmark for Mathematics problems with Visual Reasoning, comprising 178K samples. Second, to create high-quality training data, we develop a state-of-the-art image-to-code converter specialized for parsing complex mathematical figures into codes. Finally, using these training data, we train the CodePlot-CoT model for solving mathematical problems. Experimental results show that our model achieves up to 21% increase over base model on our new benchmark, fully validating the efficacy of our proposed code-driven reasoning paradigm. Our work opens a new direction for multimodal mathematical reasoning and provides the community with the first large-scale dataset, comprehensive benchmark, and strong approach for such problems. To facilitate future research, we make our datasets, code, and pretrained models publicly available at https://github.com/HKU-MMLab/Math-VR-CodePlot-CoT.

Generating faithful and readable styled text images (especially for Styled Handwritten Text generation - HTG) is an open problem with several possible applications across graphic design, document understanding, and image editing. A lot of research effort in this task is dedicated to developing strategies that reproduce the stylistic characteristics of a given writer, with promising results in terms of style fidelity and generalization achieved by the recently proposed Autoregressive Transformer paradigm for HTG. However, this method requires additional inputs, lacks a proper stop mechanism, and might end up in repetition loops, generating visual artifacts. In this work, we rethink the autoregressive formulation by framing HTG as a multimodal prompt-conditioned generation task, and tackle the content controllability issues by introducing special textual input tokens for better alignment with the visual ones. Moreover, we devise a Classifier-Free-Guidance-based strategy for our autoregressive model. Through extensive experimental validation, we demonstrate that our approach, dubbed Eruku, compared to previous solutions requires fewer inputs, generalizes better to unseen styles, and follows more faithfully the textual prompt, improving content adherence.

Controllable captioning is essential for precise multimodal alignment and instruction following, yet existing models often lack fine-grained control and reliable evaluation protocols. To address this gap, we present the AnyCap Project, an integrated solution spanning model, dataset, and evaluation. We introduce AnyCapModel (ACM), a lightweight plug-and-play framework that enhances the controllability of existing foundation models for omni-modal captioning without retraining the base model. ACM reuses the original captions from base models while incorporating user instructions and modality features to generate improved captions. To remedy the data scarcity in controllable multimodal captioning, we build AnyCapDataset (ACD), covering three modalities, 28 user-instruction types, and 300\,k high-quality data entries. We further propose AnyCapEval, a new benchmark that provides more reliable evaluation metrics for controllable captioning by decoupling content accuracy and stylistic fidelity. ACM markedly improves caption quality across a diverse set of base models on AnyCapEval. Notably, ACM-8B raises GPT-4o\'s content scores by 45\% and style scores by 12\%, and it also achieves substantial gains on widely used benchmarks such as MIA-Bench and VidCapBench.

The rapid integration of large language model-based agents into recommender systems has driven a shift from static, ranking-based pipelines toward autonomous and interactive systems that can reason, plan, and act. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of this emerging landscape by introducing a unified taxonomy grounded in the level of autonomy and three core paradigms of agentic recommender systems: agent-assisted recommendation, agent-as-recommender, and agent-as-user-simulator. The autonomy framework organizes existing methods along increasing capabilities in proactivity, context awareness, interaction flexibility, and adaptivity. Building on this framework, the survey analyzes how each paradigm adopts different agentic architectures and how agents enhance key components such as profiles, memory, tool use, workflows, and optimization mechanisms. We further examine evaluation methodologies for agentic recommendation, covering automated metrics, LLM-based judging, and simulation-based assessment, and discuss their limitations in capturing reasoning quality, user experience, and system behavior. Beyond existing evaluation protocols, we further discuss unresolved issues in evaluating agentic recommender systems, including trajectory-level assessment, agent contribution analysis, and calibration of user simulation. Lastly, the survey outlines open challenges in lifelong user modeling, contextual abstraction, multimodal alignment, controllability, trustworthiness, privacy, scalability, and efficiency. Together, these analyses establish a unified foundation for understanding the current progress of agentic recommender systems and highlight promising opportunities for developing more autonomous, reliable, and human-aligned recommendation agents.

Recent advances in large language models have enabled natural language to serve as a flexible interface for controlling complex systems, but often at the cost of large-scale multimodal training or weakened domain-specific inductive biases. In structured decision-making domains such as chess, specialized policy networks achieve strong performance but lack semantic controllability, while prompt-conditioned language models are more flexible yet typically exhibit weaker domain grounding. We propose UniMaia, a framework for prompt-conditioned policy modulation that adapts a frozen Lc0-based chess policy network using a parameter-efficient text encoder and a ControlNet-style conditioning mechanism. UniMaia enables semantic control over gameplay, including opening selection and player strength, while preserving the pretrained policy representations. We further introduce UniMaia-Aux, which incorporates auxiliary temporal conditioning and behavioral prediction objectives. To support this work, we construct a large-scale metadata-augmented Lichess dataset, develop a semi-automated prompt-generation pipeline, and introduce benchmarks spanning both prompt-conditioned and metadata-conditioned settings. UniMaia achieves state-of-the-art expected accuracy on several prompt-conditioned benchmarks and competitive top-move accuracy on general instruction-following tasks, while remaining competitive with dedicated metadata-conditioned approaches on human move prediction benchmarks. UniMaia-Aux further improves expected accuracy and behavioral modeling across several evaluation settings, with modest trade-offs in top-move accuracy. Overall, our results demonstrate that prompt-conditioned control of domain-specific policy networks is feasible without end-to-end multimodal training, while highlighting trade-offs between controllability and predictive performance.

Text-to-Audio-Video (T2AV) generation is rapidly becoming a core interface for media creation, yet its evaluation remains fragmented. Existing benchmarks largely assess audio and video in isolation or rely on coarse embedding similarity, failing to capture the fine-grained joint correctness required by realistic prompts. We introduce AVGen-Bench, a task-driven benchmark for T2AV generation featuring high-quality prompts across 11 real-world categories. To support comprehensive assessment, we propose a multi-granular evaluation framework that combines lightweight specialist models with Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), enabling evaluation from perceptual quality to fine-grained semantic controllability. Our evaluation reveals a pronounced gap between strong audio-visual aesthetics and weak semantic reliability, including persistent failures in text rendering, speech coherence, physical reasoning, and a universal breakdown in musical pitch control. Code and benchmark resources are available at http://aka.ms/avgenbench.

Recent photo-realistic 3D talking head via 3D Gaussian Splatting still has significant shortcoming in emotional expression manipulation, especially for fine-grained and expansive dynamics emotional editing using multi-modal control. This paper introduces a new editable 3D Gaussian talking head, i.e. EmoDiffTalk. Our key idea is a novel Emotion-aware Gaussian Diffusion, which includes an action unit (AU) prompt Gaussian diffusion process for fine-grained facial animator, and moreover an accurate text-to-AU emotion controller to provide accurate and expansive dynamic emotional editing using text input. Experiments on public EmoTalk3D and RenderMe-360 datasets demonstrate superior emotional subtlety, lip-sync fidelity, and controllability of our EmoDiffTalk over previous works, establishing a principled pathway toward high-quality, diffusion-driven, multimodal editable 3D talking-head synthesis. To our best knowledge, our EmoDiffTalk is one of the first few 3D Gaussian Splatting talking-head generation framework, especially supporting continuous, multimodal emotional editing within the AU-based expression space.

