Beyond Text Following: Repairable Arbitration Reversals in Audio-Language Models

Audio-language models (ALMs) often follow text that conflicts with audio, even when the audio evidence is clear. This raises a basic question: is the audio-supported answer unavailable, or is it represented but overridden by the conflicting text? We examine this question using a same-audio counterfactual that keeps the audio fixed, removes only the conflicting text, and measures the resulting shift in model preference. Across five ALMs and four conflict tasks, 64.1% of conflict samples show a sign flip: the same-audio branch prefers the audio-supported answer, whereas the joint branch prefers the text-supported answer. This pattern suggests that the relevant audio evidence is encoded but loses in arbitration. Activation patching further localizes the reversal to answer-position computation, and patching effects closely track output candidate-score differences (Spearman rho=0.93). Using this diagnostic, we propose Gated Audio Counterfactual Logit Correction (GACL), a training-free decoding rule that interpolates between joint and same-audio scores. Under a strict 5 pp faithfulness-drop budget, GACL improves nAUC by 17.8 points over the best contrastive baseline and transfers without retuning to vision-text arbitration (up to +40.5 pp).

ChunkFT: Byte-Streamed Optimization for Memory-Efficient Full Fine-Tuning

This work presents \textsc{ChunkFT}, a memory-efficient fine-tuning framework that reformulates full-parameter fine-tuning around a dynamically activated working set. \textsc{ChunkFT} enables gradient computation for arbitrary sub-tensors without modifying the network architecture, providing an algorithmic foundation for optimizing arbitrary sub-networks while avoiding standard dense gradient computation. We provide a theoretical convergence analysis of \textsc{ChunkFT} in the deterministic setting. Empirically, we apply \textsc{ChunkFT} to fine-tune Llama 3-8B and Llama 3-70B using a single RTX 4090-24GB GPU and 2$\times$ H800-80GB GPUs, respectively. Full-parameter fine-tuning of a 7B model with a 1K input length requires only 13.72GB of GPU memory. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of \textsc{ChunkFT} in memory usage, running time, and optimization quality. Moreover, downstream evaluations on language understanding, mathematical reasoning, and MT-Bench show that \textsc{ChunkFT} consistently outperforms existing memory-efficient baselines. Notably, \textsc{ChunkFT} achieves performance comparable to, and in some cases exceeding, full-parameter fine-tuning. Our repository is on https://github.com/misonsky/chunk.

SMoA: Spectrum Modulation Adapter for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning

As the number of model parameters increases, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has become the go-to choice for tailoring pre-trained large language models. Low-rank Adaptation (LoRA) uses a low-rank update method to simulate full parameter fine-tuning, which is widely used to reduce resource requirements. However, decreasing the rank encounters challenges with limited representational capacity. Theory suggests that LoRA fine-tuning with rank r converges toward the top r singular values of the pre-trained weight matrix. As the rank increases, more principal singular directions are preserved, which generally improves the model's performance. However, a larger rank also introduces more trainable parameters, leading to higher computational cost. To overcome this dilemma, we propose SMoA, a \textbf{S}pectrum \textbf{Mo}dulation \textbf{A}dapter that enlarges the accessible family of spectrum-aware updates under a smaller parameter budget. SMoA partitions the layer into multiple aligned spectral blocks and applies one in-block Hadamard-modulated low-rank branch to each diagonal block, yielding broader coverage of pretrained spectral directions. We provide theoretical analysis and empirical results on multiple tasks. In our experiments, SMoA improves average performance in the current lower-budget setting over LoRA and competitive LoRA-style baselines.

