Daily Papers

Modern medicine generates vast multimodal data across siloed systems, yet no existing model integrates the full breadth and temporal depth of the clinical record into a unified patient representation. We introduce Apollo, a multimodal temporal foundation model trained and evaluated on over three decades of longitudinal hospital records from a major US hospital system, composed of 25 billion records from 7.2 million patients, representing 28 distinct medical modalities and 12 major medical specialties. Apollo learns a unified representation space integrating over 100 thousand unique medical events in our clinical vocabulary as well as images and clinical text. This "atlas of medical concepts" forms a computational substrate for modeling entire patient care journeys comprised of sequences of structured and unstructured events, which are compressed by Apollo into virtual patient representations. To assess the potential of these whole-patient representations, we created 322 prognosis and retrieval tasks from a held-out test set of 1.4 million patients. We demonstrate the generalized clinical forecasting potential of Apollo embeddings, including predicting new disease onset risk up to five years in advance (95 tasks), disease progression (78 tasks), treatment response (59 tasks), risk of treatment-related adverse events (17 tasks), and hospital operations endpoints (12 tasks). Using feature attribution techniques, we show that model predictions align with clinically-interpretable multimodal biomarkers. We evaluate semantic similarity search on 61 retrieval tasks, and moreover demonstrate the potential of Apollo as a multimodal medical search engine using text and image queries. Together, these modeling capabilities establish the foundation for computable medicine, where the full context of patient care becomes accessible to computational reasoning.

Earth observation data presents a unique challenge: it is spatial like images, sequential like video or text, and highly multimodal. We present OlmoEarth: a multimodal, spatio-temporal foundation model that employs a novel self-supervised learning formulation, masking strategy, and loss all designed for the Earth observation domain. OlmoEarth achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to 12 other foundation models across a variety of research benchmarks and real-world tasks from external partners. When evaluating embeddings OlmoEarth achieves the best performance on 15 out of 24 tasks, and with full fine-tuning it is the best on 19 of 29 tasks. We deploy OlmoEarth as the backbone of an end-to-end platform for data collection, labeling, training, and inference of Earth observation models. The OlmoEarth Platform puts frontier foundation models and powerful data management tools into the hands of non-profits and NGOs working to solve the world's biggest problems. OlmoEarth source code, training data, and pre-trained weights are available at https://github.com/allenai/olmoearth_pretrain{https://github.com/allenai/olmoearth_pretrain}.

Existing benchmarks often highlight the remarkable performance achieved by state-of-the-art Multimodal Foundation Models (MFMs) in leveraging temporal context for video understanding. However, how well do the models truly perform visual temporal reasoning? Our study of existing benchmarks shows that this capability of MFMs is likely overestimated as many questions can be solved by using a single, few, or out-of-order frames. To systematically examine current visual temporal reasoning tasks, we propose three principles with corresponding metrics: (1) Multi-Frame Gain, (2) Frame Order Sensitivity, and (3) Frame Information Disparity. Following these principles, we introduce TOMATO, Temporal Reasoning Multimodal Evaluation, a novel benchmark crafted to rigorously assess MFMs' temporal reasoning capabilities in video understanding. TOMATO comprises 1,484 carefully curated, human-annotated questions spanning six tasks (i.e., action count, direction, rotation, shape & trend, velocity & frequency, and visual cues), applied to 1,417 videos, including 805 self-recorded and -generated videos, that encompass human-centric, real-world, and simulated scenarios. Our comprehensive evaluation reveals a human-model performance gap of 57.3% with the best-performing model. Moreover, our in-depth analysis uncovers more fundamental limitations beyond this gap in current MFMs. While they can accurately recognize events in isolated frames, they fail to interpret these frames as a continuous sequence. We believe TOMATO will serve as a crucial testbed for evaluating the next-generation MFMs and as a call to the community to develop AI systems capable of comprehending human world dynamics through the video modality.

We present Magma, a foundation model that serves multimodal AI agentic tasks in both the digital and physical worlds. Magma is a significant extension of vision-language (VL) models in that it not only retains the VL understanding ability (verbal intelligence) of the latter, but is also equipped with the ability to plan and act in the visual-spatial world (spatial-temporal intelligence) and complete agentic tasks ranging from UI navigation to robot manipulation. To endow the agentic capabilities, Magma is pretrained on large amounts of heterogeneous datasets spanning from images, videos to robotics data, where the actionable visual objects (e.g., clickable buttons in GUI) in images are labeled by Set-of-Mark (SoM) for action grounding, and the object movements (e.g., the trace of human hands or robotic arms) in videos are labeled by Trace-of-Mark (ToM) for action planning. Extensive experiments show that SoM and ToM reach great synergy and facilitate the acquisition of spatial-temporal intelligence for our Magma model, which is fundamental to a wide range of tasks as shown in Fig.1. In particular, Magma creates new state-of-the-art results on UI navigation and robotic manipulation tasks, outperforming previous models that are specifically tailored to these tasks. On image and video-related multimodal tasks, Magma also compares favorably to popular large multimodal models that are trained on much larger datasets. We make our model and code public for reproducibility at https://microsoft.github.io/Magma.

Recent progress in foundation models has shifted toward agentic behavior involving multi-step reasoning and tool use. However, open-source efforts largely focus on text-dominant settings, leaving long-horizon multimodal tasks underexplored. This gap is evident in video tasks requiring sustained temporal understanding and iterative interaction. We present InternVideo3, a framework enhancing these capabilities via Multimodal Contextual Reasoning (MCR). MCR treats understanding as a closed-loop process over a shared, evolving context containing observations, instructions, reasoning, tool actions, and memory. This frames long-video understanding as evidence accumulation and verification. To ensure efficiency, we introduce Multimodal Multi-head Latent Attention (M^2LA), a token-preserving reparameterization compressing KV-cache states while retaining the full token stream. Our staged training includes continued pretraining, short-to-long supervised fine-tuning, rule-based reinforcement learning, and on-policy distillation. Experiments show InternVideo3 achieves strong performance on benchmarks like Video-MME, MLVU, and EgoSchema. We further instantiate the model as a video agent with retrieval tools, demonstrating robust evidence-grounded behavior. Our results suggest that efficient context handling and closed-loop reasoning are vital for adapting open multimodal models toward long-horizon visually grounded agency.

We present GeoGrid-Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate the ability of foundation models to understand geo-spatial data in the grid structure. Geo-spatial datasets pose distinct challenges due to their dense numerical values, strong spatial and temporal dependencies, and unique multimodal representations including tabular data, heatmaps, and geographic visualizations. To assess how foundation models can support scientific research in this domain, GeoGrid-Bench features large-scale, real-world data covering 16 climate variables across 150 locations and extended time frames. The benchmark includes approximately 3,200 question-answer pairs, systematically generated from 8 domain expert-curated templates to reflect practical tasks encountered by human scientists. These range from basic queries at a single location and time to complex spatiotemporal comparisons across regions and periods. Our evaluation reveals that vision-language models perform best overall, and we provide a fine-grained analysis of the strengths and limitations of different foundation models in different geo-spatial tasks. This benchmark offers clearer insights into how foundation models can be effectively applied to geo-spatial data analysis and used to support scientific research.

We introduce InternVideo2, a new video foundation model (ViFM) that achieves the state-of-the-art performance in action recognition, video-text tasks, and video-centric dialogue. Our approach employs a progressive training paradigm that unifies the different self- or weakly-supervised learning frameworks of masked video token reconstruction, cross-modal contrastive learning, and next token prediction. Different training stages would guide our model to capture different levels of structure and semantic information through different pretext tasks. At the data level, we prioritize the spatiotemporal consistency by semantically segmenting videos and generating video-audio-speech captions. This improves the alignment between video and text. We scale both data and model size for our InternVideo2. Through extensive experiments, we validate our designs and demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance on over 60 video and audio tasks. Notably, our model outperforms others on various video-related captioning, dialogue, and long video understanding benchmarks, highlighting its ability to reason and comprehend long temporal contexts. Code and models are available at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/InternVideo2/.

Multimodal foundation models (MFMs) have demonstrated significant success in tasks such as visual captioning, question answering, and image-text retrieval. However, these models face inherent limitations due to their finite internal capacity, which restricts their ability to process extended temporal sequences, a crucial requirement for comprehensive video and audio analysis. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a specialized cognitive module, temporal working memory (TWM), which aims to enhance the temporal modeling capabilities of MFMs. It selectively retains task-relevant information across temporal dimensions, ensuring that critical details are preserved throughout the processing of video and audio content. The TWM uses a query-guided attention approach to focus on the most informative multimodal segments within temporal sequences. By retaining only the most relevant content, TWM optimizes the use of the model's limited capacity, enhancing its temporal modeling ability. This plug-and-play module can be easily integrated into existing MFMs. With our TWM, nine state-of-the-art models exhibit significant performance improvements across tasks such as video captioning, question answering, and video-text retrieval. By enhancing temporal modeling, TWM extends the capability of MFMs to handle complex, time-sensitive data effectively. Our code is available at https://github.com/xid32/NAACL_2025_TWM.

Despite rapid progress in multimodal foundation models, embodied intelligence community still lacks a unified, physically grounded foundation model that integrates perception, reasoning, and planning within real-world spatial-temporal dynamics. We introduce RynnBrain, an open-source spatiotemporal foundation model for embodied intelligence. RynnBrain strengthens four core capabilities in a unified framework: comprehensive egocentric understanding, diverse spatiotemporal localization, physically grounded reasoning, and physics-aware planning. The RynnBrain family comprises three foundation model scales (2B, 8B, and 30B-A3B MoE) and four post-trained variants tailored for downstream embodied tasks (i.e., RynnBrain-Nav, RynnBrain-Plan, and RynnBrain-VLA) or complex spatial reasoning tasks (i.e., RynnBrain-CoP). In terms of extensive evaluations on 20 embodied benchmarks and 8 general vision understanding benchmarks, our RynnBrain foundation models largely outperform existing embodied foundation models by a significant margin. The post-trained model suite further substantiates two key potentials of the RynnBrain foundation model: (i) enabling physically grounded reasoning and planning, and (ii) serving as a strong pretrained backbone that can be efficiently adapted to diverse embodied tasks.

Recently, there has been increasing interest in multimodal applications that integrate text with other modalities, such as images, audio and video, to facilitate natural language interactions with multimodal AI systems. While applications involving standard modalities have been extensively explored, there is still a lack of investigation into specific data modalities such as remote sensing (RS) data. Despite the numerous potential applications of RS data, including environmental protection, disaster monitoring and land planning, available solutions are predominantly focused on specific tasks like classification, captioning and retrieval. These solutions often overlook the unique characteristics of RS data, such as its capability to systematically provide information on the same geographical areas over time. This ability enables continuous monitoring of changes in the underlying landscape. To address this gap, we propose a novel foundation model for bi-temporal RS image pairs, in the context of change detection analysis, leveraging Contrastive Learning and the LEVIR-CC dataset for both captioning and text-image retrieval. By jointly training a contrastive encoder and captioning decoder, our model add text-image retrieval capabilities, in the context of bi-temporal change detection, while maintaining captioning performances that are comparable to the state of the art. We release the source code and pretrained weights at: https://github.com/rogerferrod/RSICRC.

We explore how reconciling several foundation models (large language models and vision-language models) with a novel unified memory mechanism could tackle the challenging video understanding problem, especially capturing the long-term temporal relations in lengthy videos. In particular, the proposed multimodal agent VideoAgent: 1) constructs a structured memory to store both the generic temporal event descriptions and object-centric tracking states of the video; 2) given an input task query, it employs tools including video segment localization and object memory querying along with other visual foundation models to interactively solve the task, utilizing the zero-shot tool-use ability of LLMs. VideoAgent demonstrates impressive performances on several long-horizon video understanding benchmarks, an average increase of 6.6% on NExT-QA and 26.0% on EgoSchema over baselines, closing the gap between open-sourced models and private counterparts including Gemini 1.5 Pro.

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

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

Human action understanding is crucial for the advancement of multimodal systems. While recent developments, driven by powerful large language models (LLMs), aim to be general enough to cover a wide range of categories, they often overlook the need for more specific capabilities. In this work, we address the more challenging task of Fine-grained Action Recognition (FAR), which focuses on detailed semantic labels within shorter temporal duration (e.g., "salto backward tucked with 1 turn"). Given the high costs of annotating fine-grained labels and the substantial data needed for fine-tuning LLMs, we propose to adopt semi-supervised learning (SSL). Our framework, SeFAR, incorporates several innovative designs to tackle these challenges. Specifically, to capture sufficient visual details, we construct Dual-level temporal elements as more effective representations, based on which we design a new strong augmentation strategy for the Teacher-Student learning paradigm through involving moderate temporal perturbation. Furthermore, to handle the high uncertainty within the teacher model's predictions for FAR, we propose the Adaptive Regulation to stabilize the learning process. Experiments show that SeFAR achieves state-of-the-art performance on two FAR datasets, FineGym and FineDiving, across various data scopes. It also outperforms other semi-supervised methods on two classical coarse-grained datasets, UCF101 and HMDB51. Further analysis and ablation studies validate the effectiveness of our designs. Additionally, we show that the features extracted by our SeFAR could largely promote the ability of multimodal foundation models to understand fine-grained and domain-specific semantics.

We present SAM4D, a multi-modal and temporal foundation model designed for promptable segmentation across camera and LiDAR streams. Unified Multi-modal Positional Encoding (UMPE) is introduced to align camera and LiDAR features in a shared 3D space, enabling seamless cross-modal prompting and interaction. Additionally, we propose Motion-aware Cross-modal Memory Attention (MCMA), which leverages ego-motion compensation to enhance temporal consistency and long-horizon feature retrieval, ensuring robust segmentation across dynamically changing autonomous driving scenes. To avoid annotation bottlenecks, we develop a multi-modal automated data engine that synergizes VFM-driven video masklets, spatiotemporal 4D reconstruction, and cross-modal masklet fusion. This framework generates camera-LiDAR aligned pseudo-labels at a speed orders of magnitude faster than human annotation while preserving VFM-derived semantic fidelity in point cloud representations. We conduct extensive experiments on the constructed Waymo-4DSeg, which demonstrate the powerful cross-modal segmentation ability and great potential in data annotation of proposed SAM4D.