Current video-to-music (V2M) models lack semantic control and fail to penalize instruction violations, largely due to their reliance on reconstruction objectives and the representational bottleneck of static cross-modal conditioning in Diffusion Autoregressive (DAR) architectures. To resolve this, we introduce VIBE, a novel text-and-video-to-music (T+V2M) generation model that leverages: (1) Conditioning Connection, a depth-wise cross-layer conditioning mechanism that dynamically bridges the planning and diffusion refinement heads and (2) a comprehensive reward modeling taxonomy, optimizing for both hard, verifiable constraints (e.g., tempo, key) and soft, subjective qualities (e.g., musicality, multimodal alignment) with a structured 5-stage training curriculum. Upon evaluation using audio-visual alignment, instruction following, and audio quality metrics, along with a subjective human evaluation study, we observe that VIBE demonstrates enhanced controllability and instruction adherence while performing comparably to most evaluated baselines on generation fidelity and multimodal alignment.

Recent advances in Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have enabled high-quality joint audio-video generation, producing videos with synchronized audio within a single model. However, existing controllable generation frameworks are typically restricted to video-only control. This restricts comprehensive controllability and often leads to suboptimal cross-modal alignment. To bridge this gap, we present MMControl, which enables users to perform Multi-Modal Control in joint audio-video generation. MMControl introduces a dual-stream conditional injection mechanism. It incorporates both visual and acoustic control signals, including reference images, reference audio, depth maps, and pose sequences, into a joint generation process. These conditions are injected through bypass branches into a joint audio-video Diffusion Transformer, enabling the model to simultaneously generate identity-consistent video and timbre-consistent audio under structural constraints. Furthermore, we introduce modality-specific guidance scaling, which allows users to independently and dynamically adjust the influence strength of each visual and acoustic condition at inference time. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MMControl achieves fine-grained, composable control over character identity, voice timbre, body pose, and scene layout in joint audio-video generation.

To enhance the controllability of text-to-image diffusion models, current ControlNet-like models have explored various control signals to dictate image attributes. However, existing methods either handle conditions inefficiently or use a fixed number of conditions, which does not fully address the complexity of multiple conditions and their potential conflicts. This underscores the need for innovative approaches to manage multiple conditions effectively for more reliable and detailed image synthesis. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework, DynamicControl, which supports dynamic combinations of diverse control signals, allowing adaptive selection of different numbers and types of conditions. Our approach begins with a double-cycle controller that generates an initial real score sorting for all input conditions by leveraging pre-trained conditional generation models and discriminative models. This controller evaluates the similarity between extracted conditions and input conditions, as well as the pixel-level similarity with the source image. Then, we integrate a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) to build an efficient condition evaluator. This evaluator optimizes the ordering of conditions based on the double-cycle controller's score ranking. Our method jointly optimizes MLLMs and diffusion models, utilizing MLLMs' reasoning capabilities to facilitate multi-condition text-to-image (T2I) tasks. The final sorted conditions are fed into a parallel multi-control adapter, which learns feature maps from dynamic visual conditions and integrates them to modulate ControlNet, thereby enhancing control over generated images. Through both quantitative and qualitative comparisons, DynamicControl demonstrates its superiority over existing methods in terms of controllability, generation quality and composability under various conditional controls.

Controllable image captioning is an emerging multimodal topic that aims to describe the image with natural language following human purpose, e.g., looking at the specified regions or telling in a particular text style. State-of-the-art methods are trained on annotated pairs of input controls and output captions. However, the scarcity of such well-annotated multimodal data largely limits their usability and scalability for interactive AI systems. Leveraging unimodal instruction-following foundation models is a promising alternative that benefits from broader sources of data. In this paper, we present Caption AnyThing (CAT), a foundation model augmented image captioning framework supporting a wide range of multimodel controls: 1) visual controls, including points, boxes, and trajectories; 2) language controls, such as sentiment, length, language, and factuality. Powered by Segment Anything Model (SAM) and ChatGPT, we unify the visual and language prompts into a modularized framework, enabling the flexible combination between different controls. Extensive case studies demonstrate the user intention alignment capabilities of our framework, shedding light on effective user interaction modeling in vision-language applications. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ttengwang/Caption-Anything.

Controllability plays a crucial role in video generation since it allows users to create desired content. However, existing models largely overlooked the precise control of camera pose that serves as a cinematic language to express deeper narrative nuances. To alleviate this issue, we introduce CameraCtrl, enabling accurate camera pose control for text-to-video(T2V) models. After precisely parameterizing the camera trajectory, a plug-and-play camera module is then trained on a T2V model, leaving others untouched. Additionally, a comprehensive study on the effect of various datasets is also conducted, suggesting that videos with diverse camera distribution and similar appearances indeed enhance controllability and generalization. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of CameraCtrl in achieving precise and domain-adaptive camera control, marking a step forward in the pursuit of dynamic and customized video storytelling from textual and camera pose inputs. Our project website is at: https://hehao13.github.io/projects-CameraCtrl/.

Video synthesis techniques are undergoing rapid progress, with controllability being a significant aspect of practical usability for end-users. Although text condition is an effective way to guide video synthesis, capturing the correct joint distribution between text descriptions and video motion remains a substantial challenge. In this paper, we present a disentangled and unified framework, namely I2VControl, that unifies multiple motion control tasks in image-to-video synthesis. Our approach partitions the video into individual motion units and represents each unit with disentangled control signals, which allows for various control types to be flexibly combined within our single system. Furthermore, our methodology seamlessly integrates as a plug-in for pre-trained models and remains agnostic to specific model architectures. We conduct extensive experiments, achieving excellent performance on various control tasks, and our method further facilitates user-driven creative combinations, enhancing innovation and creativity. The project page is: https://wanquanf.github.io/I2VControl .

The pursuit of controllability as a higher standard of visual content creation has yielded remarkable progress in customizable image synthesis. However, achieving controllable video synthesis remains challenging due to the large variation of temporal dynamics and the requirement of cross-frame temporal consistency. Based on the paradigm of compositional generation, this work presents VideoComposer that allows users to flexibly compose a video with textual conditions, spatial conditions, and more importantly temporal conditions. Specifically, considering the characteristic of video data, we introduce the motion vector from compressed videos as an explicit control signal to provide guidance regarding temporal dynamics. In addition, we develop a Spatio-Temporal Condition encoder (STC-encoder) that serves as a unified interface to effectively incorporate the spatial and temporal relations of sequential inputs, with which the model could make better use of temporal conditions and hence achieve higher inter-frame consistency. Extensive experimental results suggest that VideoComposer is able to control the spatial and temporal patterns simultaneously within a synthesized video in various forms, such as text description, sketch sequence, reference video, or even simply hand-crafted motions. The code and models will be publicly available at https://videocomposer.github.io.

