Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Salman Khan

Publications and source records attributed to Salman Khan.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

EvoIR: Towards All-in-One Image Restoration via Evolutionary Frequency Modulation

All-in-One Image Restoration (AiOIR) tasks often involve diverse degradation that require robust and versatile strategies. However, most existing approaches typically lack explicit frequency modeling and rely on fixed or heuristic optimization schedules, which limit the generalization across heterogeneous degradation. To address these limitations, we propose EvoIR, an AiOIR-specific framework that introduces evolutionary frequency modulation for dynamic and adaptive image restoration. Specifically, EvoIR employs the Frequency-Modulated Module (FMM) that decomposes features into high- and low-frequency branches in an explicit manner and adaptively modulates them to enhance both structural fidelity and fine-grained details. Central to EvoIR, an Evolutionary Optimization Strategy (EOS) iteratively adjusts frequency-aware objectives through a population-based evolutionary process, dynamically balancing structural accuracy and perceptual fidelity. Its evolutionary guidance further mitigates gradient conflicts across degradation and accelerates convergence. By synergizing FMM and EOS, EvoIR yields greater improvements than using either component alone, underscoring their complementary roles. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that EvoIR outperforms state-of-the-art AiOIR methods.

cs.CV↗

TAViS: Text-bridged Audio-Visual Segmentation with Foundation Models

Audio-Visual Segmentation (AVS) faces a fundamental challenge of effectively aligning audio and visual modalities. While recent approaches leverage foundation models to address data scarcity, they often rely on single-modality knowledge or combine foundation models in an off-the-shelf manner, failing to address the cross-modal alignment challenge. In this paper, we present TAViS, a novel framework that \textbf{couples} the knowledge of multimodal foundation models (ImageBind) for cross-modal alignment and a segmentation foundation model (SAM2) for precise segmentation. However, effectively combining these models poses two key challenges: the difficulty in transferring the knowledge between SAM2 and ImageBind due to their different feature spaces, and the insufficiency of using only segmentation loss for supervision. To address these challenges, we introduce a text-bridged design with two key components: (1) a text-bridged hybrid prompting mechanism where pseudo text provides class prototype information while retaining modality-specific details from both audio and visual inputs, and (2) an alignment supervision strategy that leverages text as a bridge to align shared semantic concepts within audio-visual modalities. Our approach achieves superior performance on single-source, multi-source, semantic datasets, and excels in zero-shot settings.

cs.CV↗

Bring Your Dreams to Life: Continual Text-to-Video Customization

Customized text-to-video generation (CTVG) has recently witnessed great progress in generating tailored videos from user-specific text. However, most CTVG methods assume that personalized concepts remain static and do not expand incrementally over time. Additionally, they struggle with forgetting and concept neglect when continuously learning new concepts, including subjects and motions. To resolve the above challenges, we develop a novel Continual Customized Video Diffusion (CCVD) model, which can continuously learn new concepts to generate videos across various text-to-video generation tasks by tackling forgetting and concept neglect. To address catastrophic forgetting, we introduce a concept-specific attribute retention module and a task-aware concept aggregation strategy. They can capture the unique characteristics and identities of old concepts during training, while combining all subject and motion adapters of old concepts based on their relevance during testing. Besides, to tackle concept neglect, we develop a controllable conditional synthesis to enhance regional features and align video contexts with user conditions, by incorporating layer-specific region attention-guided noise estimation. Extensive experimental comparisons demonstrate that our CCVD outperforms existing CTVG baselines on both the DreamVideo and Wan 2.1 backbones. The code is available at https://github.com/JiahuaDong/CCVD.

cs.CV↗

Video-R2: Reinforcing Consistent and Grounded Reasoning in Multimodal Language Models