Prior studies on Remote Sensing Foundation Model (RSFM) reveal immense potential towards a generic model for Earth Observation. Nevertheless, these works primarily focus on a single modality without temporal and geo-context modeling, hampering their capabilities for diverse tasks. In this study, we present SkySense, a generic billion-scale model, pre-trained on a curated multi-modal Remote Sensing Imagery (RSI) dataset with 21.5 million temporal sequences. SkySense incorporates a factorized multi-modal spatiotemporal encoder taking temporal sequences of optical and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data as input. This encoder is pre-trained by our proposed Multi-Granularity Contrastive Learning to learn representations across different modal and spatial granularities. To further enhance the RSI representations by the geo-context clue, we introduce Geo-Context Prototype Learning to learn region-aware prototypes upon RSI's multi-modal spatiotemporal features. To our best knowledge, SkySense is the largest Multi-Modal RSFM to date, whose modules can be flexibly combined or used individually to accommodate various tasks. It demonstrates remarkable generalization capabilities on a thorough evaluation encompassing 16 datasets over 7 tasks, from single- to multi-modal, static to temporal, and classification to localization. SkySense surpasses 18 recent RSFMs in all test scenarios. Specifically, it outperforms the latest models such as GFM, SatLas and Scale-MAE by a large margin, i.e., 2.76%, 3.67% and 3.61% on average respectively. We will release the pre-trained weights to facilitate future research and Earth Observation applications.

Zero-shot and prompt-based technologies capitalized on using frequently occurring images to transform visual reasoning tasks, which explains why such technologies struggle with valuable yet scarce scientific image sets. In this work, we propose Zenesis, a comprehensive no-code interactive platform designed to minimize barriers posed by data readiness for scientific images. We develop lightweight multi-modal adaptation techniques that enable zero-shot operation on raw scientific data, along with human-in-the-loop refinement and heuristic-based temporal enhancement options. We demonstrate the performance of our approach through comprehensive comparison and validation on challenging Focused Ion Beam Scanning Electron Microscopy (FIB-SEM) data of catalyst-loaded membranes. Zenesis significantly outperforms baseline methods, achieving an average accuracy of 0.947, an Intersection over Union (IOU) of 0.858, and a Dice score of 0.923 for amorphous catalyst samples and accuracy of 0.987, an IOU of 0.857, and a Dice score of 0.923 for crystalline samples. These results mark a substantial improvement over traditional methods like Otsu thresholding and even advanced models like Segment Anything Model (SAM) when used in isolation. Our results demonstrate that Zenesis is a powerful tool for scientific applications, particularly in fields where high-quality annotated datasets are unavailable, accelerating accurate analysis of experimental imaging.

Satellite Earth-observation (EO) time series in the optical and microwave ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum are often irregular due to orbital patterns and cloud obstruction. Compositing addresses these issues but loses information with respect to vegetation phenology, which is critical for many downstream tasks. Instead, we present TESSERA, a pixel-wise foundation model for multi-modal (Sentinel-1/2) EO time series that learns robust, label-efficient embeddings. During model training, TESSERA uses Barlow Twins and sparse random temporal sampling to enforce invariance to the selection of valid observations. We employ two key regularizers: global shuffling to decorrelate spatial neighborhoods and mix-based regulation to improve invariance under extreme sparsity. We find that for diverse classification, segmentation, and regression tasks, TESSERA embeddings deliver state-of-the-art accuracy with high label efficiency, often requiring only a small task head and minimal computation. To democratize access, adhere to FAIR - principles, and simplify use, we release global, annual, 10m, pixel-wise int8 embeddings together with open weights/code and lightweight adaptation heads, thus providing practical tooling for large-scale retrieval and inference at planetary scale. All code and data are available at: https://github.com/ucam-eo/tessera.

In this work, we focus on Weakly Supervised Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding (WSTVG). It is a multimodal task aimed at localizing specific subjects spatio-temporally based on textual queries without bounding box supervision. Motivated by recent advancements in multi-modal foundation models for grounding tasks, we first explore the potential of state-of-the-art object detection models for WSTVG. Despite their robust zero-shot capabilities, our adaptation reveals significant limitations, including inconsistent temporal predictions, inadequate understanding of complex queries, and challenges in adapting to difficult scenarios. We propose CoSPaL (Contextual Self-Paced Learning), a novel approach which is designed to overcome these limitations. CoSPaL integrates three core components: (1) Tubelet Phrase Grounding (TPG), which introduces spatio-temporal prediction by linking textual queries to tubelets; (2) Contextual Referral Grounding (CRG), which improves comprehension of complex queries by extracting contextual information to refine object identification over time; and (3) Self-Paced Scene Understanding (SPS), a training paradigm that progressively increases task difficulty, enabling the model to adapt to complex scenarios by transitioning from coarse to fine-grained understanding.

Zero-shot 4D segmentation and recognition of arbitrary objects in Lidar is crucial for embodied navigation, with applications ranging from streaming perception to semantic mapping and localization. However, the primary challenge in advancing research and developing generalized, versatile methods for spatio-temporal scene understanding in Lidar lies in the scarcity of datasets that provide the necessary diversity and scale of annotations.To overcome these challenges, we propose SAL-4D (Segment Anything in Lidar--4D), a method that utilizes multi-modal robotic sensor setups as a bridge to distill recent developments in Video Object Segmentation (VOS) in conjunction with off-the-shelf Vision-Language foundation models to Lidar. We utilize VOS models to pseudo-label tracklets in short video sequences, annotate these tracklets with sequence-level CLIP tokens, and lift them to the 4D Lidar space using calibrated multi-modal sensory setups to distill them to our SAL-4D model. Due to temporal consistent predictions, we outperform prior art in 3D Zero-Shot Lidar Panoptic Segmentation (LPS) over 5 PQ, and unlock Zero-Shot 4D-LPS.

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.

Foundation models are used for many real-world applications involving language generation from temporally-ordered multimodal events. In this work, we study the ability of models to identify the most important sub-events in a video, which is a fundamental prerequisite for narrating or summarizing multimodal events. Specifically, we focus on football games and evaluate models on their ability to distinguish between important and non-important sub-events in a game. To this end, we construct a new dataset by leveraging human preferences for importance implicit in football game highlight reels, without any additional annotation costs. Using our dataset, which we will publicly release to the community, we compare several state-of-the-art multimodal models and show that they are not far from chance level performance. Analyses of models beyond standard evaluation metrics reveal their tendency to rely on a single dominant modality and their ineffectiveness in synthesizing necessary information from multiple sources. Our findings underline the importance of modular architectures that can handle sample-level heterogeneity in multimodal data and the need for complementary training procedures that can maximize cross-modal synergy.

AI agents need to plan to achieve complex goals that involve orchestrating perception, sub-goal decomposition, and execution. These plans consist of ordered steps structured according to a Temporal Execution Order (TEO, a directed acyclic graph that ensures each step executes only after its preconditions are satisfied. Existing research on foundational models' understanding of temporal execution is limited to automatically derived annotations, approximations of the TEO as a linear chain, or text-only inputs. To address this gap, we introduce MATEO (MultimodAl Temporal Execution Order), a benchmark designed to assess and improve the temporal reasoning abilities of Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) required for real-world planning. We acquire a high-quality professional multimodal recipe corpus, authored through a standardized editorial process that decomposes instructions into discrete steps, each paired with corresponding images. We collect TEO annotations as graphs by designing and using a scalable crowdsourcing pipeline. Using MATEO, we evaluate six state-of-the-art LVLMs across model scales, varying language context, multimodal input structure, and fine-tuning strategies.

We introduce VideoComp, a benchmark and learning framework for advancing video-text compositionality understanding, aimed at improving vision-language models (VLMs) in fine-grained temporal alignment. Unlike existing benchmarks focused on static image-text compositionality or isolated single-event videos, our benchmark targets alignment in continuous multi-event videos. Leveraging video-text datasets with temporally localized event captions (e.g. ActivityNet-Captions, YouCook2), we construct two compositional benchmarks, ActivityNet-Comp and YouCook2-Comp. We create challenging negative samples with subtle temporal disruptions such as reordering, action word replacement, partial captioning, and combined disruptions. These benchmarks comprehensively test models' compositional sensitivity across extended, cohesive video-text sequences. To improve model performance, we propose a hierarchical pairwise preference loss that strengthens alignment with temporally accurate pairs and gradually penalizes increasingly disrupted ones, encouraging fine-grained compositional learning. To mitigate the limited availability of densely annotated video data, we introduce a pretraining strategy that concatenates short video-caption pairs to simulate multi-event sequences. We evaluate video-text foundational models and large multimodal models (LMMs) on our benchmark, identifying both strengths and areas for improvement in compositionality. Overall, our work provides a comprehensive framework for evaluating and enhancing model capabilities in achieving fine-grained, temporally coherent video-text alignment.

This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the taxonomy and evolution of multimodal foundation models that demonstrate vision and vision-language capabilities, focusing on the transition from specialist models to general-purpose assistants. The research landscape encompasses five core topics, categorized into two classes. (i) We start with a survey of well-established research areas: multimodal foundation models pre-trained for specific purposes, including two topics -- methods of learning vision backbones for visual understanding and text-to-image generation. (ii) Then, we present recent advances in exploratory, open research areas: multimodal foundation models that aim to play the role of general-purpose assistants, including three topics -- unified vision models inspired by large language models (LLMs), end-to-end training of multimodal LLMs, and chaining multimodal tools with LLMs. The target audiences of the paper are researchers, graduate students, and professionals in computer vision and vision-language multimodal communities who are eager to learn the basics and recent advances in multimodal foundation models.

Time series forecasting is a foundational task across domains, such as finance, healthcare, and environmental monitoring. While recent advances in Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) have demonstrated strong generalisation through large-scale pretraining, existing models operate predominantly in a unimodal setting, ignoring the rich multimodal context, such as visual and textual signals, that often accompanies time series data in real-world scenarios. This paper introduces a novel parameter-efficient multimodal framework, UniCast, that extends TSFMs to jointly leverage time series, vision, and text modalities for enhanced forecasting performance. Our method integrates modality-specific embeddings from pretrained Vision and Text Encoders with a frozen TSFM via soft prompt tuning, enabling efficient adaptation with minimal parameter updates. This design not only preserves the generalisation strength of the foundation model but also enables effective cross-modal interaction. Extensive experiments across diverse time-series forecasting benchmarks demonstrate that UniCast consistently and significantly outperforms all existing TSFM baselines. The findings highlight the critical role of multimodal context in advancing the next generation of general-purpose time series forecasters.

Multimodal foundation models serve numerous applications at the intersection of vision and language. Still, despite being pretrained on extensive data, they become outdated over time. To keep models updated, research into continual pretraining mainly explores scenarios with either (1) infrequent, indiscriminate updates on large-scale new data, or (2) frequent, sample-level updates. However, practical model deployment often operates in the gap between these two limit cases, as real-world applications often demand adaptation to specific subdomains, tasks or concepts -- spread over the entire, varying life cycle of a model. In this work, we complement current perspectives on continual pretraining through a research test bed as well as provide comprehensive guidance for effective continual model updates in such scenarios. We first introduce FoMo-in-Flux, a continual multimodal pretraining benchmark with realistic compute constraints and practical deployment requirements, constructed over 63 datasets with diverse visual and semantic coverage. Using FoMo-in-Flux, we explore the complex landscape of practical continual pretraining through multiple perspectives: (1) A data-centric investigation of data mixtures and stream orderings that emulate real-world deployment situations, (2) a method-centric investigation ranging from simple fine-tuning and traditional continual learning strategies to parameter-efficient updates and model merging, (3) meta learning rate schedules and mechanistic design choices, and (4) the influence of model and compute scaling. Together, our insights provide a practitioner's guide to continual multimodal pretraining for real-world deployment. Our benchmark and code is here: https://github.com/ExplainableML/fomo_in_flux.

Multimodal Foundation Models (MMFMs) have shown remarkable performance on various computer vision and natural language processing tasks. However, their performance on particular tasks such as document understanding is still limited. They also require more compute, time, and engineering resources to finetune and deploy compared to traditional, unimodal models. In this report, we present Multimodal Structured Generation, a general framework which constrains the output logits of frozen MMFMs to force them to reason before responding with structured outputs that downstream APIs can parse and use. We provide a detailed account of our approach, including the technical details, theoretical discussions, and final evaluation results in the 2nd Multimodal Foundation Models Challenge hosted by the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) conference. Our approach achieved the second highest score in the hidden test set for Phase 2 and third highest overall. This shows the method's ability to generalize to unseen tasks. And that simple engineering can beat expensive & complicated modelling steps as we first discussed in our paper, Retrieval Augmented Structured Generation: Business Document Information Extraction as Tool Use. All of our scripts, deployment steps, and evaluation results can be accessed in https://github.com/leloykun/MMFM-Challenge

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved significant advancements in tasks like Visual Question Answering (VQA) by leveraging foundational Large Language Models (LLMs). However, their abilities in specific areas such as temporal understanding, which is crucial for comprehending real-world dynamics, remain underexplored. To address this, we propose a challenging evaluation benchmark named TemporalVQA, consisting of two parts: (1) Temporal Order Understanding and (2) Time-lapse Estimation. The first part requires MLLMs to determine the sequence of events by analyzing temporally consecutive video frames. The second part presents image pairs with varying time differences, framed as multiple-choice questions, asking MLLMs to estimate the time-lapse between images with options ranging from seconds to years. Our evaluations of advanced MLLMs, including models like GPT-4o and Gemini-1.5-Pro, reveal significant challenges: GPT-4o achieved only 43.8% average consistent accuracy in temporal order tasks and 70% in time-lapse estimation, with open-source models performing even less effectively. These findings underscore the limitations of current MLLMs in visual temporal understanding and reasoning, highlighting the need for further improvements in their temporal capabilities. Our dataset can be found at https://huggingface.co/datasets/fazliimam/temporal-vqa.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable reliability and advanced capabilities through extended test-time reasoning. However, extending these capabilities to Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) remains a significant challenge due to a critical scarcity of high-quality, long-chain reasoning data and optimized training pipelines. To bridge this gap, we present a unified multi-agent visual reasoning framework that systematically evolves from our foundational image-centric model, Insight-V, into a generalized spatial-temporal architecture, Insight-V++. We first propose a scalable data generation pipeline equipped with multi-granularity assessment that autonomously synthesizes structured, complex reasoning trajectories across image and video domains without human intervention. Recognizing that directly supervising MLLMs with such intricate data yields sub-optimal results, we design a dual-agent architecture comprising a reasoning agent to execute extensive analytical chains, and a summary agent to critically evaluate and distill final outcomes. While our initial framework utilized Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), its off-policy nature fundamentally constrained reinforcement learning potential. To overcome these limitations, particularly for long-horizon video understanding, Insight-V++ introduces two novel algorithms, ST-GRPO and J-GRPO, which enhance spatial-temporal reasoning and improve evaluative robustness. Crucially, by leveraging reliable feedback from the summary agent, we guide an iterative reasoning path generation process, retraining the entire multi-agent system in a continuous, self-improving loop. Extensive experiments on base models like LLaVA-NeXT and Qwen2.5-VL demonstrate significant performance gains across challenging image and video reasoning benchmarks while preserving strong capabilities on traditional perception-focused tasks.