The field of text-to-image (T2I) generation has made significant progress in recent years, largely driven by advancements in diffusion models. Linguistic control enables effective content creation, but struggles with fine-grained control over image generation. This challenge has been explored, to a great extent, by incorporating additional user-supplied spatial conditions, such as depth maps and edge maps, into pre-trained T2I models through extra encoding. However, multi-control image synthesis still faces several challenges. Specifically, current approaches are limited in handling free combinations of diverse input control signals, overlook the complex relationships among multiple spatial conditions, and often fail to maintain semantic alignment with provided textual prompts. This can lead to suboptimal user experiences. To address these challenges, we propose AnyControl, a multi-control image synthesis framework that supports arbitrary combinations of diverse control signals. AnyControl develops a novel Multi-Control Encoder that extracts a unified multi-modal embedding to guide the generation process. This approach enables a holistic understanding of user inputs, and produces high-quality, faithful results under versatile control signals, as demonstrated by extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Our project page is available in https://any-control.github.io.

As generative models become ubiquitous, there is a critical need for fine-grained control over the generation process. Yet, while controlled generation methods from prompting to fine-tuning proliferate, a fundamental question remains unanswered: are these models truly controllable in the first place? In this work, we provide a theoretical framework to formally answer this question. Framing human-model interaction as a control process, we propose a novel algorithm to estimate the controllable sets of models in a dialogue setting. Notably, we provide formal guarantees on the estimation error as a function of sample complexity: we derive probably-approximately correct bounds for controllable set estimates that are distribution-free, employ no assumptions except for output boundedness, and work for any black-box nonlinear control system (i.e., any generative model). We empirically demonstrate the theoretical framework on different tasks in controlling dialogue processes, for both language models and text-to-image generation. Our results show that model controllability is surprisingly fragile and highly dependent on the experimental setting. This highlights the need for rigorous controllability analysis, shifting the focus from simply attempting control to first understanding its fundamental limits.

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

Controllable image synthesis, which enables fine-grained control over generated outputs, has emerged as a key focus in visual generative modeling. However, controllable generation remains challenging for Visual Autoregressive (VAR) models due to their hierarchical, next-scale prediction style. Existing VAR-based methods often suffer from inefficient control encoding and disruptive injection mechanisms that compromise both fidelity and efficiency. In this work, we present SCALAR, a controllable generation method based on VAR, incorporating a novel Scale-wise Conditional Decoding mechanism. SCALAR leverages a pretrained image encoder to extract semantic control signal encodings, which are projected into scale-specific representations and injected into the corresponding layers of the VAR backbone. This design provides persistent and structurally aligned guidance throughout the generation process. Building on SCALAR, we develop SCALAR-Uni, a unified extension that aligns multiple control modalities into a shared latent space, supporting flexible multi-conditional guidance in a single model. Extensive experiments show that SCALAR achieves superior generation quality and control precision across various tasks.

Text-conditional diffusion models are able to generate high-fidelity images with diverse contents. However, linguistic representations frequently exhibit ambiguous descriptions of the envisioned objective imagery, requiring the incorporation of additional control signals to bolster the efficacy of text-guided diffusion models. In this work, we propose Cocktail, a pipeline to mix various modalities into one embedding, amalgamated with a generalized ControlNet (gControlNet), a controllable normalisation (ControlNorm), and a spatial guidance sampling method, to actualize multi-modal and spatially-refined control for text-conditional diffusion models. Specifically, we introduce a hyper-network gControlNet, dedicated to the alignment and infusion of the control signals from disparate modalities into the pre-trained diffusion model. gControlNet is capable of accepting flexible modality signals, encompassing the simultaneous reception of any combination of modality signals, or the supplementary fusion of multiple modality signals. The control signals are then fused and injected into the backbone model according to our proposed ControlNorm. Furthermore, our advanced spatial guidance sampling methodology proficiently incorporates the control signal into the designated region, thereby circumventing the manifestation of undesired objects within the generated image. We demonstrate the results of our method in controlling various modalities, proving high-quality synthesis and fidelity to multiple external signals.

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.

Controllable music generation promotes the interaction between humans and composition systems by projecting the users' intent on their desired music. The challenge of introducing controllability is an increasingly important issue in the symbolic music generation field. When building controllable generative popular multi-instrument music systems, two main challenges typically present themselves, namely weak controllability and poor music quality. To address these issues, we first propose spatiotemporal features as powerful and fine-grained controls to enhance the controllability of the generative model. In addition, an efficient music representation called REMI_Track is designed to convert multitrack music into multiple parallel music sequences and shorten the sequence length of each track with Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) techniques. Subsequently, we release BandControlNet, a conditional model based on parallel Transformers, to tackle the multiple music sequences and generate high-quality music samples that are conditioned to the given spatiotemporal control features. More concretely, the two specially designed modules of BandControlNet, namely structure-enhanced self-attention (SE-SA) and Cross-Track Transformer (CTT), are utilized to strengthen the resulting musical structure and inter-track harmony modeling respectively. Experimental results tested on two popular music datasets of different lengths demonstrate that the proposed BandControlNet outperforms other conditional music generation models on most objective metrics in terms of fidelity and inference speed and shows great robustness in generating long music samples. The subjective evaluations show BandControlNet trained on short datasets can generate music with comparable quality to state-of-the-art models, while outperforming them significantly using longer datasets.

Multimodal machine learning has achieved remarkable progress in a wide range of scenarios. However, the reliability of multimodal learning remains largely unexplored. In this paper, through extensive empirical studies, we identify current multimodal classification methods suffer from unreliable predictive confidence that tend to rely on partial modalities when estimating confidence. Specifically, we find that the confidence estimated by current models could even increase when some modalities are corrupted. To address the issue, we introduce an intuitive principle for multimodal learning, i.e., the confidence should not increase when one modality is removed. Accordingly, we propose a novel regularization technique, i.e., Calibrating Multimodal Learning (CML) regularization, to calibrate the predictive confidence of previous methods. This technique could be flexibly equipped by existing models and improve the performance in terms of confidence calibration, classification accuracy, and model robustness.