Reasoning over dynamic visual content remains a central challenge for multimodal large language models. Recent thinking models generate explicit reasoning traces for interpretability; however, their reasoning often appears convincing while being logically inconsistent or weakly grounded in visual evidence. We identify and formalize these issues through two diagnostic metrics: Think Answer Consistency (TAC), which measures the alignment between reasoning and answers, and Video Attention Score (VAS), which captures the extent to which reasoning depends on visual versus textual cues. Analysis across 11 video reasoning benchmarks shows that current models rely heavily on linguistic priors rather than visual content. To address this, we propose a reinforcement learning approach that enhances both temporal precision and reasoning consistency. Our approach combines timestamp aware supervised fine tuning with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) guided by a novel Temporal Alignment Reward (TAR). This dual step post training stage encourages temporally aligned and causally coherent video reasoning. The resulting model, Video R2, achieves consistently higher TAC, VAS, and accuracy across multiple benchmarks, demonstrating that improvements in temporal alignment and reasoning coherence lead to more accurate and trustworthy video understanding. Code: https://github.com/mbzuai-oryx/Video-R2

cs.CV↗

Video-CoM: Interactive Video Reasoning via Chain of Manipulations

Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have advanced video understanding, yet most still "think about videos" ie once a video is encoded, reasoning unfolds entirely in text, treating visual input as a static context. This passive paradigm creates a semantic bottleneck: models cannot rewatch, refocus, or verify evidence, leading to shallow visual reasoning on tasks requiring fine grained spatio temporal understanding. In this work, we introduce Interactive Video Reasoning, a new paradigm that transforms video into an active cognitive workspace, enabling models to "think with videos". Our model, Video CoM, reasons through a Chain of Manipulations (CoM), performing iterative visual actions to gather and refine evidence. To support this behavior, we construct Video CoM Instruct, an 18K instruction tuning dataset curated for multi step manipulation reasoning. Beyond supervised learning, we further optimize the manipulation policy via reinforcement learning with reasoning aware Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Unlike prior work that relies solely on sparse answer rewards, our method introduces step level reasoning rewards, guiding the model toward grounded and consistent reasoning. Video CoM achieves strong results across nine video reasoning benchmarks, improving average performance by 3.6 percent over recent state of the art models, while training on only 25K SFT and 3K GRPO video samples, significantly fewer than comparable large scale models. Ablation studies demonstrate that reasoning aware rewards improve both accuracy and interpretability. Code: https://github.com/mbzuai-oryx/Video-CoM

cs.CV↗

MedROV: Towards Real-Time Open-Vocabulary Detection Across Diverse Medical Imaging Modalities

Traditional object detection models in medical imaging operate within a closed-set paradigm, limiting their ability to detect objects of novel labels. Open-vocabulary object detection (OVOD) addresses this limitation but remains underexplored in medical imaging due to dataset scarcity and weak text-image alignment. To bridge this gap, we introduce MedROV, the first Real-time Open Vocabulary detection model for medical imaging. To enable open-vocabulary learning, we curate a large-scale dataset, Omnis, with 600K detection samples across nine imaging modalities and introduce a pseudo-labeling strategy to handle missing annotations from multi-source datasets. Additionally, we enhance generalization by incorporating knowledge from a large pre-trained foundation model. By leveraging contrastive learning and cross-modal representations, MedROV effectively detects both known and novel structures. Experimental results demonstrate that MedROV outperforms the previous state-of-the-art foundation model for medical image detection with an average absolute improvement of 40 mAP50, and surpasses closed-set detectors by more than 3 mAP50, while running at 70 FPS, setting a new benchmark in medical detection. Our source code, dataset, and trained model are available at https://github.com/toobatehreem/MedROV.