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

The rapid advancement of foundation models (FMs) across language, image, audio, and video domains has shown remarkable capabilities in diverse tasks. However, the proliferation of FMs brings forth a critical challenge: the potential to generate hallucinated outputs, particularly in high-stakes applications. The tendency of foundation models to produce hallucinated content arguably represents the biggest hindrance to their widespread adoption in real-world scenarios, especially in domains where reliability and accuracy are paramount. This survey paper presents a comprehensive overview of recent developments that aim to identify and mitigate the problem of hallucination in FMs, spanning text, image, video, and audio modalities. By synthesizing recent advancements in detecting and mitigating hallucination across various modalities, the paper aims to provide valuable insights for researchers, developers, and practitioners. Essentially, it establishes a clear framework encompassing definition, taxonomy, and detection strategies for addressing hallucination in multimodal foundation models, laying the foundation for future research in this pivotal area.

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of spatiotemporal foundation models in different scientific disciplines. While promising, these models are often domain-specific and are only assessed within the particular applications for which they are designed. Given that many tasks can be represented as video modeling problems, video foundation models (ViFMs) hold considerable promise as general-purpose domain-agnostic approaches. However, it is not known whether the knowledge acquired on large-scale but potentially out-of-domain data can be effectively transferred across diverse scientific disciplines, and if a single, pretrained ViFM can be competitive with domain-specific baselines. To address this, we introduce SciVid, a comprehensive benchmark comprising five *Sci*entific *Vid*eo tasks, across medical computer vision, animal behavior, and weather forecasting. We adapt six leading ViFMs to SciVid using simple trainable readout modules, establishing strong baselines and demonstrating the potential for effective transfer learning. Specifically, we show that state-of-the-art results can be obtained in several applications by leveraging the general-purpose representations from ViFM backbones. Furthermore, our results reveal the limitations of existing ViFMs, and highlight opportunities for the development of generalizable models for high-impact scientific applications. We release our code at https://github.com/google-deepmind/scivid to facilitate further research in the development of ViFMs.

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

Current multimodal and multitask foundation models like 4M or UnifiedIO show promising results, but in practice their out-of-the-box abilities to accept diverse inputs and perform diverse tasks are limited by the (usually rather small) number of modalities and tasks they are trained on. In this paper, we expand upon the capabilities of them by training a single model on tens of highly diverse modalities and by performing co-training on large-scale multimodal datasets and text corpora. This includes training on several semantic and geometric modalities, feature maps from recent state of the art models like DINOv2 and ImageBind, pseudo labels of specialist models like SAM and 4DHumans, and a range of new modalities that allow for novel ways to interact with the model and steer the generation, for example image metadata or color palettes. A crucial step in this process is performing discrete tokenization on various modalities, whether they are image-like, neural network feature maps, vectors, structured data like instance segmentation or human poses, or data that can be represented as text. Through this, we expand on the out-of-the-box capabilities of multimodal models and specifically show the possibility of training one model to solve at least 3x more tasks/modalities than existing ones and doing so without a loss in performance. This enables more fine-grained and controllable multimodal generation capabilities and allows us to study the distillation of models trained on diverse data and objectives into a unified model. We successfully scale the training to a three billion parameter model using tens of modalities and different datasets. The resulting models and training code are open sourced at 4m.epfl.ch.

Multimodal foundation models can process several modalities. However, since the space of possible modalities is large and evolving over time, training a model from scratch to encompass all modalities is unfeasible. Moreover, integrating a modality into a pre-existing foundation model currently requires a significant amount of paired data, which is often not available for low-resource modalities. In this paper, we introduce a method for sample-efficient modality integration (SEMI) into Large Language Models (LLMs). To this end, we devise a hypernetwork that can adapt a shared projector -- placed between modality-specific encoders and an LLM -- to any modality. The hypernetwork, trained on high-resource modalities (i.e., text, speech, audio, video), is conditioned on a few samples from any arbitrary modality at inference time to generate a suitable adapter. To increase the diversity of training modalities, we artificially multiply the number of encoders through isometric transformations. We find that SEMI achieves a significant boost in sample efficiency during few-shot integration of new modalities (i.e., satellite images, astronomical images, inertial measurements, and molecules) with encoders of arbitrary embedding dimensionality. For instance, to reach the same accuracy as 32-shot SEMI, training the projector from scratch needs 64times more data. As a result, SEMI holds promise to extend the modality coverage of foundation models.

Spatial cognition is essential for human intelligence, enabling problem-solving through visual simulations rather than solely relying on verbal reasoning. However, existing AI benchmarks primarily assess verbal reasoning, neglecting the complexities of non-verbal, multi-step visual simulation. We introduce STARE(Spatial Transformations and Reasoning Evaluation), a benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate multimodal large language models on tasks better solved through multi-step visual simulation. STARE features 4K tasks spanning foundational geometric transformations (2D and 3D), integrated spatial reasoning (cube net folding and tangram puzzles), and real-world spatial reasoning (perspective and temporal reasoning), reflecting practical cognitive challenges like object assembly, mechanical diagram interpretation, and everyday spatial navigation. Our evaluations show that models excel at reasoning over simpler 2D transformations, but perform close to random chance on more complex tasks like 3D cube net folding and tangram puzzles that require multi-step visual simulations. Humans achieve near-perfect accuracy but take considerable time (up to 28.9s) on complex tasks, significantly speeding up (down by 7.5 seconds on average) with intermediate visual simulations. In contrast, models exhibit inconsistent performance gains from visual simulations, improving on most tasks but declining in specific cases like tangram puzzles (GPT-4o, o1) and cube net folding (Claude-3.5, Gemini-2.0 Flash), indicating that models may not know how to effectively leverage intermediate visual information.

The success of large pretrained models in natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV) has opened new avenues for constructing foundation models for time series forecasting (TSF). Traditional TSF foundation models rely heavily on numerical data fitting. In contrast, the human brain is inherently skilled at processing visual information, prefer predicting future trends by observing visualized sequences. From a biomimetic perspective, utilizing models to directly process numerical sequences might not be the most effective route to achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). This paper proposes ViTime, a novel Visual Intelligence-based foundation model for TSF. ViTime overcomes the limitations of numerical time series data fitting by utilizing visual data processing paradigms and employs a innovative data synthesis method during training, called Real Time Series (RealTS). Experiments on a diverse set of previously unseen forecasting datasets demonstrate that ViTime achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance, even surpassing the best individually trained supervised models in some situations. These findings suggest that visual intelligence can significantly enhance time series analysis and forecasting, paving the way for more advanced and versatile models in the field. The code for our framework is accessible at https://github.com/IkeYang/ViTime.

Large-scale vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP have gained popularity for their generalizable and expressive multimodal representations. By leveraging large-scale training data with diverse textual metadata, VLMs acquire open-vocabulary capabilities, solving tasks beyond their training scope. This paper investigates the temporal awareness of VLMs, assessing their ability to position visual content in time. We introduce TIME10k, a benchmark dataset of over 10,000 images with temporal ground truth, and evaluate the time-awareness of 37 VLMs by a novel methodology. Our investigation reveals that temporal information is structured along a low-dimensional, non-linear manifold in the VLM embedding space. Based on this insight, we propose methods to derive an explicit ``timeline'' representation from the embedding space. These representations model time and its chronological progression and thereby facilitate temporal reasoning tasks. Our timeline approaches achieve competitive to superior accuracy compared to a prompt-based baseline while being computationally efficient. All code and data are available at https://tekayanidham.github.io/timeline-page/.

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

The rise of foundation models has transformed machine learning research, prompting efforts to uncover their inner workings and develop more efficient and reliable applications for better control. While significant progress has been made in interpreting Large Language Models (LLMs), multimodal foundation models (MMFMs) - such as contrastive vision-language models, generative vision-language models, and text-to-image models - pose unique interpretability challenges beyond unimodal frameworks. Despite initial studies, a substantial gap remains between the interpretability of LLMs and MMFMs. This survey explores two key aspects: (1) the adaptation of LLM interpretability methods to multimodal models and (2) understanding the mechanistic differences between unimodal language models and crossmodal systems. By systematically reviewing current MMFM analysis techniques, we propose a structured taxonomy of interpretability methods, compare insights across unimodal and multimodal architectures, and highlight critical research gaps.

Event cameras offer unique advantages for vision tasks in challenging environments, yet processing asynchronous event streams remains an open challenge. While existing methods rely on specialized architectures or resource-intensive training, the potential of leveraging modern Visual Foundation Models (VFMs) pretrained on image data remains under-explored for event-based vision. To address this, we propose Temporal-Guided VFM (TGVFM), a novel framework that integrates VFMs with our temporal context fusion block seamlessly to bridge this gap. Our temporal block introduces three key components: (1) Long-Range Temporal Attention to model global temporal dependencies, (2) Dual Spatiotemporal Attention for multi-scale frame correlation, and (3) Deep Feature Guidance Mechanism to fuse semantic-temporal features. By retraining event-to-video models on real-world data and leveraging transformer-based VFMs, TGVFM preserves spatiotemporal dynamics while harnessing pretrained representations. Experiments demonstrate SoTA performance across semantic segmentation, depth estimation, and object detection, with improvements of 16%, 21%, and 16% over existing methods, respectively. Overall, this work unlocks the cross-modality potential of image-based VFMs for event-based vision with temporal reasoning. Code is available at https://github.com/XiaRho/TGVFM.

Vision systems to see and reason about the compositional nature of visual scenes are fundamental to understanding our world. The complex relations between objects and their locations, ambiguities, and variations in the real-world environment can be better described in human language, naturally governed by grammatical rules and other modalities such as audio and depth. The models learned to bridge the gap between such modalities coupled with large-scale training data facilitate contextual reasoning, generalization, and prompt capabilities at test time. These models are referred to as foundational models. The output of such models can be modified through human-provided prompts without retraining, e.g., segmenting a particular object by providing a bounding box, having interactive dialogues by asking questions about an image or video scene or manipulating the robot's behavior through language instructions. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of such emerging foundational models, including typical architecture designs to combine different modalities (vision, text, audio, etc), training objectives (contrastive, generative), pre-training datasets, fine-tuning mechanisms, and the common prompting patterns; textual, visual, and heterogeneous. We discuss the open challenges and research directions for foundational models in computer vision, including difficulties in their evaluations and benchmarking, gaps in their real-world understanding, limitations of their contextual understanding, biases, vulnerability to adversarial attacks, and interpretability issues. We review recent developments in this field, covering a wide range of applications of foundation models systematically and comprehensively. A comprehensive list of foundational models studied in this work is available at https://github.com/awaisrauf/Awesome-CV-Foundational-Models.

Time awareness is a fundamental ability of omni large language models, especially for understanding long videos and answering complex questions. Previous approaches mainly target vision-language scenarios and focus on the explicit temporal grounding questions, such as identifying when a visual event occurs or determining what event happens at aspecific time. However, they often make insufficient use of the audio modality, and overlook implicit temporal grounding across modalities--for example, identifying what is visually present when a character speaks, or determining what is said when a visual event occurs--despite such cross-modal temporal relations being prevalent in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose ChronusOmni, an omni large language model designed to enhance temporal awareness for both explicit and implicit audiovisual temporal grounding. First, we interleave text-based timestamp tokens with visual and audio representations at each time unit, enabling unified temporal modeling across modalities. Second, to enforce correct temporal ordering and strengthen fine-grained temporal reasoning, we incorporate reinforcement learning with specially designed reward functions. Moreover, we construct ChronusAV, a temporally-accurate, modality-complete, and cross-modal-aligned dataset to support the training and evaluation on audiovisual temporal grounding task. Experimental results demonstrate that ChronusOmni achieves state-of-the-art performance on ChronusAV with more than 30% improvement and top results on most metrics upon other temporal grounding benchmarks. This highlights the strong temporal awareness of our model across modalities, while preserving general video and audio understanding capabilities.

The rapid evolution of multimodal foundation model has demonstrated significant progresses in vision-language understanding and generation, e.g., our previous work SEED-LLaMA. However, there remains a gap between its capability and the real-world applicability, primarily due to the model's limited capacity to effectively respond to various user instructions and interact with diverse visual data. In this work, we focus on bridging this gap through integrating two enhanced features: (1) comprehending images of arbitrary sizes and ratios, and (2) enabling multi-granularity image generation. We present a unified and versatile foundation model, namely, SEED-X, which is able to model multi-granularity visual semantics for comprehension and generation tasks. Besides the competitive results on public benchmarks, SEED-X demonstrates its effectiveness in handling real-world applications across various domains after instruction tuning. We hope that our work will inspire future research into what can be achieved by versatile multimodal foundation models in real-world applications. The models, codes, and datasets will be released in https://github.com/AILab-CVC/SEED-X.

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

Cross-domain generalization is very important in Time Series Forecasting because similar historical information may lead to distinct future trends due to the domain-specific characteristics. Recent works focus on building unimodal time series foundation models and end-to-end multimodal supervised models. Since domain-specific knowledge is often contained in modalities like texts, the former lacks the explicit utilization of them, thus hindering the performance. The latter is tailored for end-to-end scenarios and does not support zero-shot inference for cross-domain scenarios. In this work, we introduce Aurora, a Multimodal Time Series Foundation Model, which supports multimodal inputs and zero-shot inference. Pretrained on Corss-domain Multimodal Time Series Corpus, Aurora can adaptively extract and focus on key domain knowledge contained in corrsponding text or image modalities, thus possessing strong Cross-domain generalization capability. Through tokenization, encoding, and distillation, Aurora can extract multimodal domain knowledge as guidance and then utilizes a Modality-Guided Multi-head Self-Attention to inject them into the modeling of temporal representations. In the decoding phase, the multimodal representations are used to generate the conditions and prototypes of future tokens, contributing to a novel Prototype-Guided Flow Matching for generative probabilistic forecasting. Comprehensive experiments on well-recognized benchmarks, including TimeMMD, TSFM-Bench and ProbTS, demonstrate the consistent state-of-the-art performance of Aurora on both unimodal and multimodal scenarios.

