Cross-Modal Coreference Alignment: Enabling Reliable Information Transfer in Omni-LLMs
Hongcheng Liu, Yuhao Wang, Zhe Chen, Pingjie Wang, Zhiyuan Zhu, Yixuan Hou Shanghai Jiaotong University, Yanfeng Wang Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Yu Wang Shanghai Jiao Tong University
原文摘要
Omni Large Language Models (Omni-LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in holistic multi-modal perception, yet they consistently falter in complex scenarios requiring synergistic omni-modal reasoning. Beyond understanding global multimodal context, effective reasoning also hinges on fine-grained cross-modal alignment, especially identifying shared referents across modalities, yet this aspect has been largely overlooked. To bridge this gap, we formalize the challenge as a cross-modal coreference problem, where a model must localize a referent in a source modality and re-identify it in a target modality. Building on this paradigm, we introduce CrossOmni, a dataset comprising nine tasks equipped with human-designed reasoning rationales to evaluate and enhance this capability. Experiments on 13 Omni-LLMs reveal systematic weaknesses in cross-modal coreference, which we attribute to the absence of coreference-aware thinking patterns. To address this, we enhance cross-modal alignment via two strategies: a training-free In-Context Learning method and a training-based SFT+GRPO framework designed to induce such thinking patterns. Both approaches yield substantial performance gains and generalize effectively to collaborative reasoning tasks. Overall, our findings highlight cross-modal coreference as a crucial missing piece for advancing robust omni-modal reasoning.
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