Multimodal learning is defined as learning over multiple heterogeneous input modalities such as video, audio, and text. In this work, we are concerned with understanding how models behave as the type of modalities differ between training and deployment, a situation that naturally arises in many applications of multimodal learning to hardware platforms. We present a multimodal robustness framework to provide a systematic analysis of common multimodal representation learning methods. Further, we identify robustness short-comings of these approaches and propose two intervention techniques leading to 1.5times-4times robustness improvements on three datasets, AudioSet, Kinetics-400 and ImageNet-Captions. Finally, we demonstrate that these interventions better utilize additional modalities, if present, to achieve competitive results of 44.2 mAP on AudioSet 20K.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) exhibit strong visual understanding, yet the internal features that cause these behaviors remain difficult to identify, audit, or control. While applicable to post-hoc inspection, hidden states that are decomposed into interpretable feature directions using sparse autoencoders (SAEs) neither readily isolate which features are changed by multimodal training, nor are they directly useful for targeted control. We introduce MMDiff, a multimodal model-diffing framework that trains multimodal SAEs and turns them into feature-level interfaces for discovering and controlling multimodal behavior. MMDiff supports three uses: (i) feature isolation, by diffing a base-LM SAE against its multimodal-adapted counterpart to identify features altered by multimodal training; (ii) task-specific feature detection, via per-token contrastive firing analysis that isolates causal features; and (iii) feature-level control, by causally removing or steering the discovered feature directions. We train multimodal SAEs for three MLLM families, LLaVA-MORE, PaliGemma 2, and InternVL3.5, and evaluate on visual-spatial understanding, multimodal safety, and OCR. MMDiff discovers sparse, causally specific features whose removal selectively degrades target behaviors by an average of 12% on spatial tasks and 17% on OCR, and reduces attack success rate by 24% on multimodal safety attacks, with no impact on VQA performance. Steering these features improves spatial and OCR accuracy by +3.6% and +1.8% on average over a standard single-layer steering baseline. These results show that multimodal SAEs can serve not only as interpretability tools, but as mechanisms for auditing, steering, and controlling MLLMs behavior toward safer and more capable generations.

Recent multimodal face generation models address the spatial control limitations of text-to-image diffusion models by augmenting text-based conditioning with spatial priors such as segmentation masks, sketches, or edge maps. This multimodal fusion enables controllable synthesis aligned with both high-level semantic intent and low-level structural layout. However, most existing approaches typically extend pre-trained text-to-image pipelines by appending auxiliary control modules or stitching together separate uni-modal networks. These ad hoc designs inherit architectural constraints, duplicate parameters, and often fail under conflicting modalities or mismatched latent spaces, limiting their ability to perform synergistic fusion across semantic and spatial domains. We introduce MMFace-DiT, a unified dual-stream diffusion transformer engineered for synergistic multimodal face synthesis. Its core novelty lies in a dual-stream transformer block that processes spatial (mask/sketch) and semantic (text) tokens in parallel, deeply fusing them through a shared Rotary Position-Embedded (RoPE) Attention mechanism. This design prevents modal dominance and ensures strong adherence to both text and structural priors to achieve unprecedented spatial-semantic consistency for controllable face generation. Furthermore, a novel Modality Embedder enables a single cohesive model to dynamically adapt to varying spatial conditions without retraining. MMFace-DiT achieves a 40% improvement in visual fidelity and prompt alignment over six state-of-the-art multimodal face generation models, establishing a flexible new paradigm for end-to-end controllable generative modeling. The code and dataset are available on our project page: https://vcbsl.github.io/MMFace-DiT/

Within recent approaches to text-to-video (T2V) generation, achieving controllability in the synthesized video is often a challenge. Typically, this issue is addressed by providing low-level per-frame guidance in the form of edge maps, depth maps, or an existing video to be altered. However, the process of obtaining such guidance can be labor-intensive. This paper focuses on enhancing controllability in video synthesis by employing straightforward bounding boxes to guide the subject in various ways, all without the need for neural network training, finetuning, optimization at inference time, or the use of pre-existing videos. Our algorithm, TrailBlazer, is constructed upon a pre-trained (T2V) model, and easy to implement. The subject is directed by a bounding box through the proposed spatial and temporal attention map editing. Moreover, we introduce the concept of keyframing, allowing the subject trajectory and overall appearance to be guided by both a moving bounding box and corresponding prompts, without the need to provide a detailed mask. The method is efficient, with negligible additional computation relative to the underlying pre-trained model. Despite the simplicity of the bounding box guidance, the resulting motion is surprisingly natural, with emergent effects including perspective and movement toward the virtual camera as the box size increases.

To enhance controllability in text-to-image generation, ControlNet introduces image-based control signals, while ControlNet++ improves pixel-level cycle consistency between generated images and the input control signal. To avoid the prohibitive cost of back-propagating through the sampling process, ControlNet++ optimizes only low-noise timesteps (e.g., t < 200) using a single-step approximation, which not only ignores the contribution of high-noise timesteps but also introduces additional approximation errors. A straightforward alternative for optimizing controllability across all timesteps is Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), a fine-tuning method that increases model preference for more controllable images (I^{w}) over less controllable ones (I^{l}). However, due to uncertainty in generative models, it is difficult to ensure that win--lose image pairs differ only in controllability while keeping other factors, such as image quality, fixed. To address this, we propose performing preference learning over control conditions rather than generated images. Specifically, we construct winning and losing control signals, c^{w} and c^{l}, and train the model to prefer c^{w}. This method, which we term Condition Preference Optimization (CPO), eliminates confounding factors and yields a low-variance training objective. Our approach theoretically exhibits lower contrastive loss variance than DPO and empirically achieves superior results. Moreover, CPO requires less computation and storage for dataset curation. Extensive experiments show that CPO significantly improves controllability over the state-of-the-art ControlNet++ across multiple control types: over 10% error rate reduction in segmentation, 70--80% in human pose, and consistent 2--5% reductions in edge and depth maps.

Multimodal agents (MMAs) sustain interaction through reasoning, memory, tools, and feedback, most visibly as computer-use agents, while robotic systems (RSs) couple sensing and actuation under physical dynamics. We define multimodal embodied agents (MMEAs) as goal-directed systems that couple multimodal task reasoning with physical action and revise decisions from the resulting feedback. This raises a central question: what changes when a multimodal agent moves from computer-use to robot-use? We introduce PAPAV, a unified capability-centric framework of five recurring functions: Perceive the current state, Anticipate action effects, Plan a feasible course, Act through an interface or body, and Verify the outcome. Defined by function rather than architecture, these capabilities let PAPAV identify what all three share and then compare MMEAs with MMAs and with RSs. Five physical constraints, from partial observability to unverifiable outcomes, leave fewer choices fixed in advance and less room to reverse errors. Across 64 benchmarks, explicit evaluation centers on Act; only 5 assess Anticipate and 3 assess Verify, leaving both largely hidden behind task success. These constraints also frame the open challenges we identify. PAPAV therefore provides a common basis for designing reliable physical agents and measuring progress across all five capabilities rather than task success alone.

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.

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

A central aspiration of mechanistic interpretability is controllability: if we know where a behavior is represented in a model's activations, we should be able to modify it. This rests on a hidden premise -- that the direction which detects a behavior and the direction which controls it are the same, or close. We test this geometrically: what is the angle between the direction that best detects a behavior and the one that best causes it? If detection implies control the cosine is near 1; otherwise it quantifies a detection-intervention gap. On Gemma 2-2B-it, output format (clean JSON vs markdown fencing) collapses both roles onto one axis. Hallucination does not: the model detects fake entities with perfect linear separability (AUC = 1.000 from layer 5), yet that direction sits at cos = 0.12 (about 83 degrees) from the direction producing a refusal -- a small, reproducible alignment, far from the cos = 1 that "detection is control" would require. A detector built from activations, with no chosen tokens, likewise fails to align (cos = -0.06). The gap generalizes: across four models from three families and two scales (1B-9B), cos stays in [0.12, 0.20], identical before and after instruction tuning (0.1197 vs 0.1200), placing its origin in pretraining. A 15-degree rotation toward the refusal direction partially bridges it -- 73% and 60% refusal on two held-out fake-entity categories at 1.8% false positives. We then ask whether this cosine predicts steerability, and it does not: detection is a high-dimensional class, not a single direction, and what separates the steerable case is functional, not readable from a static angle. The cosine is a weight-computable signature of the dissociation between knowing and steering, not a predictor of it.