Several video understanding tasks, such as natural language temporal video grounding, temporal activity localization, and audio description generation, require "temporally dense" reasoning over frames sampled at high temporal resolution. However, computing frame-level features for these tasks is computationally expensive given the temporal resolution requirements. In this paper, we make three contributions to reduce the cost of computing features for temporally dense tasks. First, we introduce a vision transformer (ViT) architecture, dubbed ResidualViT, that leverages the large temporal redundancy in videos to efficiently compute temporally dense frame-level features. Our architecture incorporates (i) learnable residual connections that ensure temporal consistency across consecutive frames and (ii) a token reduction module that enhances processing speed by selectively discarding temporally redundant information while reusing weights of a pretrained foundation model. Second, we propose a lightweight distillation strategy to approximate the frame-level features of the original foundation model. Finally, we evaluate our approach across four tasks and five datasets, in both zero-shot and fully supervised settings, demonstrating significant reductions in computational cost (up to 60%) and improvements in inference speed (up to 2.5x faster), all while closely approximating the accuracy of the original foundation model.

Video Foundation Models (VFMs) exhibit remarkable visual generation performance, but struggle in compositional scenarios (e.g., motion, numeracy, and spatial relation). In this work, we introduce Test-Time Optimization and Memorization (TTOM), a training-free framework that aligns VFM outputs with spatiotemporal layouts during inference for better text-image alignment. Rather than direct intervention to latents or attention per-sample in existing work, we integrate and optimize new parameters guided by a general layout-attention objective. Furthermore, we formulate video generation within a streaming setting, and maintain historical optimization contexts with a parametric memory mechanism that supports flexible operations, such as insert, read, update, and delete. Notably, we found that TTOM disentangles compositional world knowledge, showing powerful transferability and generalization. Experimental results on the T2V-CompBench and Vbench benchmarks establish TTOM as an effective, practical, scalable, and efficient framework to achieve cross-modal alignment for compositional video generation on the fly.

The advent of foundation models, which are pre-trained on vast datasets, has ushered in a new era of computer vision, characterized by their robustness and remarkable zero-shot generalization capabilities. Mirroring the transformative impact of foundation models like large language models (LLMs) in natural language processing, visual foundation models (VFMs) have become a catalyst for groundbreaking developments in computer vision. This review paper delineates the pivotal trajectories of VFMs, emphasizing their scalability and proficiency in generative tasks such as text-to-image synthesis, as well as their adeptness in discriminative tasks including image segmentation. While generative and discriminative models have historically charted distinct paths, we undertake a comprehensive examination of the recent strides made by VFMs in both domains, elucidating their origins, seminal breakthroughs, and pivotal methodologies. Additionally, we collate and discuss the extensive resources that facilitate the development of VFMs and address the challenges that pave the way for future research endeavors. A crucial direction for forthcoming innovation is the amalgamation of generative and discriminative paradigms. The nascent application of generative models within discriminative contexts signifies the early stages of this confluence. This survey aspires to be a contemporary compendium for scholars and practitioners alike, charting the course of VFMs and illuminating their multifaceted landscape.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated profound capabilities in understanding multimodal information, covering from Image LLMs to the more complex Video LLMs. Numerous studies have illustrated their exceptional cross-modal comprehension. Recently, integrating video foundation models with large language models to build a comprehensive video understanding system has been proposed to overcome the limitations of specific pre-defined vision tasks. However, the current advancements in Video LLMs tend to overlook the foundational contributions of Image LLMs, often opting for more complicated structures and a wide variety of multimodal data for pre-training. This approach significantly increases the costs associated with these methods.In response to these challenges, this work introduces an efficient method that strategically leverages the priors of Image LLMs, facilitating a resource-efficient transition from Image to Video LLMs. We propose RED-VILLM, a Resource-Efficient Development pipeline for Video LLMs from Image LLMs, which utilizes a temporal adaptation plug-and-play structure within the image fusion module of Image LLMs. This adaptation extends their understanding capabilities to include temporal information, enabling the development of Video LLMs that not only surpass baseline performances but also do so with minimal instructional data and training resources. Our approach highlights the potential for a more cost-effective and scalable advancement in multimodal models, effectively building upon the foundational work of Image LLMs.

Multimodal foundation models (MFMs) have revolutionized sequential recommender systems through advanced representation learning. While Parameter-efficient Fine-tuning (PEFT) is commonly used to adapt these models, studies often prioritize parameter efficiency, neglecting GPU memory and training speed. To address this, we introduced the IISAN framework, significantly enhancing efficiency. However, IISAN was limited to symmetrical MFMs and identical text and image encoders, preventing the use of state-of-the-art Large Language Models. To overcome this, we developed IISAN-Versa, a versatile plug-and-play architecture compatible with both symmetrical and asymmetrical MFMs. IISAN-Versa employs a Decoupled PEFT structure and utilizes both intra- and inter-modal adaptation. It effectively handles asymmetry through a simple yet effective combination of group layer-dropping and dimension transformation alignment. Our research demonstrates that IISAN-Versa effectively adapts large text encoders, and we further identify a scaling effect where larger encoders generally perform better. IISAN-Versa also demonstrates strong versatility in our defined multimodal scenarios, which include raw titles and captions generated from images and videos. Additionally, IISAN-Versa achieved state-of-the-art performance on the Microlens public benchmark. We release our code at https://github.com/GAIR-Lab/IISAN.

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

Video foundation models achieve strong performance across many video understanding tasks, but typically require large-scale pre-training on massive video datasets, resulting in substantial data and compute costs. In contrast, modern image foundation models already provide powerful spatial representations. This raises an important question: can competitive video models be built by reusing these spatial representations and pre-training only for temporal reasoning? We take initial steps toward exploring a lightweight training paradigm that freezes a pre-trained image foundation model and trains only a recurrent temporal module to process streaming video. By reusing an image foundation model as a spatial encoder, this approach could significantly reduce the amount of video data and compute required compared to end-to-end video pre-training. In this work, we explore the feasibility of this approach before investing in computing for video pre-training. Our empirical findings across multiple video understanding tasks suggest that strong temporal performance can emerge without large-scale video pre-training, motivating future work on recurrent video foundation models obtained by pre-training a temporal module on top of a frozen image foundation model. Code: https://github.com/tue-mps/towards-video-image-frozen .

Recent advances in multimodal foundation models unifying image understanding and generation have opened exciting avenues for tackling a wide range of vision-language tasks within a single framework. Despite progress, existing unified models typically require extensive pretraining and struggle to achieve the same level of performance compared to models dedicated to each task. Additionally, many of these models suffer from slow image generation speeds, limiting their practical deployment in real-time or resource-constrained settings. In this work, we propose Layerwise Timestep-Expert Flow-based Transformer (LaTtE-Flow), a novel and efficient architecture that unifies image understanding and generation within a single multimodal model. LaTtE-Flow builds upon powerful pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to inherit strong multimodal understanding capabilities, and extends them with a novel Layerwise Timestep Experts flow-based architecture for efficient image generation. LaTtE-Flow distributes the flow-matching process across specialized groups of Transformer layers, each responsible for a distinct subset of timesteps. This design significantly improves sampling efficiency by activating only a small subset of layers at each sampling timestep. To further enhance performance, we propose a Timestep-Conditioned Residual Attention mechanism for efficient information reuse across layers. Experiments demonstrate that LaTtE-Flow achieves strong performance on multimodal understanding tasks, while achieving competitive image generation quality with around 6x faster inference speed compared to recent unified multimodal models.

Video foundation models aim to integrate video understanding, generation, editing, and instruction following within a single framework, making them a central direction for next-generation multimodal systems. However, existing evaluation benchmarks remain fragmented and limited in scope, as they each target a single task, rely on task-specific metrics, and typically use short or simple video clips. As a result, they do not capture the unified capabilities that these models are designed to deliver. To address this gap, we introduce UniVBench, a benchmark purpose-built for evaluating video foundation models across four core abilities: video understanding, video generation, video editing, and a newly proposed task, video reconstruction, which assesses how faithfully a model can reproduce video content it has encountered. Our benchmark substantially expands the complexity of evaluation by incorporating 200 high-quality, diverse and multi-shot videos, each paired with detailed captions, multi-format editing instructions, and reference images. All videos are human-created and carefully validated, offering richer cinematic information than prior benchmarks. In addition, we develop a unified agentic evaluation system (UniV-Eval) that standardizes prompting, instruction parsing, and scoring across all tasks, enabling fair, scalable, and reproducible comparisons of unified video models. By grounding evaluation in instruction-based multi-shot video tasks, UniVBench provides the first framework for measuring the integrated capabilities that video foundation models aim to achieve. Extensive human annotations ensure our evaluation aligns with human judgment, enabling rigorous assessment and accelerating progress toward robust video intelligence.

Understanding temporal dynamics is critical for conversational agents, enabling effective content analysis and informed decision-making. However, time-aware datasets, particularly for persona-grounded conversations, are still limited, which narrows their scope and diminishes their complexity. To address this gap, we introduce MTPChat, a multimodal, time-aware persona dialogue dataset that integrates linguistic, visual, and temporal elements within dialogue and persona memory. Leveraging MTPChat, we propose two time-sensitive tasks: Temporal Next Response Prediction (TNRP) and Temporal Grounding Memory Prediction (TGMP), both designed to assess a model's ability to understand implicit temporal cues and dynamic interactions. Additionally, we present an innovative framework featuring an adaptive temporal module to effectively integrate multimodal streams and capture temporal dependencies. Experimental results validate the challenges posed by MTPChat and demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in multimodal time-sensitive scenarios.

We present 3D Spatial MultiModal Memory (M3), a multimodal memory system designed to retain information about medium-sized static scenes through video sources for visual perception. By integrating 3D Gaussian Splatting techniques with foundation models, M3 builds a multimodal memory capable of rendering feature representations across granularities, encompassing a wide range of knowledge. In our exploration, we identify two key challenges in previous works on feature splatting: (1) computational constraints in storing high-dimensional features for each Gaussian primitive, and (2) misalignment or information loss between distilled features and foundation model features. To address these challenges, we propose M3 with key components of principal scene components and Gaussian memory attention, enabling efficient training and inference. To validate M3, we conduct comprehensive quantitative evaluations of feature similarity and downstream tasks, as well as qualitative visualizations to highlight the pixel trace of Gaussian memory attention. Our approach encompasses a diverse range of foundation models, including vision-language models (VLMs), perception models, and large multimodal and language models (LMMs/LLMs). Furthermore, to demonstrate real-world applicability, we deploy M3's feature field in indoor scenes on a quadruped robot. Notably, we claim that M3 is the first work to address the core compression challenges in 3D feature distillation.

Visual Chain-of-Thought (VCoT) has emerged as a promising paradigm for enhancing multimodal reasoning by integrating visual perception into intermediate reasoning steps. However, existing VCoT approaches are largely confined to static scenarios and struggle to capture the temporal dynamics essential for tasks such as instruction, prediction, and camera motion. To bridge this gap, we propose TwiFF-2.7M, the first large-scale, temporally grounded VCoT dataset derived from 2.7 million video clips, explicitly designed for dynamic visual question and answer. Accompanying this, we introduce TwiFF-Bench, a high-quality evaluation benchmark of 1,078 samples that assesses both the plausibility of reasoning trajectories and the correctness of final answers in open-ended dynamic settings. Building on these foundations, we propose the TwiFF model, a unified modal that synergistically leverages pre-trained video generation and image comprehension capabilities to produce temporally coherent visual reasoning cues-iteratively generating future action frames and textual reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TwiFF significantly outperforms existing VCoT methods and Textual Chain-of-Thought baselines on dynamic reasoning tasks, which fully validates the effectiveness for visual question answering in dynamic scenarios. Our code and data is available at https://github.com/LiuJunhua02/TwiFF.

The emergence of multi-modal foundation models has markedly transformed the technology for autonomous driving, shifting away from conventional and mostly hand-crafted design choices towards unified, foundation-model-based approaches, capable of directly inferring motion trajectories from raw sensory inputs. This new class of methods can also incorporate natural language as an additional modality, with Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models serving as a representative example. In this review, we provide a comprehensive examination of such methods through a unifying taxonomy to critically evaluate their architectural design choices, methodological strengths, and their inherent capabilities and limitations. Our survey covers 37 recently proposed approaches that span the landscape of trajectory planning with foundation models. Furthermore, we assess these approaches with respect to the openness of their source code and datasets, offering valuable information to practitioners and researchers. We provide an accompanying webpage that catalogues the methods based on our taxonomy, available at: https://github.com/fiveai/FMs-for-driving-trajectories

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have ushered in a new era in artificial intelligence, merging capabilities in both language and vision to form highly capable Visual Foundation Agents. These agents are postulated to excel across a myriad of tasks, potentially approaching general artificial intelligence. However, existing benchmarks fail to sufficiently challenge or showcase the full potential of LMMs in complex, real-world environments. To address this gap, we introduce VisualAgentBench (VAB), a comprehensive and pioneering benchmark specifically designed to train and evaluate LMMs as visual foundation agents across diverse scenarios, including Embodied, Graphical User Interface, and Visual Design, with tasks formulated to probe the depth of LMMs' understanding and interaction capabilities. Through rigorous testing across nine proprietary LMM APIs and eight open models, we demonstrate the considerable yet still developing agent capabilities of these models. Additionally, VAB constructs a trajectory training set constructed through hybrid methods including Program-based Solvers, LMM Agent Bootstrapping, and Human Demonstrations, promoting substantial performance improvements in LMMs through behavior cloning. Our work not only aims to benchmark existing models but also provides a solid foundation for future development into visual foundation agents. Code, train \& test data, and part of fine-tuned open LMMs are available at https://github.com/THUDM/VisualAgentBench.

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

Multimodal foundation models (MMFMs) play a crucial role in various applications, including autonomous driving, healthcare, and virtual assistants. However, several studies have revealed vulnerabilities in these models, such as generating unsafe content by text-to-image models. Existing benchmarks on multimodal models either predominantly assess the helpfulness of these models, or only focus on limited perspectives such as fairness and privacy. In this paper, we present the first unified platform, MMDT (Multimodal DecodingTrust), designed to provide a comprehensive safety and trustworthiness evaluation for MMFMs. Our platform assesses models from multiple perspectives, including safety, hallucination, fairness/bias, privacy, adversarial robustness, and out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. We have designed various evaluation scenarios and red teaming algorithms under different tasks for each perspective to generate challenging data, forming a high-quality benchmark. We evaluate a range of multimodal models using MMDT, and our findings reveal a series of vulnerabilities and areas for improvement across these perspectives. This work introduces the first comprehensive and unique safety and trustworthiness evaluation platform for MMFMs, paving the way for developing safer and more reliable MMFMs and systems. Our platform and benchmark are available at https://mmdecodingtrust.github.io/.

