ContextQFormer: A New Context Modeling Method for Multi-Turn Multi-Modal Conversations

Multi-modal large language models have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot abilities and powerful image-understanding capabilities. However, the existing open-source multi-modal models suffer from the weak capability of multi-turn interaction, especially for long contexts. To address the issue, we first introduce a context modeling module, termed ContextQFormer, which utilizes a memory block to enhance the presentation of contextual information. Furthermore, to facilitate further research, we carefully build a new multi-turn multi-modal dialogue dataset (TMDialog) for pre-training, instruction-tuning, and evaluation, which will be open-sourced lately. Compared with other multi-modal dialogue datasets, TMDialog contains longer conversations, which supports the research of multi-turn multi-modal dialogue. In addition, ContextQFormer is compared with three baselines on TMDialog and experimental results illustrate that ContextQFormer achieves an improvement of 2%-4% in available rate over baselines.

Why Distillation can Outperform Zero-RL: The Role of Flexible Reasoning

Reinforcement learning (RL) has played an important role in improving the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs). Some studies apply RL directly to \textit{smaller} base models (known as zero-RL) and also achieve notable progress. However, in this paper, we show that using only 920 examples, a simple distillation method based on the base model can clearly outperform zero-RL, which typically requires much more data and computational cost. By analyzing the token frequency in model outputs, we find that the distilled model shows more flexible reasoning. It uses anthropomorphic tokens and logical connectors much more often than the zero-RL model. Further analysis reveals that distillation enhances the presence of two advanced cognitive behaviors: Multi-Perspective Thinking or Attempting and Metacognitive Awareness. Frequent occurrences of these two advanced cognitive behaviors give rise to flexible reasoning, which is essential for solving complex reasoning problems, while zero-RL fails to significantly boost the frequency of these behaviors.

GODBench: A Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models in Video Comment Art

Video Comment Art enhances user engagement by providing creative content that conveys humor, satire, or emotional resonance, requiring a nuanced and comprehensive grasp of cultural and contextual subtleties. Although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) have demonstrated strong reasoning abilities in STEM tasks (e.g. mathematics and coding), they still struggle to generate creative expressions such as resonant jokes and insightful satire. Moreover, existing benchmarks are constrained by their limited modalities and insufficient categories, hindering the exploration of comprehensive creativity in video-based Comment Art creation. To address these limitations, we introduce GODBench, a novel benchmark that integrates video and text modalities to systematically evaluate MLLMs' abilities to compose Comment Art. Furthermore, inspired by the propagation patterns of waves in physics, we propose Ripple of Thought (RoT), a multi-step reasoning framework designed to enhance the creativity of MLLMs. Extensive experiments reveal that existing MLLMs and CoT methods still face significant challenges in understanding and generating creative video comments. In contrast, RoT provides an effective approach to improve creative composing, highlighting its potential to drive meaningful advancements in MLLM-based creativity. GODBench is publicly available at https://github.com/stan-lei/GODBench-ACL2025.

R1-Reward: Training Multimodal Reward Model Through Stable Reinforcement Learning

Multimodal Reward Models (MRMs) play a crucial role in enhancing the performance of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). While recent advancements have primarily focused on improving the model structure and training data of MRMs, there has been limited exploration into the effectiveness of long-term reasoning capabilities for reward modeling and how to activate these capabilities in MRMs. In this paper, we explore how Reinforcement Learning (RL) can be used to improve reward modeling. Specifically, we reformulate the reward modeling problem as a rule-based RL task. However, we observe that directly applying existing RL algorithms, such as Reinforce++, to reward modeling often leads to training instability or even collapse due to the inherent limitations of these algorithms. To address this issue, we propose the StableReinforce algorithm, which refines the training loss, advantage estimation strategy, and reward design of existing RL methods. These refinements result in more stable training dynamics and superior performance. To facilitate MRM training, we collect 200K preference data from diverse datasets. Our reward model, R1-Reward, trained using the StableReinforce algorithm on this dataset, significantly improves performance on multimodal reward modeling benchmarks. Compared to previous SOTA models, R1-Reward achieves a $8.4\%$ improvement on the VL Reward-Bench and a $14.3\%$ improvement on the Multimodal Reward Bench. Moreover, with more inference compute, R1-Reward's performance is further enhanced, highlighting the potential of RL algorithms in optimizing MRMs.