Text-to-image diffusion generative models can generate high quality images at the cost of tedious prompt engineering. Controllability can be improved by introducing layout conditioning, however existing methods lack layout editing ability and fine-grained control over object attributes. The concept of multi-layer generation holds great potential to address these limitations, however generating image instances concurrently to scene composition limits control over fine-grained object attributes, relative positioning in 3D space and scene manipulation abilities. In this work, we propose a novel multi-stage generation paradigm that is designed for fine-grained control, flexibility and interactivity. To ensure control over instance attributes, we devise a novel training paradigm to adapt a diffusion model to generate isolated scene components as RGBA images with transparency information. To build complex images, we employ these pre-generated instances and introduce a multi-layer composite generation process that smoothly assembles components in realistic scenes. Our experiments show that our RGBA diffusion model is capable of generating diverse and high quality instances with precise control over object attributes. Through multi-layer composition, we demonstrate that our approach allows to build and manipulate images from highly complex prompts with fine-grained control over object appearance and location, granting a higher degree of control than competing methods.

Are concepts and mechanisms unified across modalities in current AI models, or instead implemented separately for each one? We operationalize this broad question of modality unification by studying cross-modal steering: 1) finding vectors that successfully steer generation on tokens of one modality, which then 2) transfer zero-shot to steer generation when added to tokens of another modality. Our study goes beyond simple correlational alignment (e.g. representational similarity) because steering is fundamentally causal. We study cross-modal steering in several unified multimodal models (UMMs), since they possess shared parameters for language and image generation, focusing on these two modalities. Across diverse steered concepts such as emotion and object size, we show that steering vectors transfer zero-shot in both directions (text-to-image & image-to-text). Even for concepts that are highly unique to one modality (e.g. formal vs. colloquial language), steering vectors often induce a consistent, interpretable effect in the other modality, such as formal clothing and design. This transfer has a geometric signature too: despite a clear modality gap separating text and image representations, steering vectors with strong cross-modal transferability tend to point in similar directions for the same concept. Our findings shed light on how vision and language interact inside unified multimodal models and point towards more general, modality-agnostic approaches for controlling their behavior.

Safety in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) depends on unsafe multimodal data for post-training alignment or activation steering. However, such data is hard to collect, must be gathered anew for each modality, and its collection and distribution raise ethical and legal concerns. In this work, we relax this constraint and investigate whether textual refusal directions, extracted directly from the LLM backbone, generalize across modalities (i.e., image, video). Preliminary findings confirm this ability, though effectiveness is conditioned by layer selection, steering strength, and cross-modal alignment, with the latter causing safe multimodal inputs to be spuriously steered toward refusal. Building on this, we introduce Modality-Agnostic Refusal Steering (MARS), a lightweight training-free approach that injects multimodal safety without the need for multimodal safety data. MARS corrects modality misalignment via activation centering, adaptively scales steering strength within a geometrically defined trust region, and selects the optimal intervention layer, operating at the first generated token. Evaluated on five SOTA MLLMs across safety, utility, and video jailbreak, MARS achieves consistent safety gains while preserving utility up to over-refusal. MARS reveals that safety-relevant structure is shared across modalities and that textual refusal directions are a powerful and underexplored foundation for multimodal alignment.

Robotic systems often exhibit unstable modes, along which small perturbations and disturbances can cause unbounded growth unless corrected through feedback. Controlling such systems from high-dimensional visual observations requires representations that preserve these modes. Joint-embedding predictive architectures (JEPAs) provide a natural framework for learning such representations and their dynamics from visual data. However, we demonstrate that next step prediction combined with anti-collapse regularization does not guarantee that controllable unstable modes are preserved: the training loss can be minimized while these modes are collapsed, making stabilization from the learned representation impossible. To address this, we augment world-model training with an action reconstruction objective (i.e., an inverse dynamics loss) that encourages control-aware representations, namely, visual representations that preserve crucial features for control. We prove that exact action reconstruction makes the encoder injective on the finite-horizon reachable subspace. Thus, the encoder cannot discard any state direction reachable by an action sequence within H steps. Moreover, we show that, as H grows, the dominant eigenspace of the finite-horizon controllability Gramian converges to the controllable unstable subspace. We establish our theoretical results for linear systems and demonstrate empirically that our findings extend to nonlinear visual control tasks (CartPole, Walker2D, and PointMaze), highlighting the benefits of control-aware representation learning.

Multimodal learning helps to comprehensively understand the world, by integrating different senses. Accordingly, multiple input modalities are expected to boost model performance, but we actually find that they are not fully exploited even when the multimodal model outperforms its uni-modal counterpart. Specifically, in this paper we point out that existing multimodal discriminative models, in which uniform objective is designed for all modalities, could remain under-optimized uni-modal representations, caused by another dominated modality in some scenarios, e.g., sound in blowing wind event, vision in drawing picture event, etc. To alleviate this optimization imbalance, we propose on-the-fly gradient modulation to adaptively control the optimization of each modality, via monitoring the discrepancy of their contribution towards the learning objective. Further, an extra Gaussian noise that changes dynamically is introduced to avoid possible generalization drop caused by gradient modulation. As a result, we achieve considerable improvement over common fusion methods on different multimodal tasks, and this simple strategy can also boost existing multimodal methods, which illustrates its efficacy and versatility. The source code is available at https://github.com/GeWu-Lab/OGM-GE_CVPR2022.

In recent years, significant progress has been made in the development of text-to-image generation models. However, these models still face limitations when it comes to achieving full controllability during the generation process. Often, specific training or the use of limited models is required, and even then, they have certain restrictions. To address these challenges, A two-stage method that effectively combines controllability and high quality in the generation of images is proposed. This approach leverages the expertise of pre-trained models to achieve precise control over the generated images, while also harnessing the power of diffusion models to achieve state-of-the-art quality. By separating controllability from high quality, This method achieves outstanding results. It is compatible with both latent and image space diffusion models, ensuring versatility and flexibility. Moreover, This approach consistently produces comparable outcomes to the current state-of-the-art methods in the field. Overall, This proposed method represents a significant advancement in text-to-image generation, enabling improved controllability without compromising on the quality of the generated images.

