Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress on cross-modal reasoning tasks, yet they continue to suffer from hallucinations in long-chain reasoning processes. In this work, we revisit hallucination in MLLMs from the perspective of reasoning generation dynamics. We argue that entropy is not merely a static measure of uncertainty but a structured signal that reflects how modality information is integrated throughout decoding. Through systematic analysis, we identify two characteristic entropy patterns associated with hallucination behaviors: (1) a generally high-confidence regime corresponds to premature convergence to inappropriate multimodal interactions; and (2) local abrupt entropy transitions are associated with reasoning instability and hallucination onset. Building on these observations, we propose an entropy-aware self-introspective framework for MLLM reasoning. Our method continuously tracks entropy dynamics during decoding and performs targeted visual re-alignment when suspicious hallucination states are detected, encouraging the model to re-examine salient visual evidence at critical reasoning stages. Extensive experiments across six multimodal reasoning benchmarks spanning nine distinct evaluation settings demonstrate that our approach delivers robust improvements in reasoning accuracy and hallucination robustness, while providing new insights into the generation dynamics underlying MLLM failures. The code is available at: https://github.com/jden4524/SelfRetrospectiveDecoding.
Ali Abedi, Q. M. Jonathan Wu, Ning Zhang, Farhad Pourpanah
Skin cancer diagnosis, particularly differentiating melanoma from benign nevi, is challenging due to the visual similarity between lesions. Although convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and vision transformers (ViTs) have shown promising performance, their effectiveness often deteriorates on data from heterogeneous clinical sources. Conventional domain adaptation methods address domain shift but require access to source data during adaptation, which is often infeasible due to privacy regulations. Multi-source-free unsupervised domain adaptation (MSFDA) addresses this limitation by leveraging multiple labeled source domains to generalize to an unlabeled target domain without requiring access to source data. However, existing MSFDA methods rely on full backbone fine-tuning, leading to catastrophic forgetting and overfitting on small clinical datasets, and address domain shift at the aggregation stage without establishing a shared domain-invariant feature space. Furthermore, their reliance on hard pseudo-labels or confidence-weighted aggregation introduces noisy supervision signals under domain shift. To address these limitations, we propose CAT-CKD, consisting of two components: (1) contrastive adapter training (CAT), which trains lightweight ConvPass adapters within a frozen ViT backbone using supervised contrastive learning (SCL) to establish a shared domain-invariant feature space before source-specific model training, and (2) consensus knowledge distillation (CKD), which aggregates logits from multiple source models into a consensus supervisory signal and adapts a student model on unlabeled target data using KL divergence. Experiments on five publicly available skin lesion datasets show that CAT-CKD achieves an average AUROC of 86.1%, outperforming existing MSFDA methods while requiring only 4.3M trainable parameters. The code is available at https://github.com/A-Abedi/CAT_CKD.
Video-conditioned audio generation, including Video-to-Sound (V2S) and Visual Text-to-Speech (VisualTTS), has traditionally been studied as two separate tasks despite their shared objective of generating audio conditioned on visual content. Existing methods rely on task-specific architectures and training paradigms, while the possibility of a unified generative framework remains largely unexplored due to heterogeneous conditioning signals and limited joint training data. In this paper, we propose ViSSFlow, a unified flow-matching framework for both V2S and VisualTTS. To effectively integrate diverse conditioning modalities within a Diffusion Transformer (DiT), we introduce a disentangled condition aggregation mechanism that exploits the complementary roles of attention layers, using cross-attention to model semantic conditions and self-attention to capture temporally dense visual cues. Furthermore, contrary to the common assumption that joint optimization of V2S and VisualTTS causes task interference, we show that a single model can be trained end-to-end without sacrificing task-specific performance. To address the scarcity of paired training data covering both sound and speech generation, we further propose a simple yet effective feature-level data synthesis strategy that enables robust joint learning. Extensive experiments on V2S, VisualTTS, and joint generation benchmarks demonstrate that ViSSFlow consistently outperforms state-of-the-art task-specific baselines while providing a unified solution for video-conditioned audio generation. Code and demos are provided in Supplementary Material.
Ultra-low-field (ULF) Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) offers a portable, low-cost alternative to conventional scanners by operating at field strengths below 10 mT. At these fields, two sensor technologies compete: quantum SQUID (Superconducting Quantum Interference Device) sensors, which provide high sensitivity but require cryogenic cooling, and classical induction coils, which are inexpensive and room-temperature but produce weaker signals. With conventional physics-based imaging, both suffer from low signal-to-noise ratios (SNR). Data-driven reconstruction has overcome similar limits in related inverse problems, but its use for ULF-MRI has been hindered by a lack of open datasets, benchmarks, and flexible simulators. To close this gap, we present OpenULF, a modular, open-source simulation toolkit that generates paired training data and supports end-to-end machine-learning (ML) reconstruction. OpenULF integrates a Bloch-equation-validated physics simulator, calibrated SQUID and coil receiver models, reconstruction ML networks, and an automated design-space exploration engine. Architecturally, a receiver abstract base class, a typed HDF5 contract that decouples physics from learning, and a resumable sweep engine make sensors, models, and datasets independently substitutable. Using OpenULF, we train 774 models across four anatomical datasets and conduct three design-space explorations. The effectiveness of ML reconstruction depends strongly on the dataset and the sensor. We identify a SQUID-to-coil crossover near 450 $μ$T and demonstrate that sensor hardware and ML model capacity can be traded off during system design. Sensor and reconstruction choices must therefore be co-designed: the best sensor is set by the dataset and field strength, not by SNR.