SeriesBench: A Benchmark for Narrative-Driven Drama Series Understanding

With the rapid development of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), an increasing number of benchmarks have been established to evaluate the video understanding capabilities of these models. However, these benchmarks focus on \textbf{standalone} videos and mainly assess ``visual elements'' like human actions and object states. In reality, contemporary videos often encompass complex and continuous narratives, typically presented as a \textbf{series}. To address this challenge, we propose \textbf{SeriesBench}, a benchmark consisting of 105 carefully curated narrative-driven series, covering 28 specialized tasks that require deep narrative understanding. Specifically, we first select a diverse set of drama series spanning various genres. Then, we introduce a novel long-span narrative annotation method, combined with a full-information transformation approach to convert manual annotations into diverse task formats. To further enhance model capacity for detailed analysis of plot structures and character relationships within series, we propose a novel narrative reasoning framework, \textbf{PC-DCoT}. Extensive results on \textbf{SeriesBench} indicate that existing MLLMs still face significant challenges in understanding narrative-driven series, while \textbf{PC-DCoT} enables these MLLMs to achieve performance improvements. Overall, our \textbf{SeriesBench} and \textbf{PC-DCoT} highlight the critical necessity of advancing model capabilities to understand narrative-driven series, guiding the future development of MLLMs. SeriesBench is publicly available at https://github.com/zackhxn/SeriesBench-CVPR2025.

VLM as Policy: Common-Law Content Moderation Framework for Short Video Platform

Exponentially growing short video platforms (SVPs) face significant challenges in moderating content detrimental to users' mental health, particularly for minors. The dissemination of such content on SVPs can lead to catastrophic societal consequences. Although substantial efforts have been dedicated to moderating such content, existing methods suffer from critical limitations: (1) Manual review is prone to human bias and incurs high operational costs. (2) Automated methods, though efficient, lack nuanced content understanding, resulting in lower accuracy. (3) Industrial moderation regulations struggle to adapt to rapidly evolving trends due to long update cycles. In this paper, we annotate the first SVP content moderation benchmark with authentic user/reviewer feedback to fill the absence of benchmark in this field. Then we evaluate various methods on the benchmark to verify the existence of the aforementioned limitations. We further propose our common-law content moderation framework named KuaiMod to address these challenges. KuaiMod consists of three components: training data construction, offline adaptation, and online deployment & refinement. Leveraging large vision language model (VLM) and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, KuaiMod adequately models video toxicity based on sparse user feedback and fosters dynamic moderation policy with rapid update speed and high accuracy. Offline experiments and large-scale online A/B test demonstrates the superiority of KuaiMod: KuaiMod achieves the best moderation performance on our benchmark. The deployment of KuaiMod reduces the user reporting rate by 20% and its application in video recommendation increases both Daily Active User (DAU) and APP Usage Time (AUT) on several Kuaishou scenarios. We have open-sourced our benchmark at https://kuaimod.github.io.

InstructEngine: Instruction-driven Text-to-Image Alignment

Reinforcement Learning from Human/AI Feedback (RLHF/RLAIF) has been extensively utilized for preference alignment of text-to-image models. Existing methods face certain limitations in terms of both data and algorithm. For training data, most approaches rely on manual annotated preference data, either by directly fine-tuning the generators or by training reward models to provide training signals. However, the high annotation cost makes them difficult to scale up, the reward model consumes extra computation and cannot guarantee accuracy. From an algorithmic perspective, most methods neglect the value of text and only take the image feedback as a comparative signal, which is inefficient and sparse. To alleviate these drawbacks, we propose the InstructEngine framework. Regarding annotation cost, we first construct a taxonomy for text-to-image generation, then develop an automated data construction pipeline based on it. Leveraging advanced large multimodal models and human-defined rules, we generate 25K text-image preference pairs. Finally, we introduce cross-validation alignment method, which refines data efficiency by organizing semantically analogous samples into mutually comparable pairs. Evaluations on DrawBench demonstrate that InstructEngine improves SD v1.5 and SDXL's performance by 10.53% and 5.30%, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines, with ablation study confirming the benefits of InstructEngine's all components. A win rate of over 50% in human reviews also proves that InstructEngine better aligns with human preferences.