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

Recently, several multi-modal models have been developed for joint image and language understanding, which have demonstrated impressive chat abilities by utilizing advanced large language models (LLMs). The process of developing such models is straightforward yet effective. It involves pre-training an adaptation module to align the semantics of the vision encoder and language model, followed by fine-tuning on the instruction-following data. However, despite the success of this pipeline in image and language understanding, its effectiveness in joint video and language understanding has not been widely explored. In this paper, we aim to develop a novel multi-modal foundation model capable of perceiving video, image, and language within a general framework. To achieve this goal, we introduce Valley: Video Assistant with Large Language model Enhanced ability. Specifically, our proposed Valley model is designed with a simple projection module that bridges video, image, and language modalities, and is further unified with a multi-lingual LLM. We also collect multi-source vision-text pairs and adopt a spatio-temporal pooling strategy to obtain a unified vision encoding of video and image input for pre-training. Furthermore, we generate multi-task instruction-following video data, including multi-shot captions, long video descriptions, action recognition, causal relationship inference, etc. To obtain the instruction-following data, we design diverse rounds of task-oriented conversations between humans and videos, facilitated by ChatGPT. Qualitative examples demonstrate that our proposed model has the potential to function as a highly effective multilingual video assistant that can make complex video understanding scenarios easy. Code, data, and models will be available at https://github.com/RupertLuo/Valley.

In this paper, we introduce MIO, a novel foundation model built on multimodal tokens, capable of understanding and generating speech, text, images, and videos in an end-to-end, autoregressive manner. While the emergence of large language models (LLMs) and multimodal large language models (MM-LLMs) propels advancements in artificial general intelligence through their versatile capabilities, they still lack true any-to-any understanding and generation. Recently, the release of GPT-4o has showcased the remarkable potential of any-to-any LLMs for complex real-world tasks, enabling omnidirectional input and output across images, speech, and text. However, it is closed-source and does not support the generation of multimodal interleaved sequences. To address this gap, we present MIO, which is trained on a mixture of discrete tokens across four modalities using causal multimodal modeling. MIO undergoes a four-stage training process: (1) alignment pre-training, (2) interleaved pre-training, (3) speech-enhanced pre-training, and (4) comprehensive supervised fine-tuning on diverse textual, visual, and speech tasks. Our experimental results indicate that MIO exhibits competitive, and in some cases superior, performance compared to previous dual-modal baselines, any-to-any model baselines, and even modality-specific baselines. Moreover, MIO demonstrates advanced capabilities inherent to its any-to-any feature, such as interleaved video-text generation, chain-of-visual-thought reasoning, visual guideline generation, instructional image editing, etc.

This paper does not introduce a novel method but instead establishes a straightforward, incremental, yet essential baseline for video temporal grounding (VTG), a core capability in video understanding. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) excel at various video understanding tasks, the recipes for optimizing them for VTG remain under-explored. In this paper, we present TimeLens, a systematic investigation into building MLLMs with strong VTG ability, along two primary dimensions: data quality and algorithmic design. We first expose critical quality issues in existing VTG benchmarks and introduce TimeLens-Bench, comprising meticulously re-annotated versions of three popular benchmarks with strict quality criteria. Our analysis reveals dramatic model re-rankings compared to legacy benchmarks, confirming the unreliability of prior evaluation standards. We also address noisy training data through an automated re-annotation pipeline, yielding TimeLens-100K, a large-scale, high-quality training dataset. Building on our data foundation, we conduct in-depth explorations of algorithmic design principles, yielding a series of meaningful insights and effective yet efficient practices. These include interleaved textual encoding for time representation, a thinking-free reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) approach as the training paradigm, and carefully designed recipes for RLVR training. These efforts culminate in TimeLens models, a family of MLLMs with state-of-the-art VTG performance among open-source models and even surpass proprietary models such as GPT-5 and Gemini-2.5-Flash. All codes, data, and models will be released to facilitate future research.

We evaluate existing foundation models video understanding capabilities using a carefully designed experiment protocol consisting of three hallmark tasks (action recognition, temporal localization, and spatiotemporal localization), eight datasets well received by the community, and four adaptation methods tailoring a foundation model (FM) for a downstream task. Moreover, we propose a scalar VideoGLUE score (VGS) to measure an FMs efficacy and efficiency when adapting to general video understanding tasks. Our main findings are as follows. First, task-specialized models significantly outperform the six FMs studied in this work, in sharp contrast to what FMs have achieved in natural language and image understanding. Second,video-native FMs, whose pretraining data contains the video modality, are generally better than image-native FMs in classifying motion-rich videos, localizing actions in time, and understanding a video of more than one action. Third, the video-native FMs can perform well on video tasks under light adaptations to downstream tasks(e.g., freezing the FM backbones), while image-native FMs win in full end-to-end finetuning. The first two observations reveal the need and tremendous opportunities to conduct research on video-focused FMs, and the last confirms that both tasks and adaptation methods matter when it comes to the evaluation of FMs.

Current machine learning models for vision are often highly specialized and limited to a single modality and task. In contrast, recent large language models exhibit a wide range of capabilities, hinting at a possibility for similarly versatile models in computer vision. In this paper, we take a step in this direction and propose a multimodal training scheme called 4M. It consists of training a single unified Transformer encoder-decoder using a masked modeling objective across a wide range of input/output modalities - including text, images, geometric, and semantic modalities, as well as neural network feature maps. 4M achieves scalability by unifying the representation space of all modalities through mapping them into discrete tokens and performing multimodal masked modeling on a small randomized subset of tokens. 4M leads to models that exhibit several key capabilities: (1) they can perform a diverse set of vision tasks out of the box, (2) they excel when fine-tuned for unseen downstream tasks or new input modalities, and (3) they can function as a generative model that can be conditioned on arbitrary modalities, enabling a wide variety of expressive multimodal editing capabilities with remarkable flexibility. Through experimental analyses, we demonstrate the potential of 4M for training versatile and scalable foundation models for vision tasks, setting the stage for further exploration in multimodal learning for vision and other domains.

Applying Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to video understanding presents significant challenges due to the need to model temporal relations across frames. Existing approaches adopt either implicit temporal modeling, relying solely on the LLM decoder, or explicit temporal modeling, employing auxiliary temporal encoders. To investigate this debate between the two paradigms, we propose the Stackable Temporal Encoder (STE). STE enables flexible explicit temporal modeling with adjustable temporal receptive fields and token compression ratios. Using STE, we systematically compare implicit and explicit temporal modeling across dimensions such as overall performance, token compression effectiveness, and temporal-specific understanding. We also explore STE's design considerations and broader impacts as a plug-in module and in image modalities. Our findings emphasize the critical role of explicit temporal modeling, providing actionable insights to advance video MLLMs.

With the rapid development of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), a number of diagnostic benchmarks have recently emerged to evaluate the comprehension capabilities of these models. However, most benchmarks predominantly assess spatial understanding in the static image tasks, while overlooking temporal understanding in the dynamic video tasks. To alleviate this issue, we introduce a comprehensive Multi-modal Video understanding Benchmark, namely MVBench, which covers 20 challenging video tasks that cannot be effectively solved with a single frame. Specifically, we first introduce a novel static-to-dynamic method to define these temporal-related tasks. By transforming various static tasks into dynamic ones, we enable the systematic generation of video tasks that require a broad spectrum of temporal skills, ranging from perception to cognition. Then, guided by the task definition, we automatically convert public video annotations into multiple-choice QA to evaluate each task. On one hand, such a distinct paradigm allows us to build MVBench efficiently, without much manual intervention. On the other hand, it guarantees evaluation fairness with ground-truth video annotations, avoiding the biased scoring of LLMs. Moreover, we further develop a robust video MLLM baseline, i.e., VideoChat2, by progressive multi-modal training with diverse instruction-tuning data. The extensive results on our MVBench reveal that, the existing MLLMs are far from satisfactory in temporal understanding, while our VideoChat2 largely surpasses these leading models by over 15% on MVBench. All models and data are available at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/Ask-Anything.

The recent advancement in video temporal grounding (VTG) has significantly enhanced fine-grained video understanding, primarily driven by multimodal large language models (MLLMs). With superior multimodal comprehension and reasoning abilities, VTG approaches based on MLLMs (VTG-MLLMs) are gradually surpassing traditional fine-tuned methods. They not only achieve competitive performance but also excel in generalization across zero-shot, multi-task, and multi-domain settings. Despite extensive surveys on general video-language understanding, comprehensive reviews specifically addressing VTG-MLLMs remain scarce. To fill this gap, this survey systematically examines current research on VTG-MLLMs through a three-dimensional taxonomy: 1) the functional roles of MLLMs, highlighting their architectural significance; 2) training paradigms, analyzing strategies for temporal reasoning and task adaptation; and 3) video feature processing techniques, which determine spatiotemporal representation effectiveness. We further discuss benchmark datasets, evaluation protocols, and summarize empirical findings. Finally, we identify existing limitations and propose promising research directions. For additional resources and details, readers are encouraged to visit our repository at https://github.com/ki-lw/Awesome-MLLMs-for-Video-Temporal-Grounding.

Recent studies have indicated that vision models pre-trained on images can serve as time series foundation models (TSFMs) by reformulating time series forecasting (TSF) as image reconstruction. However, effective cross-modal transfer from vision to time series remains challenging due to three discrepancies: (1) the data-modality gap between structured, bounded image data and unbounded, heterogeneous time series; (2) the multivariate-forecasting gap between fixed RGB-three-channel vision models and time series with arbitrary numbers of variates; and (3) the probabilistic-forecasting gap between the deterministic outputs of vision models and the requirement for uncertainty-aware probabilistic predictions. To bridge these gaps, we propose VisonTS++, a TSFM based on continual pre-training of a vision model on large-scale time series. Our approach introduces three key innovations: (1) vision-model-based filtering to identify high-quality sequences to stabilize pre-training and mitigate modality gap; (2) colorized multivariate conversion, encoding multivariate series as multi-subfigure RGB images to enhance cross-variate modeling; (3) multi-quantile forecasting, using parallel reconstruction heads to generate quantile forecasts without parametric assumptions. Experiments show that VisionTS++ achieves state-of-the-art performance in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution forecasting, outperforming specialized TSFMs by 6%-44% in MSE reduction and ranking first in GIFT-Eval benchmark which comprises 23 datasets across 7 domains. Our work demonstrates that with appropriate adaptation, vision models can effectively generalize to TSF, thus advancing the pursuit of universal TSFMs. Code is available at https://github.com/HALF111/VisionTSpp.

Automated visual understanding of our diverse and open world demands computer vision models to generalize well with minimal customization for specific tasks, similar to human vision. Computer vision foundation models, which are trained on diverse, large-scale dataset and can be adapted to a wide range of downstream tasks, are critical for this mission to solve real-world computer vision applications. While existing vision foundation models such as CLIP, ALIGN, and Wu Dao 2.0 focus mainly on mapping images and textual representations to a cross-modal shared representation, we introduce a new computer vision foundation model, Florence, to expand the representations from coarse (scene) to fine (object), from static (images) to dynamic (videos), and from RGB to multiple modalities (caption, depth). By incorporating universal visual-language representations from Web-scale image-text data, our Florence model can be easily adapted for various computer vision tasks, such as classification, retrieval, object detection, VQA, image caption, video retrieval and action recognition. Moreover, Florence demonstrates outstanding performance in many types of transfer learning: fully sampled fine-tuning, linear probing, few-shot transfer and zero-shot transfer for novel images and objects. All of these properties are critical for our vision foundation model to serve general purpose vision tasks. Florence achieves new state-of-the-art results in majority of 44 representative benchmarks, e.g., ImageNet-1K zero-shot classification with top-1 accuracy of 83.74 and the top-5 accuracy of 97.18, 62.4 mAP on COCO fine tuning, 80.36 on VQA, and 87.8 on Kinetics-600.

Foundation models have emerged as a promising approach in time series forecasting (TSF). Existing approaches either fine-tune large language models (LLMs) or build large-scale time-series datasets to develop TSF foundation models. However, these methods face challenges due to the severe cross-domain gap or in-domain heterogeneity. In this paper, we explore a new road to building a TSF foundation model from rich and high-quality natural images, based on the intrinsic similarities between images and time series. To bridge the gap between the two domains, we reformulate the TSF task as an image reconstruction task, which is further processed by a visual masked autoencoder (MAE) self-supervised pre-trained on the ImageNet dataset. Surprisingly, without further adaptation in the time-series domain, the proposed VisionTS could achieve superior zero-shot forecasting performance compared to existing TSF foundation models. With minimal fine-tuning, VisionTS could further improve the forecasting and achieve state-of-the-art performance in most cases. These findings suggest that visual models could be a free lunch for TSF and highlight the potential for future cross-domain research between computer vision and TSF. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Keytoyze/VisionTS.

A short video succeeds not simply because of what it shows, but because of how it schedules attention -- yet current multimodal models lack the structural grammar to parse or produce this organization. Existing models can describe scenes, answer event-centric questions, and read on-screen text, but they are far less reliable at identifying timeline-grounded units such as hooks, cut rationales, shot-induced tension, and platform-facing packaging cues. We propose SV6D (Structured Video in Six Dimensions), inspired by professional storyboard practice in film and television production, a representation framework that decomposes internet-native video into six complementary structural dimensions -- subject, aesthetics, camera language, editing, narrative, and dissemination -- with each label tied to physically observable evidence on the timeline. We formalize a unified optimization objective over SV6D that combines Hungarian-matched temporal alignment, dimension-wise semantic label distance, and quality regularization. Building on this framework, we present Leum-VL-8B, an 8B video-language model that realizes the SV6D objective through an expert-driven post-training pipeline, further refined through verifiable reinforcement learning on perception-oriented tasks. Leum-VL-8B achieves 70.8 on VideoMME (w/o subtitles), 70.0 on MVBench, and 61.6 on MotionBench, while remaining competitive on general multimodal evaluations such as MMBench-EN. We also construct FeedBench, a benchmark for structure-sensitive short-video understanding. Our results indicate that the missing layer in video AI is not pixel generation but structural representation: grounded on the timeline, linked to visible evidence, and directly consumable by downstream workflows such as editing, retrieval, recommendation, and generation control, including text-heavy internet video formats with overlays and image-text layouts.