DiM\textsuperscript{3}: Bridging Multilingual and Multimodal Models via Direction- and Magnitude-Aware Merging

Towards more general and human-like intelligence, large language models should seamlessly integrate both multilingual and multimodal capabilities; however, extending an existing multimodal model to many languages typically requires expensive multilingual multimodal data construction and repeated end-to-end retraining. We study a training-free alternative: injecting multilingual capability into an existing multimodal model by composing residual updates in the shared language model backbone. The key challenge is that multilingual and multimodal updates are heterogeneous, reflecting different functional roles in the shared model. To address this, we propose Direction- and Magnitude-aware Multilingual Multimodal merging (DiM3), which selectively composes the two updates at each parameter dimension while preserving the original vision encoder and multimodal projector. Experiments on multilingual benchmarks in both text-only and vision-language settings, covering 57 languages across LLaVA- and Qwen-based backbones, show that DiM3 consistently outperforms existing merging baselines, substantially improves multilingual performance over the original multimodal model, and remains competitive with dedicated multilingual multimodal fine-tuning while largely retaining general multimodal ability. We further show that DiM3 can be directly applied to already trained multilingual multimodal models and still yield additional gains. Further interpretability analysis shows that DiM3 primarily reshapes intermediate-layer semantic representations, strengthening cross-lingual alignment under both text-only and multimodal inputs while preserving higher-layer task-sensitive structure. Our repository is on https://github.com/wzj1718/DiM3.

SR-Nav: Spatial Relationships Matter for Zero-shot Object Goal Navigation

Zero-shot object-goal navigation aims to find target objects in unseen environments using only egocentric observation. Recent methods leverage foundation models' comprehension and reasoning capabilities to enhance navigation performance. However, when faced with poor viewpoints or weak semantic cues, foundation models often fail to support reliable reasoning in both perception and planning, resulting in inefficient or failed navigation. We observe that inherent relationships among objects and regions encode structured scene priors, which help agents infer plausible target locations even under partial observations. Motivated by this insight, we propose Spatial Relation-aware Navigation (SR-Nav), a framework that models both observed and experience-based spatial relationships to enhance both perception and planning. Specifically, SR-Nav first constructs a Dynamic Spatial Relationship Graph (DSRG) that encodes the target-centered spatial relationships through the foundation models and updates dynamically with real-time observations. We then introduce a Relation-aware Matching Module. It utilizes relationship matching instead of naive detection, leveraging diverse relationships in the DSRG to verify and correct errors, enhancing visual perception robustness. Finally, we design a Dynamic Relationship Planning Module to reduce the planning search space by dynamically computing the optimal paths based on the DSRG from the current position, thereby guiding planning and reducing exploration redundancy. Experiments on HM3D show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both success rate and navigation efficiency. The code will be publicly available at https://github.com/Mzyw-1314/SR-Nav

High-Rank Structured Modulation for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning

As the number of model parameters increases, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has become the go-to choice for tailoring pre-trained large language models. Low-rank Adaptation (LoRA) uses a low-rank update method to simulate full parameter fine-tuning, which is widely used to reduce resource requirements. However, decreasing the rank encounters challenges with limited representational capacity when compared to full parameter fine-tuning. We present \textbf{SMoA}, a high-rank \textbf{S}tructured \textbf{MO}dulation \textbf{A}dapter that uses fewer trainable parameters while maintaining a higher rank, thereby improving the model's representational capacity and offering improved performance potential. The core idea is to freeze the original pretrained weights and selectively amplify or suppress important features of the original weights across multiple subspaces. The subspace mechanism provides an efficient way to increase the capacity and complexity of a model. We conduct both theoretical analyses and empirical studies on various tasks. Experiment results show that SMoA outperforms LoRA and its variants on 10 tasks, with extensive ablation studies validating its effectiveness.

PlaM: Training-Free Plateau-Guided Model Merging for Better Visual Grounding in MLLMs

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) rely on strong linguistic reasoning inherited from their base language models. However, multimodal instruction fine-tuning paradoxically degrades this text's reasoning capability, undermining multimodal performance. To address this issue, we propose a training-free framework to mitigate this degradation. Through layer-wise vision token masking, we reveal a common three-stage pattern in multimodal large language models: early-modal separation, mid-modal alignment, and late-modal degradation. By analyzing the behavior of MLLMs at different stages, we propose a plateau-guided model merging method that selectively injects base language model parameters into MLLMs. Experimental results based on five MLLMs on nine benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Attention-based analysis further reveals that merging shifts attention from diffuse, scattered patterns to focused localization on task-relevant visual regions. Our repository is on https://github.com/wzj1718/PlaM.