Decoupling Contrastive Decoding: Robust Hallucination Mitigation in Multimodal Large Language Models

Although multimodal large language models (MLLMs) exhibit remarkable reasoning capabilities on complex multimodal understanding tasks, they still suffer from the notorious hallucination issue: generating outputs misaligned with obvious visual or factual evidence. Currently, training-based solutions, like direct preference optimization (DPO), leverage paired preference data to suppress hallucinations. However, they risk sacrificing general reasoning capabilities due to the likelihood displacement. Meanwhile, training-free solutions, like contrastive decoding, achieve this goal by subtracting the estimated hallucination pattern from a distorted input. Yet, these handcrafted perturbations (e.g., add noise to images) may poorly capture authentic hallucination patterns. To avoid these weaknesses of existing methods, and realize robust hallucination mitigation (i.e., maintaining general reasoning performance), we propose a novel framework: Decoupling Contrastive Decoding (DCD). Specifically, DCD decouples the learning of positive and negative samples in preference datasets, and trains separate positive and negative image projections within the MLLM. The negative projection implicitly models real hallucination patterns, which enables vision-aware negative images in the contrastive decoding inference stage. Our DCD alleviates likelihood displacement by avoiding pairwise optimization and generalizes robustly without handcrafted degradation. Extensive ablations across hallucination benchmarks and general reasoning tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of DCD, i.e., it matches DPO's hallucination suppression while preserving general capabilities and outperforms the handcrafted contrastive decoding methods.

TIME: Temporal-sensitive Multi-dimensional Instruction Tuning and Benchmarking for Video-LLMs

Video large language models have achieved remarkable performance in tasks such as video question answering, however, their temporal understanding remains suboptimal. To address this limitation, we curate a dedicated instruction fine-tuning dataset that focuses on enhancing temporal comprehension across five key dimensions. In order to reduce reliance on costly temporal annotations, we introduce a multi-task prompt fine-tuning approach that seamlessly integrates temporal-sensitive tasks into existing instruction datasets without requiring additional annotations. Furthermore, we develop a novel benchmark for temporal-sensitive video understanding that not only fills the gaps in dimension coverage left by existing benchmarks but also rigorously filters out potential shortcuts, ensuring a more accurate evaluation. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances the temporal understanding of video-LLMs while avoiding reliance on shortcuts.

Exo2Ego: Exocentric Knowledge Guided MLLM for Egocentric Video Understanding

AI personal assistants, deployed through robots or wearables, require embodied understanding to collaborate effectively with humans. Current Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) primarily focus on third-person (exocentric) vision, overlooking the unique aspects of first-person (egocentric) videos. Additionally, high acquisition costs limit data size, impairing MLLM performance. To address these challenges, we propose learning the mapping between exocentric and egocentric domains, leveraging the extensive exocentric knowledge within existing MLLMs to enhance egocentric video understanding. To this end, we introduce Ego-ExoClip, a pre-training dataset comprising 1.1M synchronized ego-exo clip-text pairs derived from Ego-Exo4D. Our approach features a progressive training pipeline with three stages: Teacher Self-Preparation, Teacher-Student Guidance, and Student Self-Practice. Additionally, we propose an instruction-tuning data EgoIT from multiple sources to strengthen the model's instruction-following capabilities, along with the EgoBench benchmark comprising eight different tasks for thorough evaluation. Extensive experiments across diverse egocentric tasks reveal that existing MLLMs perform inadequately in egocentric video understanding, while our model significantly outperforms these leading models.