Behavioral cloning becomes challenging when the same observation admits several valid actions. We study how generative behavioral-cloning policies represent such multimodal expert behavior and identify different bottlenecks across model parameterizations. For latent-variable policies, preserving demonstrated modes requires action-conditioned information in the latent representation. Excessive posterior-prior regularization can suppress this information and prevent the policy from distinguishing demonstrated modes. Weaker or aggregate regularization can preserve mode information, but shifts the challenge to ensuring that the deployment-time prior covers the relevant latent regions. For action-space generative policies, multimodality is constrained by the smoothness of the base-to-action transport: a map with a small Lipschitz constant cannot assign substantial probability to many well-separated modes. Covering many modes therefore requires either sharp transitions in base space or off-support bridge regions in action space. Experiments on synthetic multimodal navigation and a physical-robot bimodal manipulation task support these mechanisms. In contrast, our analysis reveals limited conditional multimodality in standard robotic simulation benchmarks, where deterministic regression remains competitive.

We present OmniBooth, an image generation framework that enables spatial control with instance-level multi-modal customization. For all instances, the multimodal instruction can be described through text prompts or image references. Given a set of user-defined masks and associated text or image guidance, our objective is to generate an image, where multiple objects are positioned at specified coordinates and their attributes are precisely aligned with the corresponding guidance. This approach significantly expands the scope of text-to-image generation, and elevates it to a more versatile and practical dimension in controllability. In this paper, our core contribution lies in the proposed latent control signals, a high-dimensional spatial feature that provides a unified representation to integrate the spatial, textual, and image conditions seamlessly. The text condition extends ControlNet to provide instance-level open-vocabulary generation. The image condition further enables fine-grained control with personalized identity. In practice, our method empowers users with more flexibility in controllable generation, as users can choose multi-modal conditions from text or images as needed. Furthermore, thorough experiments demonstrate our enhanced performance in image synthesis fidelity and alignment across different tasks and datasets. Project page: https://len-li.github.io/omnibooth-web/

Controllable video generation remains challenging due to the difficulty of specifying precise multi-object interactions using text prompts or motion-control inputs that primarily constrain pixel movement. In practice, trajectory-based control often requires users to draw accurate tracks for multiple objects, which scales poorly with scene complexity and becomes ambiguous under occlusion or overlap. To enable flexible yet precise multi-subject control, we introduce GraphVid, a graph-conditioned image-to-video generation model that enables interactive control through structured interaction graphs. We further curate GraphVid-Bench, a large-scale interaction-centric video dataset with structured relational annotations to enable training of interaction-aware video generation models. Despite using substantially less training data and fewer trainable parameters than prior motion-control methods, GraphVid delivers strong controllability and video quality. Compared with Motion-I2V, GraphVid reduces FID by up to 39.9% and FVD by 37.6%, while improving PSNR (9.87=>15.98) and SSIM (0.38=>0.61). Our results highlight the potential of structured semantic interfaces as a powerful paradigm for controllable video generation.

Prompt engineering is crucial for deploying LLMs but is poorly understood mathematically. We formalize LLM systems as a class of discrete stochastic dynamical systems to explore prompt engineering through the lens of control theory. We investigate the reachable set of output token sequences R_y(mathbf x_0) for which there exists a control input sequence mathbf u for each mathbf y in R_y(mathbf x_0) that steers the LLM to output mathbf y from initial state sequence mathbf x_0. We offer analytic analysis on the limitations on the controllability of self-attention in terms of reachable set, where we prove an upper bound on the reachable set of outputs R_y(mathbf x_0) as a function of the singular values of the parameter matrices. We present complementary empirical analysis on the controllability of a panel of LLMs, including Falcon-7b, Llama-7b, and Falcon-40b. Our results demonstrate a lower bound on the reachable set of outputs R_y(mathbf x_0) w.r.t. initial state sequences mathbf x_0 sampled from the Wikitext dataset. We find that the correct next Wikitext token following sequence mathbf x_0 is reachable over 97% of the time with prompts of kleq 10 tokens. We also establish that the top 75 most likely next tokens, as estimated by the LLM itself, are reachable at least 85% of the time with prompts of kleq 10 tokens. Intriguingly, short prompt sequences can dramatically alter the likelihood of specific outputs, even making the least likely tokens become the most likely ones. This control-centric analysis of LLMs demonstrates the significant and poorly understood role of input sequences in steering output probabilities, offering a foundational perspective for enhancing language model system capabilities.

Cross-modal learning, i.e., learning to predict one modality from another, is a fundamental mechanism for self-supervision via leveraging multimodality. Many practical applications, e.g., deploying a household robot, involve devices that are equipped with a rich set of sensors that enable multimodal sensing in their test environment. This presents an opportunity to apply cross-modal learning to the multimodal data sensed by these devices to learn representations. Findings in developmental psychology also suggest that biological agents leverage it to build an effective representation of their surroundings. To study this, we propose a controlled setup, where we restrict a user device to just a given test environment. It results in a specialization setup where we attempt to develop a performant model for this specific test environment. Under this setup, we develop Test-Space Training (TST), which performs multimodal data collection in the test environment and performs self-supervised pre-training on it. We evaluate these models on various downstream tasks in the same environment. Under this setup, we find various interesting insights, such as collecting rich multimodal data only from the test environment and leveraging cross-modal learning, we can achieve competitive results with generalist models (e.g., DINOv2 and CLIP) pre-trained on large-scale internet datasets. This enables an alternative scenario where the need for external Internet-scale datasets for pre-training models is reduced. We also present a set of analyses and ablations that raise intriguing points on substituting data with (multi)modality, and how varying pre-training data enables a tradeoff between a model's abilities to specialise to a test environment, and generalize to held-out spaces.

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

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

Motion-controllable image animation is a fundamental task with a wide range of potential applications. Recent works have made progress in controlling camera or object motion via various motion representations, while they still struggle to support collaborative camera and object motion control with adaptive control granularity. To this end, we introduce 3D-aware motion representation and propose an image animation framework, called Perception-as-Control, to achieve fine-grained collaborative motion control. Specifically, we construct 3D-aware motion representation from a reference image, manipulate it based on interpreted user intentions, and perceive it from different viewpoints. In this way, camera and object motions are transformed into intuitive, consistent visual changes. Then, the proposed framework leverages the perception results as motion control signals, enabling it to support various motion-related video synthesis tasks in a unified and flexible way. Experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework. For more details and qualitative results, please refer to our project webpage: https://chen-yingjie.github.io/projects/Perception-as-Control.

