Parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods introduce a small number of training parameters, enabling pre-trained models to adapt rapidly to new data distributions. While these methods have shown promising results, they exhibit notable limitations. First, most existing methods operate in the signal space domain, which results in substantial information redundancy. Second, most existing methods utilize fixed prompts or adaptation layers, failing to fully account for the multi-scale characteristics of signals. To address these challenges, we propose the Multi-Scale Frequency Adapter (FreqAdapter), which integrates textual information and performs multi-scale fine-tuning of visual signal in the frequency domain. Additionally, we introduce a multi-scale adaptation strategy to optimize receptive fields across different frequency ranges, further enhancing the model’s representational capacity. Extensive experiments on multimodal models, including CLIP and LLaVA, demonstrate that FreqAdapter significantly improves both performance and efficiency. FreqAdapter improves performance with minimal cost and fast convergence within one epoch.

Distractors—incorrect yet plausible answer choices in multiple-choice questions (MCQs)—are vital in educational assessments, as they help identify student misconceptions by presenting potential reasoning errors. Current distractor generation methods typically produce shared distractors for all students, ignoring the individual variations in reasoning, which limits their diagnostic effectiveness. To tackle this challenge, we introduce the task of Personalized Distractor Generation, which tailors distractors to each student’s specific cognitive flaws, inferred from their past question-answering (QA) history. While promising, this task is particularly demanding due to the limited number of QA records available for each student, which are insufficient for training, as well as the absence of their underlying reasoning process. To overcome this, we propose a novel, training-free two-stage framework. In the first stage, Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is used to reconstruct the student’s reasoning process from past errors, creating a student-specific misconception prototype. In the second stage, this prototype guides the simulation of the student’s reasoning on new questions, generating personalized distractors that resonate with their individual misconceptions. Our experiments, conducted on 1,361 students across 6 subjects, demonstrate that this approach outperforms existing methods in generating plausible, personalized distractors, and also effectively adapts to group-level settings, highlighting its robustness and versatility.

To address the deficiencies in chart types and the limited scope of chart tasks in existing datasets, we conducted a comprehensive review of current data collection methodologies. By integrating manual annotation with data generation leveraging GPT-4, we developed a dataset that includes 21 diverse chart types and a broad spectrum of tasks, such as data retrieval and mathematical reasoning. Our analysis of existing models revealed that capabilities in information extraction, mathematical reasoning, and understanding of multiple chart types are essential for performing a variety of chart tasks. To overcome the limitations in these areas, we devised a two-stage training strategy and a method for jointly training the vision encoder tailored for multi-type charts. In the first stage, we designed several tasks to enhance the model’s general understanding of charts, aligning multimodal large models pre-trained on natural images to chart tasks. To further improve the model’s capability to understand various chart tasks and enhance its reasoning abilities, we employed Chain-of-Thought data for training in the second stage. Through two-stage training on our proposed dataset, the pre-trained multimodal large language model achieved state-of-the-art performance across multiple chart understanding tasks, demonstrating the superiority of our data and methods.

Large language models (LLMs) are revolutionizing education, with LLM-based agents playing a key role in simulating student behavior. A major challenge in student simulation is modeling the diverse learning patterns of students at various cognitive levels. However, current LLMs, typically trained as “helpful assistants”, target at generating perfect responses. As a result, they struggle to simulate students with diverse cognitive abilities, as they often produce overly advanced answers, missing the natural imperfections that characterize student learning and resulting in unrealistic simulations. To address this issue, we propose a training-free framework for student simulation. We begin by constructing a cognitive prototype for each student using a knowledge graph, which captures their understanding of concepts from past learning records. This prototype is then mapped to new tasks to predict student performance. Next, we simulate student solutions based on these predictions and iteratively refine them using a beam search method to better replicate realistic mistakes. To validate our approach, we construct the Student_100 dataset, consisting of 100 students working on Python programming and 5,000 learning records. Experimental results show that our method consistently outperforms baseline models, achieving 100% improvement in simulation accuracy and realism.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance in open-ended generation tasks. However, they often struggle to adapt content to users with differing cognitive capacities, leading to a phenomenon we term cognitive misalignment. This issue arises in two forms: knowledge-level misalignment, where content is too complex or too simplistic relative to user understanding, and presentation style misalignment, where the structure or tone hinders effective comprehension. To address these challenges, we propose the Cognitive-Level Alignment Framework (CLAF), a general-purpose generation framework that aligns both knowledge complexity and presentation style with user cognition. CLAF integrates a capability-aware retrieval module based on a hierarchical knowledge graph and a style optimization module guided by Bloom’s taxonomy and preference learning. Additionally, a knowledge-controllable generation component ensures consistency and relevance throughout the output. To support training and evaluation, we construct Scale, a cognitively annotated dataset containing responses at multiple comprehension levels per query. Empirical results show that CLAF enhances the adaptability and informativeness of LLM outputs across a range of user profiles, offering a robust solution to cognitive-level alignment in real-world applications.

