Thinking vision-language models reason for thousands of tokens, yet still miss small details in high-resolution images. Zooming methods pay for extra inference passes, and outcome rewards never tell the model where to look at. In Qwen3.5-4B, we find that the bottleneck is selection, not seeing: a few attention heads, which we call localization heads, pick the evidence out of thousands of visual tokens; ablating four of them costs 13.2 points more than ablating four random heads, and their focus fades as the reasoning grows. We therefore propose Localization-Head Alignment (LHA), which makes attention a training signal: whenever the reasoning states a visual fact, these heads learn to look at the focal region rather than the background, as an auxiliary loss in both SFT and RL training. On benchmarks of V*, HR-Bench 4K and TreeBench, LHA lifts Qwen3.5-4B from 74.1% to 76.6% accuracy, the best single-pass 4B result we evaluate, ahead of multi-pass zooming and released 7B models. Alignment alone adds 1.8 points over otherwise identical training while shortening reasoning by 20%, and the gains carry over to Qwen2.5-VL-3B.
Yuchen Zhang, Yaxiong Wang, Yujiao Wu, Lianwei Wu, Qi Zhang, Li Zhu, Chaofeng Dong, Le Wu 等 9 位作者
Multimodal forgery detection is commonly studied under a static assumption: training attacks are expected to approximate those encountered after deployment. This assumption becomes increasingly fragile as generators, editing systems, and multimodal large language models continually introduce new forgery mechanisms and forensic evidence. We formulate this problem as attack-incremental continual multimodal forgery detection, where the binary real/fake interface remains fixed while emerging attacks must be learned without forgetting previous ones. We introduce Fable-Bench, which organizes attack evolution through complementary joint-modality, text-side, and image-side protocols. We further propose ARISE (Authentic Reference-Informed Stability Enhancement), motivated by the open-ended forged class and the comparatively reusable geometry of authentic content. ARISE fits a real-only Gaussian mixture model to projected authentic replay representations as a compact historical reference. Meanwhile, the proposed Gaussian-Responsibility-Aware Stability Preservation (GRASP) derives a sample-adaptive anisotropic metric that strongly constrains historically stable representation directions while retaining plasticity elsewhere. Our Vulnerability-Aware Replay (VAR) further estimates stage-wise vulnerability from authentic-density degradation, forged-to-authentic boundary confusion, and authentic-mode occupancy drift, then assigns bounded replay emphasis to fragile stages. All adaptive signals are obtained from training-time replay statistics, while inference uses only the original multimodal backbone and binary classification head. Experiments across three attack-evolution protocols and multiple detector architectures demonstrate improved historical retention and final average performance over representative continual-learning baselines.
Zhuohang Li, Yiding Ma, Yu Shang, Lei Jin, Shengyuan Wang, Jianjie Fang, Zhaolu Wang, Xvyuan Liu 等 29 位作者
World models have emerged as a central paradigm for embodied intelligence, enabling agents to predict action-conditioned future and reason about environmental dynamics. However, existing embodied world model benchmarks are still largely confined to vision-only prediction, offline embodied applications, and simulator-based evaluation, making them insufficient for assessing increasingly comprehensive world models. In this work, we introduce WorldArena 2.0, an expanded benchmark that systematically broadens embodied world model evaluation along three dimensions: modality, functionality, and platform. Along the modality dimension, WorldArena 2.0 extends evaluation from vision-only to visuotactile modalities, enabling assessment of multimodal perception and prediction. Along the functionality dimension, it extends beyond policy evaluation and planning to assess world models as interactive RL environments for policy optimization. Along the platform dimension, it moves beyond simulator-only evaluation to a diverse suite of simulated and real-world robotic settings across multiple embodiments. Under a standardized protocol, WorldArena 2.0 comprehensively evaluates perceptual quality, interactive utility, and cross-platform performance, providing a comprehensive testbed for tracking progress toward embodied world models. The project page including codes and demos is available at: https://world-arena.ai/.
David Restrepo, Chenwei Wu, Luis Filipe Nakayama, Miguel L. Martins, Stergios Christodoulidis, Maria Vakalopoulou, Enzo Ferrante
Progress in AI-based retinal image analysis has accelerated with the adoption of foundation models, yet evaluating their real-world reliability remains challenging. Performance reported on a single dataset does not capture how models behave under dataset shift, across clinical definitions, or for different patient subgroups. This limitation is particularly critical in medical imaging, where robustness, calibration, and fairness are essential for safe deployment. We introduce FOCUS (Foundation Ophthalmic Cross-Dataset Understanding under Shift), a cross-dataset benchmark evaluating retinal fundus models across vision-only encoder models (VM), vision-language dual-encoder models (VLM), and multimodal large language models (MLLM). FOCUS harmonizes binary diabetic retinopathy, referable diabetic retinopathy, and glaucomatous optic neuropathy tasks across ten public datasets spanning diverse geographies, acquisition conditions, and label protocols. The benchmark evaluates models through a unified analysis layer that measures ranking performance, calibration, subgroup disparities, and image-quality robustness. We present a large-scale evaluation covering 532 base configurations and 228 MLLM configurations adapted via LoRA fine-tuning. Results show no model family consistently dominates across tasks and datasets: general VM encoders achieve the strongest average ranking performance, medical MLLMs are competitive but variable, and dual-encoder VLMs benefit substantially from lightweight adaptation. Fine-tuning improves in-domain performance but exhibits heterogeneous transfer to external datasets, particularly in calibration. FOCUS provides a practical framework and public benchmark to assess generalization, reliability, and robustness beyond single-dataset leaderboards.