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

Image-Language Foundation Models (ILFM) have demonstrated remarkable success in image-text understanding/generation tasks, providing transferable multimodal representations that generalize across diverse downstream image-based tasks. The advancement of video-text research has spurred growing interest in extending image-based models to the video domain. This paradigm, known as image-to-video transfer learning, succeeds in alleviating the substantial data and computational requirements associated with training video-language foundation models from scratch for video-text learning. This survey provides the first comprehensive review of this emerging field, which begins by summarizing the widely used ILFM and their capabilities. We then systematically classify existing image-to-video transfer learning strategies into two categories: frozen features and modified features, depending on whether the original representations from ILFM are preserved or undergo modifications. Building upon the task-specific nature of image-to-video transfer, this survey methodically elaborates these strategies and details their applications across a spectrum of video-text learning tasks, ranging from fine-grained (e.g., spatio-temporal video grounding) to coarse-grained (e.g., video question answering). We further present a detailed experimental analysis to investigate the efficacy of different image-to-video transfer learning paradigms on a range of downstream video understanding tasks. Finally, we identify prevailing challenges and highlight promising directions for future research. By offering a comprehensive and structured overview, this survey aims to establish a structured roadmap for advancing video-text learning based on existing ILFM, and to inspire future research directions in this rapidly evolving domain.

Time series data are ubiquitous across a wide range of real-world domains. While real-world time series analysis (TSA) requires human experts to integrate numerical series data with multimodal domain-specific knowledge, most existing TSA models rely solely on numerical data, overlooking the significance of information beyond numerical series. This oversight is due to the untapped potential of textual series data and the absence of a comprehensive, high-quality multimodal dataset. To overcome this obstacle, we introduce Time-MMD, the first multi-domain, multimodal time series dataset covering 9 primary data domains. Time-MMD ensures fine-grained modality alignment, eliminates data contamination, and provides high usability. Additionally, we develop MM-TSFlib, the first multimodal time-series forecasting (TSF) library, seamlessly pipelining multimodal TSF evaluations based on Time-MMD for in-depth analyses. Extensive experiments conducted on Time-MMD through MM-TSFlib demonstrate significant performance enhancements by extending unimodal TSF to multimodality, evidenced by over 15% mean squared error reduction in general, and up to 40% in domains with rich textual data. More importantly, our datasets and library revolutionize broader applications, impacts, research topics to advance TSA. The dataset and library are available at https://github.com/AdityaLab/Time-MMD and https://github.com/AdityaLab/MM-TSFlib.

Large video-language models (LVLMs) have shown remarkable performance across various video-language tasks. However, they encounter significant challenges when processing long videos because of the large number of video frames involved. Downsampling long videos in either space or time can lead to visual hallucinations, making it difficult to accurately interpret long videos. Motivated by human hierarchical temporal search strategies, we propose TimeSearch, a novel framework enabling LVLMs to understand long videos in a human-like manner. TimeSearch integrates two human-like primitives into a unified autoregressive LVLM: 1) Spotlight efficiently identifies relevant temporal events through a Temporal-Augmented Frame Representation (TAFR), explicitly binding visual features with timestamps; 2) Reflection evaluates the correctness of the identified events, leveraging the inherent temporal self-reflection capabilities of LVLMs. TimeSearch progressively explores key events and prioritizes temporal search based on reflection confidence. Extensive experiments on challenging long-video benchmarks confirm that TimeSearch substantially surpasses previous state-of-the-art, improving the accuracy from 41.8\% to 51.5\% on the LVBench. Additionally, experiments on temporal grounding demonstrate that appropriate TAFR is adequate to effectively stimulate the surprising temporal grounding ability of LVLMs in a simpler yet versatile manner, which improves mIoU on Charades-STA by 11.8\%. The code will be released.

Forecasting urban phenomena such as housing prices and public health indicators requires the effective integration of various geospatial data. Current methods primarily utilize task-specific models, while recent foundation models for spatial representations often support only limited modalities and lack multimodal fusion capabilities. To overcome these challenges, we present UrbanFusion, a Geo-Foundation Model (GeoFM) that features Stochastic Multimodal Fusion (SMF). The framework employs modality-specific encoders to process different types of inputs, including street view imagery, remote sensing data, cartographic maps, and points of interest (POIs) data. These multimodal inputs are integrated via a Transformer-based fusion module that learns unified representations. An extensive evaluation across 41 tasks in 56 cities worldwide demonstrates UrbanFusion's strong generalization and predictive performance compared to state-of-the-art GeoAI models. Specifically, it 1) outperforms prior foundation models on location-encoding, 2) allows multimodal input during inference, and 3) generalizes well to regions unseen during training. UrbanFusion can flexibly utilize any subset of available modalities for a given location during both pretraining and inference, enabling broad applicability across diverse data availability scenarios. All source code is available at https://github.com/DominikM198/UrbanFusion.

Large multimodal foundation models, particularly in the domains of language and vision, have significantly advanced various tasks, including robotics, autonomous driving, information retrieval, and grounding. However, many of these models perceive objects as indivisible, overlooking the components that constitute them. Understanding these components and their associated affordances provides valuable insights into an object's functionality, which is fundamental for performing a wide range of tasks. In this work, we introduce a novel real-world benchmark, InstructPart, comprising hand-labeled part segmentation annotations and task-oriented instructions to evaluate the performance of current models in understanding and executing part-level tasks within everyday contexts. Through our experiments, we demonstrate that task-oriented part segmentation remains a challenging problem, even for state-of-the-art Vision-Language Models (VLMs). In addition to our benchmark, we introduce a simple baseline that achieves a twofold performance improvement through fine-tuning with our dataset. With our dataset and benchmark, we aim to facilitate research on task-oriented part segmentation and enhance the applicability of VLMs across various domains, including robotics, virtual reality, information retrieval, and other related fields. Project website: https://zifuwan.github.io/InstructPart/.

Video understanding is a complex challenge that requires effective modeling of spatial-temporal dynamics. With the success of image foundation models (IFMs) in image understanding, recent approaches have explored parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) to adapt IFMs for video. However, most of these methods tend to process spatial and temporal information separately, which may fail to capture the full intricacy of video dynamics. In this paper, we propose MoMa, an efficient adapter framework that achieves full spatial-temporal modeling by integrating Mamba's selective state space modeling into IFMs. We propose a novel SeqMod operation to inject spatial-temporal information into pre-trained IFMs, without disrupting their original features. By incorporating SeqMod into a Divide-and-Modulate architecture, MoMa enhances video understanding while maintaining computational efficiency. Extensive experiments on multiple video benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of MoMa, achieving superior performance with reduced computational cost.

Recent years have seen remarkable progress in both multimodal understanding models and image generation models. Despite their respective successes, these two domains have evolved independently, leading to distinct architectural paradigms: While autoregressive-based architectures have dominated multimodal understanding, diffusion-based models have become the cornerstone of image generation. Recently, there has been growing interest in developing unified frameworks that integrate these tasks. The emergence of GPT-4o's new capabilities exemplifies this trend, highlighting the potential for unification. However, the architectural differences between the two domains pose significant challenges. To provide a clear overview of current efforts toward unification, we present a comprehensive survey aimed at guiding future research. First, we introduce the foundational concepts and recent advancements in multimodal understanding and text-to-image generation models. Next, we review existing unified models, categorizing them into three main architectural paradigms: diffusion-based, autoregressive-based, and hybrid approaches that fuse autoregressive and diffusion mechanisms. For each category, we analyze the structural designs and innovations introduced by related works. Additionally, we compile datasets and benchmarks tailored for unified models, offering resources for future exploration. Finally, we discuss the key challenges facing this nascent field, including tokenization strategy, cross-modal attention, and data. As this area is still in its early stages, we anticipate rapid advancements and will regularly update this survey. Our goal is to inspire further research and provide a valuable reference for the community. The references associated with this survey are available on GitHub (https://github.com/AIDC-AI/Awesome-Unified-Multimodal-Models).

Recent works propose complex multi-modal models that handle both time series and language, ultimately claiming high performance on complex tasks like time series reasoning and cross-modal question-answering. However, they skip evaluations of simple and important foundational tasks, which complex models should reliably master. They also lack direct, head-to-head comparisons with other popular approaches. So we ask a simple question: Can recent models even produce generic visual descriptions of time series data? In response, we propose three new tasks, posing that successful multi-modal models should be able to recognize, differentiate, and generate language descriptions of time series. We then create BEDTime, the first benchmark dataset to assess models on each task, comprising four datasets reformatted for these tasks across multiple modalities. Using BEDTime, we evaluate 13 state-of-the-art models, and find that (1) surprisingly, dedicated time series foundation models severely underperform, despite being designed for similar tasks, (2) vision-language models are quite capable, (3) language-only methods perform worst, despite many lauding their potential, and (4) all approaches are clearly fragile to a range of realistic robustness tests, indicating avenues for future work.

Stimulated by the sophisticated reasoning capabilities of recent Large Language Models (LLMs), a variety of strategies for bridging video modality have been devised. A prominent strategy involves Video Language Models (VideoLMs), which train a learnable interface with video data to connect advanced vision encoders with LLMs. Recently, an alternative strategy has surfaced, employing readily available foundation models, such as VideoLMs and LLMs, across multiple stages for modality bridging. In this study, we introduce a simple yet novel strategy where only a single Vision Language Model (VLM) is utilized. Our starting point is the plain insight that a video comprises a series of images, or frames, interwoven with temporal information. The essence of video comprehension lies in adeptly managing the temporal aspects along with the spatial details of each frame. Initially, we transform a video into a single composite image by arranging multiple frames in a grid layout. The resulting single image is termed as an image grid. This format, while maintaining the appearance of a solitary image, effectively retains temporal information within the grid structure. Therefore, the image grid approach enables direct application of a single high-performance VLM without necessitating any video-data training. Our extensive experimental analysis across ten zero-shot video question answering benchmarks, including five open-ended and five multiple-choice benchmarks, reveals that the proposed Image Grid Vision Language Model (IG-VLM) surpasses the existing methods in nine out of ten benchmarks.

Graph Foundation Models (GFMs) have achieved remarkable success in generalizing across diverse domains. However, they mainly focus on Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs), leaving Multimodal-Attributed Graphs (MAGs) largely untapped. Developing Multimodal Graph Foundation Models (MGFMs) allows for leveraging the rich multimodal information in MAGs, and extends applicability to broader types of downstream tasks. While recent MGFMs integrate diverse modality information, our empirical investigation reveals two fundamental limitations of existing MGFMs: (1)they fail to explicitly model modality interaction, essential for capturing intricate cross-modal semantics beyond simple aggregation, and (2)they exhibit sub-optimal modality alignment, which is critical for bridging the significant semantic disparity between distinct modal spaces. To address these challenges, we propose PLANET (graPh topoLogy-aware modAlity iNteraction and alignmEnT), a novel framework employing a Divide-and-Conquer strategy to decouple modality interaction and alignment across distinct granularities. At the embedding granularity, (1)Embedding-wise Domain Gating (EDG) performs local semantic enrichment by adaptively infusing topology-aware cross-modal context, achieving modality interaction. At the node granularity, (2)Node-wise Discretization Retrieval (NDR) ensures global modality alignment by constructing a Discretized Semantic Representation Space (DSRS) to bridge modality gaps. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PLANET significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across diverse graph-centric and multimodal generative tasks.

Fine-grained spatio-temporal understanding is essential for video reasoning and embodied AI. Yet, while Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) master static semantics, their grasp of temporal dynamics remains brittle. We present TimeBlind, a diagnostic benchmark for compositional spatio-temporal understanding. Inspired by cognitive science, TimeBlind categorizes fine-grained temporal understanding into three levels: recognizing atomic events, characterizing event properties, and reasoning about event interdependencies. Unlike benchmarks that conflate recognition with temporal reasoning, TimeBlind leverages a minimal-pairs paradigm: video pairs share identical static visual content but differ solely in temporal structure, utilizing complementary questions to neutralize language priors. Evaluating over 20 state-of-the-art MLLMs (e.g., GPT-5, Gemini 3 Pro) on 600 curated instances (2400 video-question pairs), reveals that the Instance Accuracy (correctly distinguishing both videos in a pair) of the best performing MLLM is only 48.2%, far below the human performance (98.2%). These results demonstrate that even frontier models rely heavily on static visual shortcuts rather than genuine temporal logic, positioning TimeBlind as a vital diagnostic tool for next-generation video understanding. Dataset and code are available at https://baiqi-li.github.io/timeblind_project/ .

Time series foundation models have shown impressive performance on a variety of tasks, across a wide range of domains, even in zero-shot settings. However, most of these models are designed to handle short univariate time series as an input. This limits their practical use, especially in domains such as healthcare with copious amounts of long and multivariate data with strong temporal and intra-variate dependencies. Our study bridges this gap by cataloging and systematically comparing various context expansion techniques from both language and time series domains, and introducing a novel compressive memory mechanism to allow encoder-only TSFMs to effectively model intra-variate dependencies. We demonstrate the benefits of our approach by imbuing MOMENT, a recent family of multi-task time series foundation models, with the multivariate context.

Foundation models pretrained on diverse data at scale have demonstrated extraordinary capabilities in a wide range of vision and language tasks. When such models are deployed in real world environments, they inevitably interface with other entities and agents. For example, language models are often used to interact with human beings through dialogue, and visual perception models are used to autonomously navigate neighborhood streets. In response to these developments, new paradigms are emerging for training foundation models to interact with other agents and perform long-term reasoning. These paradigms leverage the existence of ever-larger datasets curated for multimodal, multitask, and generalist interaction. Research at the intersection of foundation models and decision making holds tremendous promise for creating powerful new systems that can interact effectively across a diverse range of applications such as dialogue, autonomous driving, healthcare, education, and robotics. In this manuscript, we examine the scope of foundation models for decision making, and provide conceptual tools and technical background for understanding the problem space and exploring new research directions. We review recent approaches that ground foundation models in practical decision making applications through a variety of methods such as prompting, conditional generative modeling, planning, optimal control, and reinforcement learning, and discuss common challenges and open problems in the field.