Missing modality issues are common in real-world applications, arising from factors such as equipment failures and privacy concerns. When fine-tuning pre-trained models on downstream datasets with missing modalities, performance can degrade significantly. Current methods often aggregate various missing cases to train recovery modules or align multimodal features, resulting in suboptimal performance, high computational costs, and the risk of catastrophic forgetting in continual environments where data arrives sequentially. In this paper, we formulate the dynamic missing modality problem as a continual learning task and introduce the continual multimodal missing modality task. To address this challenge efficiently, we introduce three types of prompts: modality-specific, task-aware, and task-specific prompts. These prompts enable the model to learn intra-modality, inter-modality, intra-task, and inter-task features. Furthermore, we propose a contrastive task interaction strategy to explicitly learn prompts correlating different modalities. We conduct extensive experiments on three public datasets, where our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.

Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and diffusion models (DMs) have opened new possibilities for AI-generated content. Yet, personalized cover image generation remains underexplored, despite its critical role in boosting user engagement on digital platforms. We propose ICG, a novel framework that integrates MLLM-based prompting with personalized preference alignment to generate high-quality, contextually relevant covers. ICG extracts semantic features from item titles and reference images via meta tokens, refines them with user embeddings, and injects the resulting personalized context into the diffusion model. To address the lack of labeled supervision, we adopt a multi-reward learning strategy that combines public aesthetic and relevance rewards with a personalized preference model trained from user behavior. Unlike prior pipelines relying on handcrafted prompts and disjointed modules, ICG employs an adapter to bridge MLLMs and diffusion models for end-to-end training. Experiments demonstrate that ICG significantly improves image quality, semantic fidelity, and personalization, leading to stronger user appeal and offline recommendation accuracy in downstream tasks. As a plug-and-play adapter bridging MLLMs and diffusion models, ICG is compatible with common checkpoints and requires no ground-truth labels during optimization.

Transformer-based methods have gone mainstream in multimodal sequential learning. The intra and inter modality interactions are captured by the query-key associations of multi-head attention. In this way, the calculated multimodal contexts (attentional results) are expected to be relevant to the query modality. However, in existing literature, the alignment degree between different calculated attentional results of the same query are under-explored. Based on this concern, we propose a new constrained scheme called Multimodal Contextual Contrast (MCC), which could align the multiple attentional results from both local and global perspectives, making the information capture more efficient. Concretely, the calculated attentional results of different modalities are mapped into a common feature space, those attentional vectors with the same query are considered as a positive group and the remaining sets are negative. From local perspective, we sample the negative groups for a positive group by randomly changing the sequential step of one specific context and keeping the other stay the same. From coarse global perspective, we divide all the contextual groups into two sets (i.e., aligned and unaligned), making the total score of aligned group relatively large. We extend the vectorial inner product operation for more input and calculate the aligned score for each multimodal group. Considering that the computational complexity scales exponentially to the number of modalities, we adopt stochastic expectation approximation (SEA) for the real process. The extensive experimental results on several tasks reveal the effectiveness of our contributions.

The task of spoken video grounding aims to localize moments in videos that are relevant to descriptive spoken queries. However, extracting semantic information from speech and modeling the cross-modal correlation pose two critical challenges. Previous studies solve them by representing spoken queries based on the matched video frames, which require tremendous effort for frame-level labeling. In this work, we investigate weakly-supervised spoken video grounding, i.e., learning to localize moments without expensive temporal annotations. To effectively represent the cross-modal semantics, we propose Semantic Interaction Learning (SIL), a novel framework consisting of the acoustic-semantic pre-training (ASP) and acoustic-visual contrastive learning (AVCL). In ASP, we pre-train an effective encoder for the grounding task with three comprehensive tasks, where the robustness task enhances stability by explicitly capturing the invariance between time- and frequency-domain features, the conciseness task avoids over-smooth attention by compressing long sequence into segments, and the semantic task improves spoken language understanding by modeling the precise semantics. In AVCL, we mine pseudo labels with discriminative sampling strategies and directly strengthen the interaction between speech and video by maximizing their mutual information. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our method.