Look Within or Look Beyond? A Theoretical Comparison Between Parameter-Efficient and Full Fine-Tuning

Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods achieve performance comparable to Full Fine-Tuning (FFT) while requiring significantly fewer computing resources, making it the go-to choice for researchers. We find that although PEFT can achieve competitive results on some benchmarks, its performance falls short of FFT in complex tasks, such as reasoning and instruction-based fine-tuning. In this paper, we compare the characteristics of PEFT and FFT in terms of representational capacity and robustness based on optimization theory. We theoretically demonstrate that PEFT is a strict subset of FFT. By providing theoretical upper bounds for PEFT, we show that the limited parameter space constrains the model's representational ability, making it more susceptible to perturbations. Experiments on 15 datasets encompassing classification, generation, reasoning, instruction fine-tuning tasks and 11 adversarial test sets validate our theories. We hope that these results spark further research beyond the realms of well established PEFT. The source code is in the anonymous Github repository\footnote{https://github.com/misonsky/PEFTEval}.

Why Do More Experts Fail? A Theoretical Analysis of Model Merging

Model merging dramatically reduces storage and computational resources by combining multiple expert models into a single multi-task model. Although recent model merging methods have shown promising results, they struggle to maintain performance gains as the number of merged models increases. In this paper, we investigate the key obstacles that limit the scalability of model merging when integrating a large number of expert models. First, we prove that there is an upper bound on model merging. Further theoretical analysis reveals that the limited effective parameter space imposes a strict constraint on the number of models that can be successfully merged. Gaussian Width shows that the marginal benefit of merging additional models diminishes according to a strictly concave function. This implies that the effective parameter space becomes rapidly saturated as the number of merged models increases. Furthermore, using Approximate Kinematics Theory, we prove the existence of a unique optimal threshold beyond which adding more models does not yield significant performance improvements. At the same time, we introduce a straightforward Reparameterized Heavy-Tailed method (RHT) to extend the coverage of the merged model, thereby enhancing its performance. Empirical results on 12 benchmarks, including both knowledge-intensive and general-purpose tasks, validate our theoretical analysis. We believe that these results spark further research beyond the current scope of model merging. The source code is in the anonymous Github repository https://github.com/wzj1718/ModelMergingAnalysis.

Emotional Brain State Classification on fMRI Data Using Deep Residual and Convolutional Networks

The goal of emotional brain state classification on functional MRI (fMRI) data is to recognize brain activity patterns related to specific emotion tasks performed by subjects during an experiment. Distinguishing emotional brain states from other brain states using fMRI data has proven to be challenging due to two factors: a difficulty to generate fast yet accurate predictions in short time frames, and a difficulty to extract emotion features which generalize to unseen subjects. To address these challenges, we conducted an experiment in which 22 subjects viewed pictures designed to stimulate either negative, neutral or rest emotional responses while their brain activity was measured using fMRI. We then developed two distinct Convolution-based approaches to decode emotional brain states using only spatial information from single, minimally pre-processed (slice timing and realignment) fMRI volumes. In our first approach, we trained a 1D Convolutional Network (84.9% accuracy; chance level 33%) to classify 3 emotion conditions using One-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) voxel selection combined with hyperalignment. In our second approach, we trained a 3D ResNet-50 model (78.0% accuracy; chance level 50%) to classify 2 emotion conditions from single 3D fMRI volumes directly. Our Convolutional and Residual classifiers successfully learned group-level emotion features and could decode emotion conditions from fMRI volumes in milliseconds. These approaches could potentially be used in brain computer interfaces and real-time fMRI neurofeedback research.