Yuchen Zhang Xi'an Jiaotong University, Yaxiong Wang Hefei University of Technology, Kecheng Han, Yujiao Wu CSIRO, Lianwei Wu, Li Zhu Xi'an Jiaotong University, Zhedong Zheng University of Macau
Recent advances in generative AI have significantly enhanced the realism of multimodal media manipulation, thereby posing substantial challenges to manipulation detection. Existing manipulation detection and grounding approaches predominantly focus on manipulation type classification under result-oriented supervision, which not only lacks interpretability but also tends to overfit superficial artifacts. In this paper, we argue that generalizable detection requires incorporating explicit forensic reasoning, rather than merely classifying a limited set of manipulation types, which fails to generalize to unseen manipulation patterns. To this end, we propose REFORM, a reasoning-driven framework that shifts learning from outcome fitting to process modeling. REFORM adopts a three-stage curriculum that first induces forensic rationales, then aligns reasoning with final judgments, and finally refines logical consistency via reinforcement learning. To support this paradigm, we introduce ROM, a large-scale dataset with rich reasoning annotations. Extensive experiments show that REFORM establishes new state-of-the-art performance with superior generalization, achieving 81.52% ACC on ROM, 76.65% ACC on DGM4, and 74.9 F1 on MMFakeBench.
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cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Jingchun Lian, Lingyu Liu Xi'an Jiaotong University, Yaxiong Wang Hefei University of Technology, Yujiao Wu CSIRO, Lianwei Wu, Li Zhu Xi'an Jiaotong University, Zhedong Zheng University of Macau
Existing facial forgery detection methods typically focus on binary classification or pixel-level localization, providing little semantic insight into the nature of the manipulation. To address this, we introduce Forgery Attribution Report Generation, a new multimodal task designed to provide post-hoc forensic evidence for manipulated images. This task jointly localizes forged regions (“Where“) and generates natural language explanations grounded in the editing process (“Why“). This dual-focus approach goes beyond traditional binary forensics, providing a comprehensive, interpretable understanding of the manipulation. To enable research in this domain, we present Multi-Modal Tamper Tracing (MMTT), a large-scale dataset of 152,217 samples. Each sample features a process-derived ground-truth mask and a human-authored textual description, ensuring high annotation precision and linguistic richness. We further propose ForgeryTalker, a unified end-to-end baseline that integrates vision and language via a shared encoder and dual decoders for mask and text generation. Experiments show that ForgeryTalker achieves competitive performance on both subtasks, i.e., 59.3 CIDEr and 73.67 IoU, establishing a strong baseline for explainable multimedia forensics. Our dataset and code are available at: https://github.com/NattyLianJc/Generating-Attribution-Reports.
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cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Huicong Li, Xiangbo Ji, Wei Wu Inner Mongolia University
Multimodal sentiment analysis is fundamentally challenged by semantic incongruence, where ambiguous visual signals often conflict with explicit textual cues. In semi-supervised scenarios, naively fusing such noisy features contaminates the joint representation, while conventional static alignment strategies fail to effectively arbitrate conflicting modalities in this task, leading to error reinforcement during self-training. To this end, we propose a novel Adaptive Arbitration for Semantic Incongruence (A2SI) framework for semi-supervised multimodal sentiment analysis, which emphasizes stable cross-modal representations and reliable supervision. Specifically, we first constrain unreliable visual representations by leveraging the reliable textual modality as an anchor to align divergent embeddings and reduce representation noise. Based on this, we further consider the reliability of supervision signals and calibrate pseudo-labels by adaptively weighting evidentiary confidence from heterogeneous views. Finally, to prevent error accumulation caused by unreliable samples, we introduce a progressive arbitration mechanism that verifies pseudo-labeled data from dual perspectives, enabling the model to dynamically balance sample diversity and label purity throughout self-training. Extensive experiments on the MVSA-Single and MVSA-Multiple datasets demonstrate that A2SI consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods under label-limited settings.
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cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Qingyan Wang, Lianwei Wu, Botao Wang, Wangkang, Yaxiong Wang Hefei University of Technology
The rapid growth of short video platforms has made multimodal fake news more prevalent. Existing detectors suffer from two major limitations: (I) global-alignment bias that overemphasizes holistic cross-modal matching and thus misses subtle, localized inconsistencies; and (II) LLM-based methods that leverage powerful generative reasoning to identify cognitive forgeries but inherently suffer from hallucinations and high inference latency. To overcome these limitations, we propose PCDD, a novel Perception-Cognition Dual-driven Detector that jointly observes the form and probes the logic for short video fake news detection. The perception stream exposes fine-grained cross-modal conflicts by amplifying localized inconsistencies into explicit discrepancies. The cognition stream transfers reasoning capabilities from LLMs to a lightweight student to mine cognitive forgeries, while reducing the risk of hallucinations and eliminating reliance on LLMs at inference. Experiments on real-world datasets show that PCDD consistently outperforms baselines, while improving interpretability and robustness in data scarcity scenarios. Our code is available at: https://github.com/SeinCore/PCDD.
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cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表