Multimodal foundation models, such as GPT-4o, have recently made remarkable progress, but it is not clear where exactly these models stand in terms of understanding vision. In this paper, we benchmark the performance of popular multimodal foundation models (GPT-4o, o4-mini, Gemini 1.5 Pro and Gemini 2.0 Flash, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Qwen2-VL, Llama 3.2) on standard computer vision tasks (semantic segmentation, object detection, image classification, depth and surface normal prediction) using established datasets (e.g., COCO, ImageNet and its variants, etc). The main challenges to performing this are: 1) most models are trained to output text and cannot natively express versatile domains, such as segments or 3D geometry, and 2) many leading models are proprietary and accessible only at an API level, i.e., there is no weight access to adapt them. We address these challenges by translating standard vision tasks into equivalent text-promptable and API-compatible tasks via prompt chaining to create a standardized benchmarking framework. We observe that 1) the models are not close to the state-of-the-art specialist models at any task. However, 2) they are respectable generalists; this is remarkable as they are presumably trained on primarily image-text-based tasks. 3) They perform semantic tasks notably better than geometric ones. 4) While the prompt-chaining techniques affect performance, better models exhibit less sensitivity to prompt variations. 5) GPT-4o performs the best among non-reasoning models, securing the top position in 4 out of 6 tasks, 6) reasoning models, e.g. o3, show improvements in geometric tasks, and 7) a preliminary analysis of models with native image generation, like the latest GPT-4o, shows they exhibit quirks like hallucinations and spatial misalignments.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made significant progress in vision-language understanding, yet effectively aligning different modalities remains a fundamental challenge. We present a framework that unifies multimodal understanding by applying byte-pair encoding to visual tokens. Unlike conventional approaches that rely on modality-specific encoders, our method directly incorporates structural information into visual tokens, mirroring successful tokenization strategies in text-only language models. We introduce a priority-guided encoding scheme that considers both frequency and spatial consistency, coupled with a multi-stage training procedure based on curriculum-driven data composition. These enhancements enable the transformer model to better capture cross-modal relationships and reason with visual information. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate improved performance across diverse vision-language tasks. By bridging the gap between visual and textual representations, our approach contributes to the advancement of more capable and efficient multimodal foundation models.

Multi-modality foundation models, as represented by GPT-4V, have brought a new paradigm for low-level visual perception and understanding tasks, that can respond to a broad range of natural human instructions in a model. While existing foundation models have shown exciting potentials on low-level visual tasks, their related abilities are still preliminary and need to be improved. In order to enhance these models, we conduct a large-scale subjective experiment collecting a vast number of real human feedbacks on low-level vision. Each feedback follows a pathway that starts with a detailed description on the low-level visual appearance (*e.g. clarity, color, brightness* of an image, and ends with an overall conclusion, with an average length of 45 words. The constructed **Q-Pathway** dataset includes 58K detailed human feedbacks on 18,973 images with diverse low-level appearance. Moreover, to enable foundation models to robustly respond to diverse types of questions, we design a GPT-participated conversion to process these feedbacks into diverse-format 200K instruction-response pairs. Experimental results indicate that the **Q-Instruct** consistently elevates low-level perception and understanding abilities across several foundational models. We anticipate that our datasets can pave the way for a future that general intelligence can perceive, understand low-level visual appearance and evaluate visual quality like a human. Our dataset, model zoo, and demo is published at: https://q-future.github.io/Q-Instruct.

Pre-trained Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) provide strong visual representations for a wide range of applications. In this paper, we continually pre-train prevailing VFMs in a multimodal manner such that they can effortlessly process visual inputs of varying sizes and produce visual representations that are more aligned with language representations, regardless of their original pre-training process. To this end, we introduce CoMP, a carefully designed multimodal pre-training pipeline. CoMP uses a Continual Rotary Position Embedding to support native resolution continual pre-training, and an Alignment Loss between visual and textual features through language prototypes to align multimodal representations. By three-stage training, our VFMs achieve remarkable improvements not only in multimodal understanding but also in other downstream tasks such as classification and segmentation. Remarkably, CoMP-SigLIP achieves scores of 66.7 on ChartQA and 75.9 on DocVQA with a 0.5B LLM, while maintaining an 87.4% accuracy on ImageNet-1K and a 49.5 mIoU on ADE20K under frozen chunk evaluation.

Understanding fine-grained temporal dynamics is crucial for multimodal video comprehension and generation. Due to the lack of fine-grained temporal annotations, existing video benchmarks mostly resemble static image benchmarks and are incompetent at evaluating models for temporal understanding. In this paper, we introduce TemporalBench, a new benchmark dedicated to evaluating fine-grained temporal understanding in videos. TemporalBench consists of ~10K video question-answer pairs, derived from ~2K high-quality human annotations detailing the temporal dynamics in video clips. As a result, our benchmark provides a unique testbed for evaluating various temporal understanding and reasoning abilities such as action frequency, motion magnitude, event order, etc. Moreover, it enables evaluations on various tasks like both video question answering and captioning, both short and long video understanding, as well as different models such as multimodal video embedding models and text generation models. Results show that state-of-the-art models like GPT-4o achieve only 38.5% question answering accuracy on TemporalBench, demonstrating a significant gap (~30%) between humans and AI in temporal understanding. Furthermore, we notice a critical pitfall for multi-choice QA where LLMs can detect the subtle changes in negative captions and find a centralized description as a cue for its prediction, where we propose Multiple Binary Accuracy (MBA) to correct such bias. We hope that TemporalBench can foster research on improving models' temporal reasoning capabilities. Both dataset and evaluation code will be made available.

Multi-modal (vision-language) models, such as CLIP, are replacing traditional supervised pre-training models (e.g., ImageNet-based pre-training) as the new generation of visual foundation models. These models with robust and aligned semantic representations learned from billions of internet image-text pairs and can be applied to various downstream tasks in a zero-shot manner. However, in some fine-grained domains like medical imaging and remote sensing, the performance of multi-modal foundation models often leaves much to be desired. Consequently, many researchers have begun to explore few-shot adaptation methods for these models, gradually deriving three main technical approaches: 1) prompt-based methods, 2) adapter-based methods, and 3) external knowledge-based methods. Nevertheless, this rapidly developing field has produced numerous results without a comprehensive survey to systematically organize the research progress. Therefore, in this survey, we introduce and analyze the research advancements in few-shot adaptation methods for multi-modal models, summarizing commonly used datasets and experimental setups, and comparing the results of different methods. In addition, due to the lack of reliable theoretical support for existing methods, we derive the few-shot adaptation generalization error bound for multi-modal models. The theorem reveals that the generalization error of multi-modal foundation models is constrained by three factors: domain gap, model capacity, and sample size. Based on this, we propose three possible solutions from the following aspects: 1) adaptive domain generalization, 2) adaptive model selection, and 3) adaptive knowledge utilization.

We introduce MMaDA, a novel class of multimodal diffusion foundation models designed to achieve superior performance across diverse domains such as textual reasoning, multimodal understanding, and text-to-image generation. The approach is distinguished by three key innovations: (i) MMaDA adopts a unified diffusion architecture with a shared probabilistic formulation and a modality-agnostic design, eliminating the need for modality-specific components. This architecture ensures seamless integration and processing across different data types. (ii) We implement a mixed long chain-of-thought (CoT) fine-tuning strategy that curates a unified CoT format across modalities. By aligning reasoning processes between textual and visual domains, this strategy facilitates cold-start training for the final reinforcement learning (RL) stage, thereby enhancing the model's ability to handle complex tasks from the outset. (iii) We propose UniGRPO, a unified policy-gradient-based RL algorithm specifically tailored for diffusion foundation models. Utilizing diversified reward modeling, UniGRPO unifies post-training across both reasoning and generation tasks, ensuring consistent performance improvements. Experimental results demonstrate that MMaDA-8B exhibits strong generalization capabilities as a unified multimodal foundation model. It surpasses powerful models like LLaMA-3-7B and Qwen2-7B in textual reasoning, outperforms Show-o and SEED-X in multimodal understanding, and excels over SDXL and Janus in text-to-image generation. These achievements highlight MMaDA's effectiveness in bridging the gap between pretraining and post-training within unified diffusion architectures, providing a comprehensive framework for future research and development. We open-source our code and trained models at: https://github.com/Gen-Verse/MMaDA

The advent of foundation models has revolutionized the fields of natural language processing and computer vision, paving the way for their application in autonomous driving (AD). This survey presents a comprehensive review of more than 40 research papers, demonstrating the role of foundation models in enhancing AD. Large language models contribute to planning and simulation in AD, particularly through their proficiency in reasoning, code generation and translation. In parallel, vision foundation models are increasingly adapted for critical tasks such as 3D object detection and tracking, as well as creating realistic driving scenarios for simulation and testing. Multi-modal foundation models, integrating diverse inputs, exhibit exceptional visual understanding and spatial reasoning, crucial for end-to-end AD. This survey not only provides a structured taxonomy, categorizing foundation models based on their modalities and functionalities within the AD domain but also delves into the methods employed in current research. It identifies the gaps between existing foundation models and cutting-edge AD approaches, thereby charting future research directions and proposing a roadmap for bridging these gaps.

Audio-visual generalised zero-shot learning for video classification requires understanding the relations between the audio and visual information in order to be able to recognise samples from novel, previously unseen classes at test time. The natural semantic and temporal alignment between audio and visual data in video data can be exploited to learn powerful representations that generalise to unseen classes at test time. We propose a multi-modal and Temporal Cross-attention Framework (\modelName) for audio-visual generalised zero-shot learning. Its inputs are temporally aligned audio and visual features that are obtained from pre-trained networks. Encouraging the framework to focus on cross-modal correspondence across time instead of self-attention within the modalities boosts the performance significantly. We show that our proposed framework that ingests temporal features yields state-of-the-art performance on the \ucf, \vgg, and \activity benchmarks for (generalised) zero-shot learning. Code for reproducing all results is available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/TCAF-GZSL.

Real-world user-generated short videos, especially those distributed on platforms such as WeChat Channel and TikTok, dominate the mobile internet. However, current large multimodal models lack essential temporally-structured, detailed, and in-depth video comprehension capabilities, which are the cornerstone of effective video search and recommendation, as well as emerging video applications. Understanding real-world shorts is actually challenging due to their complex visual elements, high information density in both visuals and audio, and fast pacing that focuses on emotional expression and viewpoint delivery. This requires advanced reasoning to effectively integrate multimodal information, including visual, audio, and text. In this work, we introduce ARC-Hunyuan-Video, a multimodal model that processes visual, audio, and textual signals from raw video inputs end-to-end for structured comprehension. The model is capable of multi-granularity timestamped video captioning and summarization, open-ended video question answering, temporal video grounding, and video reasoning. Leveraging high-quality data from an automated annotation pipeline, our compact 7B-parameter model is trained through a comprehensive regimen: pre-training, instruction fine-tuning, cold start, reinforcement learning (RL) post-training, and final instruction fine-tuning. Quantitative evaluations on our introduced benchmark ShortVid-Bench and qualitative comparisons demonstrate its strong performance in real-world video comprehension, and it supports zero-shot or fine-tuning with a few samples for diverse downstream applications. The real-world production deployment of our model has yielded tangible and measurable improvements in user engagement and satisfaction, a success supported by its remarkable efficiency, with stress tests indicating an inference time of just 10 seconds for a one-minute video on H20 GPU.

Foundation models are vital tools in various Computer Vision applications. They take as input a single RGB image and output a deep feature representation that is useful for various applications. However, in case we have multiple views of the same 3D scene, they operate on each image independently and do not always produce consistent features for the same 3D point. We propose a way to convert a Foundation Model into a Multi-View Foundation Model. Such a model takes as input a set of images and outputs a feature map for each image such that the features of corresponding points are as consistent as possible. This approach bypasses the need to build a consistent 3D model of the features and allows direct manipulation in the image space. Specifically, we show how to augment Transformers-based foundation models (i.e., DINO, SAM, CLIP) with intermediate 3D-aware attention layers that help match features across different views. As leading examples, we show surface normal estimation and multi-view segmentation tasks. Quantitative experiments show that our method improves feature matching considerably compared to current foundation models.

Recent advances in video-based multimodal large language models (Video-LLMs) have significantly improved video understanding by processing videos as sequences of image frames. However, many existing methods treat frames independently in the vision backbone, lacking explicit temporal modeling, which limits their ability to capture dynamic patterns and efficiently handle long videos. To address these limitations, we introduce STORM (Spatiotemporal TOken Reduction for Multimodal LLMs), a novel architecture incorporating a dedicated temporal encoder between the image encoder and the LLM. Our temporal encoder leverages the Mamba State Space Model to integrate temporal information into image tokens, generating enriched representations that preserve inter-frame dynamics across the entire video sequence. This enriched encoding not only enhances video reasoning capabilities but also enables effective token reduction strategies, including test-time sampling and training-based temporal and spatial pooling, substantially reducing computational demands on the LLM without sacrificing key temporal information. By integrating these techniques, our approach simultaneously reduces training and inference latency while improving performance, enabling efficient and robust video understanding over extended temporal contexts. Extensive evaluations show that STORM achieves state-of-the-art results across various long video understanding benchmarks (more than 5\% improvement on MLVU and LongVideoBench) while reducing the computation costs by up to 8times and the decoding latency by 2.4-2.9times for the fixed numbers of input frames. Project page is available at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/lpr/storm

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

Satellite image time-series analysis demands fine-grained spatial-temporal reasoning, which remains a challenge for existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs). In this work, we study the capabilities of MLLMs on a novel task that jointly targets temporal change understanding and future scene generation, aiming to assess their potential for modeling complex multimodal dynamics over time. We propose TAMMs, a Temporal-Aware Multimodal Model for satellite image change understanding and forecasting, which enhances frozen MLLMs with lightweight temporal modules for structured sequence encoding and contextual prompting. To guide future image generation, TAMMs introduces a Semantic-Fused Control Injection (SFCI) mechanism that adaptively combines high-level semantic reasoning and structural priors within an enhanced ControlNet. This dual-path conditioning enables temporally consistent and semantically grounded image synthesis. Experiments demonstrate that TAMMs outperforms strong MLLM baselines in both temporal change understanding and future image forecasting tasks, highlighting how carefully designed temporal reasoning and semantic fusion can unlock the full potential of MLLMs for spatio-temporal understanding.

Large multimodal models (LMMs) extend large language models (LLMs) with multi-sensory skills, such as visual understanding, to achieve stronger generic intelligence. In this paper, we analyze the latest model, GPT-4V(ision), to deepen the understanding of LMMs. The analysis focuses on the intriguing tasks that GPT-4V can perform, containing test samples to probe the quality and genericity of GPT-4V's capabilities, its supported inputs and working modes, and the effective ways to prompt the model. In our approach to exploring GPT-4V, we curate and organize a collection of carefully designed qualitative samples spanning a variety of domains and tasks. Observations from these samples demonstrate that GPT-4V's unprecedented ability in processing arbitrarily interleaved multimodal inputs and the genericity of its capabilities together make GPT-4V a powerful multimodal generalist system. Furthermore, GPT-4V's unique capability of understanding visual markers drawn on input images can give rise to new human-computer interaction methods such as visual referring prompting. We conclude the report with in-depth discussions on the emerging application scenarios and the future research directions for GPT-4V-based systems. We hope that this preliminary exploration will inspire future research on the next-generation multimodal task formulation, new ways to exploit and enhance LMMs to solve real-world problems, and gaining better understanding of multimodal foundation models.