Recent advances in motion diffusion models have enabled spatially controllable text-to-motion generation. However, these models struggle to achieve high-precision control while maintaining high-quality motion generation. To address these challenges, we propose MaskControl, the first approach to introduce controllability to the generative masked motion model. Our approach introduces two key innovations. First, Logits Regularizer implicitly perturbs logits at training time to align the distribution of motion tokens with the controlled joint positions, while regularizing the categorical token prediction to ensure high-fidelity generation. Second, Logit Optimization explicitly optimizes the predicted logits during inference time, directly reshaping the token distribution that forces the generated motion to accurately align with the controlled joint positions. Moreover, we introduce Differentiable Expectation Sampling (DES) to combat the non-differential distribution sampling process encountered by logits regularizer and optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MaskControl outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior motion quality (FID decreases by ~77\%) and higher control precision (average error 0.91 vs. 1.08). Additionally, MaskControl enables diverse applications, including any-joint-any-frame control, body-part timeline control, and zero-shot objective control. Video visualization can be found at https://www.ekkasit.com/ControlMM-page/

While generative video models have achieved remarkable fidelity and consistency, applying these capabilities to video editing remains a complex challenge. Recent research has explored motion controllability as a means to enhance text-to-video generation or image animation; however, we identify precise motion control as a promising yet under-explored paradigm for editing existing videos. In this work, we propose modifying video motion by directly editing sparse trajectories extracted from the input. We term the deviation between input and output trajectories a "motion edit" and demonstrate that this representation, when coupled with a generative backbone, enables powerful video editing capabilities. To achieve this, we introduce a pipeline for generating "motion counterfactuals", video pairs that share identical content but distinct motion, and we fine-tune a motion-conditioned video diffusion architecture on this dataset. Our approach allows for edits that start at any timestamp and propagate naturally. In a four-way head-to-head user study, our model achieves over 65 percent preference against prior work. Please see our project page: https://ryanndagreat.github.io/MotionV2V

The field of Text-to-Speech has experienced huge improvements last years benefiting from deep learning techniques. Producing realistic speech becomes possible now. As a consequence, the research on the control of the expressiveness, allowing to generate speech in different styles or manners, has attracted increasing attention lately. Systems able to control style have been developed and show impressive results. However the control parameters often consist of latent variables and remain complex to interpret. In this paper, we analyze and compare different latent spaces and obtain an interpretation of their influence on expressive speech. This will enable the possibility to build controllable speech synthesis systems with an understandable behaviour.

Slider-based control aims to give users continuous, fine-grained control over the intensity of individual edits in instruction-based image editing. However, existing approaches fail to deliver reliable continuous controllability: traversing a slider can produce abrupt visual jumps and non-monotonic changes, while jointly controlled sliders can interfere with one another. To systematically study these limitations, we introduce SlideBench, a comprehensive benchmark for continuous image editing spanning diverse editing categories and equipped with a unified suite of metrics quantifying monotonic progression, perceptual continuity, and inter-slider disentanglement. Building on these observations, we propose SliderEdit++, which explicitly regularizes the intermediate editing trajectory rather than supervising only its endpoints. Our method combines velocity- and semantic-space trajectory regularization with spectral control to encourage smooth, predictable slider traversal, together with a disentanglement objective that reduces interference between independently controlled edits. On SlideBench, SliderEdit++ achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving the overall score by 18.5% relative to the strongest baseline. At the same time, using a few-step editing backbone makes our method approximately 3x to 20x faster than existing slider-based approaches, enabling substantially more responsive interactive editing.

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

Image-to-Video (I2V) generation aims to synthesize a video clip according to a given image and condition (e.g., text). The key challenge of this task lies in simultaneously generating natural motions while preserving the original appearance of the images. However, current I2V diffusion models (I2V-DMs) often produce videos with limited motion degrees or exhibit uncontrollable motion that conflicts with the textual condition. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Extrapolating and Decoupling framework, which introduces model merging techniques to the I2V domain for the first time. Specifically, our framework consists of three separate stages: (1) Starting with a base I2V-DM, we explicitly inject the textual condition into the temporal module using a lightweight, learnable adapter and fine-tune the integrated model to improve motion controllability. (2) We introduce a training-free extrapolation strategy to amplify the dynamic range of the motion, effectively reversing the fine-tuning process to enhance the motion degree significantly. (3) With the above two-stage models excelling in motion controllability and degree, we decouple the relevant parameters associated with each type of motion ability and inject them into the base I2V-DM. Since the I2V-DM handles different levels of motion controllability and dynamics at various denoising time steps, we adjust the motion-aware parameters accordingly over time. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the superiority of our framework over existing methods.

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

Video inbetweening creates smooth and natural transitions between two image frames, making it an indispensable tool for video editing and long-form video synthesis. Existing works in this domain are unable to generate large, complex, or intricate motions. In particular, they cannot accommodate the versatility of user intents and generally lack fine control over the details of intermediate frames, leading to misalignment with the creative mind. To fill these gaps, we introduce MultiCOIN, a video inbetweening framework that allows multi-modal controls, including depth transition and layering, motion trajectories, text prompts, and target regions for movement localization, while achieving a balance between flexibility, ease of use, and precision for fine-grained video interpolation. To achieve this, we adopt the Diffusion Transformer (DiT) architecture as our video generative model, due to its proven capability to generate high-quality long videos. To ensure compatibility between DiT and our multi-modal controls, we map all motion controls into a common sparse and user-friendly point-based representation as the video/noise input. Further, to respect the variety of controls which operate at varying levels of granularity and influence, we separate content controls and motion controls into two branches to encode the required features before guiding the denoising process, resulting in two generators, one for motion and the other for content. Finally, we propose a stage-wise training strategy to ensure that our model learns the multi-modal controls smoothly. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that multi-modal controls enable a more dynamic, customizable, and contextually accurate visual narrative.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown impressive reasoning abilities and general intelligence in various domains. It inspires researchers to train end-to-end MLLMs or utilize large models to generate policies with human-selected prompts for embodied agents. However, these methods exhibit limited generalization capabilities on unseen tasks or scenarios, and overlook the multimodal environment information which is critical for robots to make decisions. In this paper, we introduce a novel Robotic Multimodal Perception-Planning (RoboMP^2) framework for robotic manipulation which consists of a Goal-Conditioned Multimodal Preceptor (GCMP) and a Retrieval-Augmented Multimodal Planner (RAMP). Specially, GCMP captures environment states by employing a tailored MLLMs for embodied agents with the abilities of semantic reasoning and localization. RAMP utilizes coarse-to-fine retrieval method to find the k most-relevant policies as in-context demonstrations to enhance the planner. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of RoboMP^2 on both VIMA benchmark and real-world tasks, with around 10% improvement over the baselines.

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

The field has made significant progress in synthesizing realistic human motion driven by various modalities. Yet, the need for different methods to animate various body parts according to different control signals limits the scalability of these techniques in practical scenarios. In this paper, we introduce a cohesive and scalable approach that consolidates multimodal (text, music, speech) and multi-part (hand, torso) human motion generation. Our methodology unfolds in several steps: We begin by quantizing the motions of diverse body parts into separate codebooks tailored to their respective domains. Next, we harness the robust capabilities of pre-trained models to transcode multimodal signals into a shared latent space. We then translate these signals into discrete motion tokens by iteratively predicting subsequent tokens to form a complete sequence. Finally, we reconstruct the continuous actual motion from this tokenized sequence. Our method frames the multimodal motion generation challenge as a token prediction task, drawing from specialized codebooks based on the modality of the control signal. This approach is inherently scalable, allowing for the easy integration of new modalities. Extensive experiments demonstrated the effectiveness of our design, emphasizing its potential for broad application.

