MARS2 2025 Challenge on Multimodal Reasoning: Datasets, Methods, Results, Discussion, and Outlook

This paper reviews the MARS2 2025 Challenge on Multimodal Reasoning. We aim to bring together different approaches in multimodal machine learning and LLMs via a large benchmark. We hope it better allows researchers to follow the state-of-the-art in this very dynamic area. Meanwhile, a growing number of testbeds have boosted the evolution of general-purpose large language models. Thus, this year's MARS2 focuses on real-world and specialized scenarios to broaden the multimodal reasoning applications of MLLMs. Our organizing team released two tailored datasets Lens and AdsQA as test sets, which support general reasoning in 12 daily scenarios and domain-specific reasoning in advertisement videos, respectively. We evaluated 40+ baselines that include both generalist MLLMs and task-specific models, and opened up three competition tracks, i.e., Visual Grounding in Real-world Scenarios (VG-RS), Visual Question Answering with Spatial Awareness (VQA-SA), and Visual Reasoning in Creative Advertisement Videos (VR-Ads). Finally, 76 teams from the renowned academic and industrial institutions have registered and 40+ valid submissions (out of 1200+) have been included in our ranking lists. Our datasets, code sets (40+ baselines and 15+ participants' methods), and rankings are publicly available on the MARS2 workshop website and our GitHub organization page https://github.com/mars2workshop/, where our updates and announcements of upcoming events will be continuously provided.

Coordinated Defense Allocation in Reach-Avoid Scenarios with Efficient Online Optimization

Deriving strategies for multiple agents under adversarial scenarios poses a significant challenge in attaining both optimality and efficiency. In this paper, we propose an efficient defense strategy for cooperative defense against a group of attackers in a convex environment. The defenders aim to minimize the total number of attackers that successfully enter the target set without prior knowledge of the attacker's strategy. Our approach involves a two-scale method that decomposes the problem into coordination against a single attacker and assigning defenders to attackers. We first develop a coordination strategy for multiple defenders against a single attacker, implementing online convex programming. This results in the maximum defense-winning region of initial joint states from which the defender can successfully defend against a single attacker. We then propose an allocation algorithm that significantly reduces computational effort required to solve the induced integer linear programming problem. The allocation guarantees defense performance enhancement as the game progresses. We perform various simulations to verify the efficiency of our algorithm compared to the state-of-the-art approaches, including the one using the Gazabo platform with Robot Operating System.