Healthcare data now span EHRs, medical imaging, genomics, and wearable sensors, but most diagnostic models still process these modalities in isolation. This limits their ability to capture early, cross-modal disease signatures. This paper introduces a multimodal foundation model built on a transformer architecture that integrates heterogeneous clinical data through modality-specific encoders and cross-modal attention. Each modality is mapped into a shared latent space and fused using multi-head attention with residual normalization. We implement the framework using a multimodal dataset that simulates early-stage disease patterns across EHR sequences, imaging patches, genomic profiles, and wearable signals, including missing-modality scenarios and label noise. The model is trained using supervised classification together with self-supervised reconstruction and contrastive alignment to improve robustness. Experimental evaluation demonstrates strong performance in early-detection settings, with stable classification metrics, reliable uncertainty estimates, and interpretable attention patterns. The approach moves toward a flexible, pretrain-and-fine-tune foundation model that supports precision diagnostics, handles incomplete inputs, and improves early disease detection across oncology, cardiology, and neurology applications.

In this technical report, we introduce our solution to human-centric spatio-temporal video grounding task. We propose a concise and effective framework named STVGFormer, which models spatiotemporal visual-linguistic dependencies with a static branch and a dynamic branch. The static branch performs cross-modal understanding in a single frame and learns to localize the target object spatially according to intra-frame visual cues like object appearances. The dynamic branch performs cross-modal understanding across multiple frames. It learns to predict the starting and ending time of the target moment according to dynamic visual cues like motions. Both the static and dynamic branches are designed as cross-modal transformers. We further design a novel static-dynamic interaction block to enable the static and dynamic branches to transfer useful and complementary information from each other, which is shown to be effective to improve the prediction on hard cases. Our proposed method achieved 39.6% vIoU and won the first place in the HC-STVG track of the 4th Person in Context Challenge.

Existing text-to-video diffusion models rely solely on text-only encoders for their pretraining. This limitation stems from the absence of large-scale multimodal prompt video datasets, resulting in a lack of visual grounding and restricting their versatility and application in multimodal integration. To address this, we construct a large-scale multimodal prompt dataset by employing retrieval methods to pair in-context examples with the given text prompts and then utilize a two-stage training strategy to enable diverse video generation tasks within the same model. In the first stage, we propose a multimodal conditional video generation framework for pretraining on these augmented datasets, establishing a foundational model for grounded video generation. Secondly, we finetune the model from the first stage on three video generation tasks, incorporating multi-modal instructions. This process further refines the model's ability to handle diverse inputs and tasks, ensuring seamless integration of multi-modal information. After this two-stage train-ing process, VIMI demonstrates multimodal understanding capabilities, producing contextually rich and personalized videos grounded in the provided inputs, as shown in Figure 1. Compared to previous visual grounded video generation methods, VIMI can synthesize consistent and temporally coherent videos with large motion while retaining the semantic control. Lastly, VIMI also achieves state-of-the-art text-to-video generation results on UCF101 benchmark.

Video temporal grounding aims to pinpoint a video segment that matches the query description. Despite the recent advance in short-form videos (e.g., in minutes), temporal grounding in long videos (e.g., in hours) is still at its early stage. To address this challenge, a common practice is to employ a sliding window, yet can be inefficient and inflexible due to the limited number of frames within the window. In this work, we propose an end-to-end framework for fast temporal grounding, which is able to model an hours-long video with one-time network execution. Our pipeline is formulated in a coarse-to-fine manner, where we first extract context knowledge from non-overlapped video clips (i.e., anchors), and then supplement the anchors that highly response to the query with detailed content knowledge. Besides the remarkably high pipeline efficiency, another advantage of our approach is the capability of capturing long-range temporal correlation, thanks to modeling the entire video as a whole, and hence facilitates more accurate grounding. Experimental results suggest that, on the long-form video datasets MAD and Ego4d, our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-arts, and achieves 14.6times / 102.8times higher efficiency respectively. Project can be found at https://github.com/afcedf/SOONet.git.

Training diffusion models for audiovisual sequences allows for a range of generation tasks by learning conditional distributions of various input-output combinations of the two modalities. Nevertheless, this strategy often requires training a separate model for each task which is expensive. Here, we propose a novel training approach to effectively learn arbitrary conditional distributions in the audiovisual space.Our key contribution lies in how we parameterize the diffusion timestep in the forward diffusion process. Instead of the standard fixed diffusion timestep, we propose applying variable diffusion timesteps across the temporal dimension and across modalities of the inputs. This formulation offers flexibility to introduce variable noise levels for various portions of the input, hence the term mixture of noise levels. We propose a transformer-based audiovisual latent diffusion model and show that it can be trained in a task-agnostic fashion using our approach to enable a variety of audiovisual generation tasks at inference time. Experiments demonstrate the versatility of our method in tackling cross-modal and multimodal interpolation tasks in the audiovisual space. Notably, our proposed approach surpasses baselines in generating temporally and perceptually consistent samples conditioned on the input. Project page: avdit2024.github.io

With the growth of high-quality data and advancement in visual pre-training paradigms, Video Foundation Models (VFMs) have made significant progress recently, demonstrating their remarkable performance on traditional video understanding benchmarks. However, the existing benchmarks (e.g. Kinetics) and their evaluation protocols are often limited by relatively poor diversity, high evaluation costs, and saturated performance metrics. In this paper, we build a comprehensive benchmark suite to address these issues, namely VideoEval. Specifically, we establish the Video Task Adaption Benchmark (VidTAB) and the Video Embedding Benchmark (VidEB) from two perspectives: evaluating the task adaptability of VFMs under few-shot conditions and assessing their representation power by directly applying to downstream tasks. With VideoEval, we conduct a large-scale study on 20 popular open-source vision foundation models. Our study reveals some insightful findings on VFMs: 1) overall, current VFMs exhibit weak generalization across diverse tasks, 2) increasing video data, whether labeled or weakly-labeled video-text pairs, does not necessarily improve task performance, 3) the effectiveness of some pre-training paradigms may not be fully validated in previous benchmarks, and 4) combining different pre-training paradigms can help improve the generalization capabilities. We believe this study serves as an important complement to the current evaluation for VFMs and offers valuable insights for the future research.

Video Foundation Models (VFMs) have recently been used to simulate the real world to train physical AI systems and develop creative visual experiences. However, there are significant challenges in training large-scale, high quality VFMs that can generate high-quality videos. We present a scalable, open-source VFM training pipeline with NVIDIA NeMo, providing accelerated video dataset curation, multimodal data loading, and parallelized video diffusion model training and inference. We also provide a comprehensive performance analysis highlighting best practices for efficient VFM training and inference.

In this report, we introduce ERNIE 5.0, a natively autoregressive foundation model desinged for unified multimodal understanding and generation across text, image, video, and audio. All modalities are trained from scratch under a unified next-group-of-tokens prediction objective, based on an ultra-sparse mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture with modality-agnostic expert routing. To address practical challenges in large-scale deployment under diverse resource constraints, ERNIE 5.0 adopts a novel elastic training paradigm. Within a single pre-training run, the model learns a family of sub-models with varying depths, expert capacities, and routing sparsity, enabling flexible trade-offs among performance, model size, and inference latency in memory- or time-constrained scenarios. Moreover, we systematically address the challenges of scaling reinforcement learning to unified foundation models, thereby guaranteeing efficient and stable post-training under ultra-sparse MoE architectures and diverse multimodal settings. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ERNIE 5.0 achieves strong and balanced performance across multiple modalities. To the best of our knowledge, among publicly disclosed models, ERNIE 5.0 represents the first production-scale realization of a trillion-parameter unified autoregressive model that supports both multimodal understanding and generation. To facilitate further research, we present detailed visualizations of modality-agnostic expert routing in the unified model, alongside comprehensive empirical analysis of elastic training, aiming to offer profound insights to the community.

While recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made impressive strides, they predominantly employ a conventional autoregressive architecture as their backbone, leaving significant room to explore effective and efficient alternatives in architectural design. Concurrently, recent studies have successfully applied discrete diffusion models to various domains, such as visual understanding and image generation, revealing their considerable potential as a promising backbone for multimodal systems. Drawing inspiration from these pioneering research, we introduce Omni-Diffusion, the first any-to-any multimodal language model built entirely on mask-based discrete diffusion models, which unifies understanding and generation across text, speech, and images. Omni-Diffusion employs a unified mask-based discrete diffusion model to directly capture the joint distribution over discrete multimodal tokens. This approach supports not only bimodal tasks but also more complex scenarios involving multiple modalities. On a diverse set of benchmarks, our method outperforms or performs on par with existing multimodal systems that process two or more modalities, highlighting the significant promise of diffusion models in powering the next generation of multimodal foundation models. Project webpage: https://omni-diffusion.github.io.

Video Question Answering (VideoQA) task serves as a critical playground for evaluating whether foundation models can effectively perceive, understand, and reason about dynamic real-world scenarios. However, existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) struggle with simultaneously modeling spatial relationships within video frames and understanding the causal dynamics of temporal evolution on complex and reasoning-intensive VideoQA task. In this work, we equip MLLM with a comprehensive and extensible Video Toolkit, to enhance MLLM's spatiotemporal reasoning capabilities and ensure the harmony between the quantity and diversity of tools. To better control the tool invocation sequence and avoid toolchain shortcut issues, we propose a Spatiotemporal Reasoning Framework (STAR) that strategically schedules temporal and spatial tools, thereby progressively localizing the key area in the video. Our STAR framework enhances GPT-4o using lightweight tools, achieving an 8.2% gain on VideoMME and 4.6% on LongVideoBench. We believe that our proposed Video Toolkit and STAR framework make an important step towards building autonomous and intelligent video analysis assistants. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/fansunqi/VideoTool.

In the current landscape of artificial intelligence, foundation models serve as the bedrock for advancements in both language and vision domains. OpenAI GPT-4 has emerged as the pinnacle in large language models (LLMs), while the computer vision (CV) domain boasts a plethora of state-of-the-art (SOTA) models such as Meta's SAM and DINO, and YOLOS. However, the financial and computational burdens of training new models from scratch remain a significant barrier to progress. In response to this challenge, we introduce UnifiedVisionGPT, a novel framework designed to consolidate and automate the integration of SOTA vision models, thereby facilitating the development of vision-oriented AI. UnifiedVisionGPT distinguishes itself through four key features: (1) provides a versatile multimodal framework adaptable to a wide range of applications, building upon the strengths of multimodal foundation models; (2) seamlessly integrates various SOTA vision models to create a comprehensive multimodal platform, capitalizing on the best components of each model; (3) prioritizes vision-oriented AI, ensuring a more rapid progression in the CV domain compared to the current trajectory of LLMs; and (4) introduces automation in the selection of SOTA vision models, generating optimal results based on diverse multimodal inputs such as text prompts and images. This paper outlines the architecture and capabilities of UnifiedVisionGPT, demonstrating its potential to revolutionize the field of computer vision through enhanced efficiency, versatility, generalization, and performance. Our implementation, along with the unified multimodal framework and comprehensive dataset, is made publicly available at https://github.com/LHBuilder/SA-Segment-Anything.

Large foundation models, including large language models (LLMs), vision transformers (ViTs), diffusion, and LLM-based multimodal models, are revolutionizing the entire machine learning lifecycle, from training to deployment. However, the substantial advancements in versatility and performance these models offer come at a significant cost in terms of hardware resources. To support the growth of these large models in a scalable and environmentally sustainable way, there has been a considerable focus on developing resource-efficient strategies. This survey delves into the critical importance of such research, examining both algorithmic and systemic aspects. It offers a comprehensive analysis and valuable insights gleaned from existing literature, encompassing a broad array of topics from cutting-edge model architectures and training/serving algorithms to practical system designs and implementations. The goal of this survey is to provide an overarching understanding of how current approaches are tackling the resource challenges posed by large foundation models and to potentially inspire future breakthroughs in this field.

We introduce SciVer, the first benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the ability of foundation models to verify claims within a multimodal scientific context. SciVer consists of 3,000 expert-annotated examples over 1,113 scientific papers, covering four subsets, each representing a common reasoning type in multimodal scientific claim verification. To enable fine-grained evaluation, each example includes expert-annotated supporting evidence. We assess the performance of 21 state-of-the-art multimodal foundation models, including o4-mini, Gemini-2.5-Flash, Llama-3.2-Vision, and Qwen2.5-VL. Our experiment reveals a substantial performance gap between these models and human experts on SciVer. Through an in-depth analysis of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and human-conducted error evaluations, we identify critical limitations in current open-source models, offering key insights to advance models' comprehension and reasoning in multimodal scientific literature tasks.

The visual world offers a critical axis for advancing foundation models beyond language. Despite growing interest in this direction, the design space for native multimodal models remains opaque. We provide empirical clarity through controlled, from-scratch pretraining experiments, isolating the factors that govern multimodal pretraining without interference from language pretraining. We adopt the Transfusion framework, using next-token prediction for language and diffusion for vision, to train on diverse data including text, video, image-text pairs, and even action-conditioned video. Our experiments yield four key insights: (i) Representation Autoencoder (RAE) provides an optimal unified visual representation by excelling at both visual understanding and generation; (ii) visual and language data are complementary and yield synergy for downstream capabilities; (iii) unified multimodal pretraining leads naturally to world modeling, with capabilities emerging from general training; and (iv) Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) enables efficient and effective multimodal scaling while naturally inducing modality specialization. Through IsoFLOP analysis, we compute scaling laws for both modalities and uncover a scaling asymmetry: vision is significantly more data-hungry than language. We demonstrate that the MoE architecture harmonizes this scaling asymmetry by providing the high model capacity required by language while accommodating the data-intensive nature of vision, paving the way for truly unified multimodal models.

Text to video generation has emerged as a critical frontier in generative artificial intelligence, yet existing approaches struggle with maintaining temporal consistency, compositional understanding, and fine grained control over visual narratives. We present MOVAI (Multimodal Original Video AI), a novel hierarchical framework that integrates compositional scene understanding with temporal aware diffusion models for high fidelity text to video synthesis. Our approach introduces three key innovations: (1) a Compositional Scene Parser (CSP) that decomposes textual descriptions into hierarchical scene graphs with temporal annotations, (2) a Temporal-Spatial Attention Mechanism (TSAM) that ensures coherent motion dynamics across frames while preserving spatial details, and (3) a Progressive Video Refinement (PVR) module that iteratively enhances video quality through multi-scale temporal reasoning. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that MOVAI achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving video quality metrics by 15.3% in LPIPS, 12.7% in FVD, and 18.9% in user preference studies compared to existing methods. Our framework shows particular strength in generating complex multi-object scenes with realistic temporal dynamics and fine-grained semantic control.