Controlling video and audio generation requires diverse modalities, from depth and pose to camera trajectories and audio transformations, yet existing approaches either train a single monolithic model for a fixed set of controls or introduce costly architectural changes for each new modality. We introduce AVControl, a lightweight, extendable framework built on LTX-2, a joint audio-visual foundation model, where each control modality is trained as a separate LoRA on a parallel canvas that provides the reference signal as additional tokens in the attention layers, requiring no architectural changes beyond the LoRA adapters themselves. We show that simply extending image-based in-context methods to video fails for structural control, and that our parallel canvas approach resolves this. On the VACE Benchmark, we outperform all evaluated baselines on depth- and pose-guided generation, inpainting, and outpainting, and show competitive results on camera control and audio-visual benchmarks. Our framework supports a diverse set of independently trained modalities: spatially-aligned controls such as depth, pose, and edges, camera trajectory with intrinsics, sparse motion control, video editing, and, to our knowledge, the first modular audio-visual controls for a joint generation model. Our method is both compute- and data-efficient: each modality requires only a small dataset and converges within a few hundred to a few thousand training steps, a fraction of the budget of monolithic alternatives. We publicly release our code and trained LoRA checkpoints.

Recent video diffusion models have made remarkable strides in visual quality, yet precise, fine-grained control remains a key bottleneck that limits practical customizability for content creation. For AI video creators, three forms of control are crucial: (i) scene composition, (ii) multi-view consistent subject customization, and (iii) camera-pose or object-motion adjustment. Existing methods typically handle these dimensions in isolation, with limited support for multi-view subject synthesis and identity preservation under arbitrary pose changes. This lack of a unified architecture makes it difficult to support versatile, jointly controllable video. We introduce Tri-Prompting, a unified framework and two-stage training paradigm that integrates scene composition, multi-view subject consistency, and motion control. Our approach leverages a dual-condition motion module driven by 3D tracking points for background scenes and downsampled RGB cues for foreground subjects. To ensure a balance between controllability and visual realism, we further propose an inference ControlNet scale schedule. Tri-Prompting supports novel workflows, including 3D-aware subject insertion into any scenes and manipulation of existing subjects in an image. Experimental results demonstrate that Tri-Prompting significantly outperforms specialized baselines such as Phantom and DaS in multi-view subject identity, 3D consistency, and motion accuracy.

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

With the rapid development of AI-generated content (AIGC), video generation has emerged as one of its most dynamic and impactful subfields. In particular, the advancement of video generation foundation models has led to growing demand for controllable video generation methods that can more accurately reflect user intent. Most existing foundation models are designed for text-to-video generation, where text prompts alone are often insufficient to express complex, multi-modal, and fine-grained user requirements. This limitation makes it challenging for users to generate videos with precise control using current models. To address this issue, recent research has explored the integration of additional non-textual conditions, such as camera motion, depth maps, and human pose, to extend pretrained video generation models and enable more controllable video synthesis. These approaches aim to enhance the flexibility and practical applicability of AIGC-driven video generation systems. In this survey, we provide a systematic review of controllable video generation, covering both theoretical foundations and recent advances in the field. We begin by introducing the key concepts and commonly used open-source video generation models. We then focus on control mechanisms in video diffusion models, analyzing how different types of conditions can be incorporated into the denoising process to guide generation. Finally, we categorize existing methods based on the types of control signals they leverage, including single-condition generation, multi-condition generation, and universal controllable generation. For a complete list of the literature on controllable video generation reviewed, please visit our curated repository at https://github.com/mayuelala/Awesome-Controllable-Video-Generation.

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

There is a high demand for audio-visual editing in video post-production and the film making field. While numerous models have explored audio and video editing, they struggle with object-level audio-visual operations. Specifically, object-level audio-visual editing requires the ability to perform object addition, replacement, and removal across both audio and visual modalities, while preserving the structural information of the source instances during the editing process. In this paper, we present Object-AVEdit, achieving the object-level audio-visual editing based on the inversion-regeneration paradigm. To achieve the object-level controllability during editing, we develop a word-to-sounding-object well-aligned audio generation model, bridging the gap in object-controllability between audio and current video generation models. Meanwhile, to achieve the better structural information preservation and object-level editing effect, we propose an inversion-regeneration holistically-optimized editing algorithm, ensuring both information retention during the inversion and better regeneration effect. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our editing model achieved advanced results in both audio-video object-level editing tasks with fine audio-visual semantic alignment. In addition, our developed audio generation model also achieved advanced performance. More results on our project page: https://gewu-lab.github.io/Object_AVEdit-website/.

Nonverbal vocalizations (NVVs), such as laughing, sighing, and sobbing, are essential for human-like speech, yet standardized evaluation rarely jointly assesses whether systems generate the intended NVVs, place them correctly, and keep them salient without harming speech. We present NVV-SuperBench, a bilingual English/Chinese benchmark for speech generation with NVVs. It provides a unified 45-type taxonomy and a multi-axis protocol beyond conventional speech quality assessment, evaluating NVV-specific controllability, placement, and perceptual salience. We benchmark 15 speech generation systems spanning prompt-based and tag-based control paradigms, using objective metrics, human listening tests, and LLM-based multi-rater evaluation. Results show that NVV controllability often decouples from speech quality, while low-SNR oral cues and long-duration affective NVVs remain bottlenecks. NVV-SuperBench highlights current gaps and supports progress toward more human-like speech generation.

Multimodal learning typically relies on the assumption that all modalities are fully available during both the training and inference phases. However, in real-world scenarios, consistently acquiring complete multimodal data presents significant challenges due to various factors. This often leads to the issue of missing modalities, where data for certain modalities are absent, posing considerable obstacles not only for the availability of multimodal pretrained models but also for their fine-tuning and the preservation of robustness in downstream tasks. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework integrating parameter-efficient fine-tuning of unimodal pretrained models with a self-supervised joint-embedding learning method. This framework enables the model to predict the embedding of a missing modality in the representation space during inference. Our method effectively predicts the missing embedding through prompt tuning, leveraging information from available modalities. We evaluate our approach on several multimodal benchmark datasets and demonstrate its effectiveness and robustness across various scenarios of missing modalities.

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

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

Generating realistic human motion from given action descriptions has experienced significant advancements because of the emerging requirement of digital humans. While recent works have achieved impressive results in generating motion directly from textual action descriptions, they often support only a single modality of the control signal, which limits their application in the real digital human industry. This paper presents a Motion General-Purpose generaTor (MotionGPT) that can use multimodal control signals, e.g., text and single-frame poses, for generating consecutive human motions by treating multimodal signals as special input tokens in large language models (LLMs). Specifically, we first quantize multimodal control signals into discrete codes and then formulate them in a unified prompt instruction to ask the LLMs to generate the motion answer. Our MotionGPT demonstrates a unified human motion generation model with multimodal control signals by tuning a mere 0.4% of LLM parameters. To the best of our knowledge, MotionGPT is the first method to generate human motion by multimodal control signals, which we hope can shed light on this new direction. Codes shall be released upon acceptance.