Audio-visual text generation aims to understand multi-modality contents and translate them into texts. Although various transfer learning techniques of text generation have been proposed, they focused on uni-modal analysis (e.g. text-to-text, visual-to-text) and lack consideration of multi-modal content and cross-modal relation. Motivated by the fact that humans can recognize the timbre of the same low-level concepts (e.g., footstep, rainfall, and laughing), even in different visual conditions, we aim to mitigate the domain discrepancies by audio-visual correlation. In this paper, we propose a novel Transferable Audio-Visual Text Generation framework, named TAVT, which consists of two key components: Audio-Visual Meta-Mapper (AVMM) and Dual Counterfactual Contrastive Learning (DCCL). (1) AVMM first introduces a universal auditory semantic space and drifts the domain-invariant low-level concepts into visual prefixes. Then the reconstruct-based learning encourages the AVMM to learn “which pixels belong to the same sound” and achieve audio-enhanced visual prefix. The well-trained AVMM can be further applied to uni-modal setting. (2) Furthermore, DCCL leverages the destructive counterfactual transformations to provide cross-modal constraints for AVMM from the perspective of feature distribution and text generation. (3) The experimental results show that TAVT outperforms the state-of-the-art methods across multiple domains (cross-datasets, cross-categories) and various modal settings (uni-modal, multi-modal).

Speech Recognition builds a bridge between the multimedia streaming (audio-only, visual-only or audio-visual) and the corresponding text transcription. However, when training the specific model of new domain, it often gets stuck in the lack of new-domain utterances, especially the labeled visual utterances. To break through this restriction, we attempt to achieve zero-shot modality transfer by maintaining the multi-modality alignment in phoneme space learned with unlabeled multimedia utterances in the high resource domain during the pre-training, and propose a training system Open-modality Speech Recognition (OpenSR) that enables the models trained on a single modality (e.g., audio-only) applicable to more modalities (e.g., visual-only and audio-visual). Furthermore, we employ a cluster-based prompt tuning strategy to handle the domain shift for the scenarios with only common words in the new domain utterances. We demonstrate that OpenSR enables modality transfer from one to any in three different settings (zero-, few- and full-shot), and achieves highly competitive zero-shot performance compared to the existing few-shot and full-shot lip-reading methods. To the best of our knowledge, OpenSR achieves the state-of-the-art performance of word error rate in LRS2 on audio-visual speech recognition and lip-reading with 2.7% and 25.0%, respectively.

Visual temporal-aligned translation aims to transform the visual sequence into natural words, including important applicable tasks such as lipreading and fingerspelling recognition. However, various performance habits of specific words by different speakers or signers can lead to visual ambiguity, which has become a major obstacle to the development of current methods. Considering the constraints above, the generalization ability of the translation system is supposed to be further explored through the evaluation results on unseen performers. In this paper, we develop a novel generalizable framework named Contrastive Token-Wise Meta-learning (CtoML), which strives to transfer recognition skills to unseen performers. To the best of our knowledge, employing meta-learning methods directly in the image domain poses two main challenges, and we propose corresponding strategies. First, sequence prediction in visual temporal-aligned translation, which aims to generate multiple words autoregressively, is different from the vanilla classification. Thus, we devise the token-wise diversity-aware weights for the meta-train stage, which encourages the model to make efforts on those ambiguously recognized tokens. Second, considering the consistency of word-visual prototypes across different domains, we develop two complementary global and local contrastive losses to maintain inter-class relationships and promote domain-independent. We conduct extensive experiments on the widely-used lipreading dataset GRID and the fingerspelling dataset ChicagoFSWild, and the experimental results show the effectiveness of our proposed CtoML over existing state-of-the-art methods.

Visual segmentation from language queries has attracted significant research interest. Despite the effectiveness, existing works require expensive labeling and suffer severe degradation when deployed to an unseen domain. In this paper, we investigate a novel task Cross-domain Query-based Visual Segmentation (CQVS), aiming to adapt the segmentation model from a labeled domain to a new unlabeled domain. The challenges of CQVS stem from three domain discrepancies: (1) multi-modal content shift, (2) uni-modal feature gap and (3) cross-modal relation bias. Existing domain adaptation methods fail to address them comprehensively and precisely (e.g. at pixel level), thus being suboptimal for CQVS. To overcome this limitation, we propose Semantic-conditioned Dual Adaptation (SDA), a novel framework to achieve precise feature- and relation-invariant across domains via a universal semantic structure. The SDA consists of two key components: Content-aware Semantic Modeling (CSM) and Dual Adaptive Branches (DAB). First, CSM introduces a common semantic space across domains to provide uniform guidance. Then, DAB seamlessly leverages this semantic information to develop a contrastive feature branch for category-wise pixel alignment, and design a reciprocal relation branch for relation enhancement via two complementary masks. Extensive experiments on three video benchmarks and three image benchmarks evidence the superiority of our approach over the state-of-the-arts.