cs.CV↗

CLIMB-3D: Continual Learning for Imbalanced 3D Instance Segmentation

While 3D instance segmentation (3DIS) has advanced significantly, most existing methods assume that all object classes are known in advance and uniformly distributed. However, this assumption is unrealistic in dynamic, real-world environments where new classes emerge gradually and exhibit natural imbalance. Although some approaches address the emergence of new classes, they often overlook class imbalance, which leads to suboptimal performance, particularly on rare categories. To tackle this, we propose \ourmethodbf, a unified framework for \textbf{CL}ass-incremental \textbf{Imb}alance-aware \textbf{3D}IS. Building upon established exemplar replay (ER) strategies, we show that ER alone is insufficient to achieve robust performance under memory constraints. To mitigate this, we introduce a novel pseudo-label generator (PLG) that extends supervision to previously learned categories by leveraging predictions from a frozen model trained on prior tasks. Despite its promise, PLG tends to be biased towards frequent classes. Therefore, we propose a class-balanced re-weighting (CBR) scheme that estimates object frequencies from pseudo-labels and dynamically adjusts training bias, without requiring access to past data. We design and evaluate three incremental scenarios for 3DIS on the challenging ScanNet200 dataset and additionally validate our method for semantic segmentation on ScanNetV2. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results, surpassing prior work by up to 16.76\% mAP for instance segmentation and approximately 30\% mIoU for semantic segmentation, demonstrating strong generalisation across both frequent and rare classes. Code is available at: https://github.com/vgthengane/CLIMB3D

cs.CV↗

Diversity Has Always Been There in Your Visual Autoregressive Models

Visual Autoregressive (VAR) models have recently garnered significant attention for their innovative next-scale prediction paradigm, offering notable advantages in both inference efficiency and image quality compared to traditional multi-step autoregressive (AR) and diffusion models. However, despite their efficiency, VAR models often suffer from the diversity collapse i.e., a reduction in output variability, analogous to that observed in few-step distilled diffusion models. In this paper, we introduce DiverseVAR, a simple yet effective approach that restores the generative diversity of VAR models without requiring any additional training. Our analysis reveals the pivotal component of the feature map as a key factor governing diversity formation at early scales. By suppressing the pivotal component in the model input and amplifying it in the model output, DiverseVAR effectively unlocks the inherent generative potential of VAR models while preserving high-fidelity synthesis. Empirical results demonstrate that our approach substantially enhances generative diversity with only neglectable performance influences. Our code will be publicly released at https://github.com/wangtong627/DiverseVAR.

cs.CV↗

BiMediX2: Bio-Medical EXpert LMM for Diverse Medical Modalities

We introduce BiMediX2, a bilingual (Arabic-English) Bio-Medical EXpert Large Multimodal Model that supports text-based and image-based medical interactions. It enables multi-turn conversation in Arabic and English and supports diverse medical imaging modalities, including radiology, CT, and histology. To train BiMediX2, we curate BiMed-V, an extensive Arabic-English bilingual healthcare dataset consisting of 1.6M samples of diverse medical interactions. This dataset supports a range of medical Large Language Model (LLM) and Large Multimodal Model (LMM) tasks, including multi-turn medical conversations, report generation, and visual question answering (VQA). We also introduce BiMed-MBench, the first Arabic-English medical LMM evaluation benchmark, verified by medical experts. BiMediX2 demonstrates excellent performance across multiple medical LLM and LMM benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art results compared to other open-sourced models. On BiMed-MBench, BiMediX2 outperforms existing methods by over 9% in English and more than 20% in Arabic evaluations. Additionally, it surpasses GPT-4 by approximately 9% in UPHILL factual accuracy evaluations and excels in various medical VQA, report generation, and report summarization tasks. Our trained models, instruction set, and source code are available at https://github.com/mbzuai-oryx/BiMediX2

cs.CV↗

Synergistic Neural Forecasting of Air Pollution with Stochastic Sampling

Air pollution remains a leading global health and environmental risk, particularly in regions vulnerable to episodic air pollution spikes due to wildfires, urban haze and dust storms. Accurate forecasting of particulate matter (PM) concentrations is essential to enable timely public health warnings and interventions, yet existing models often underestimate rare but hazardous pollution events. Here, we present SynCast, a high-resolution neural forecasting model that integrates meteorological and air composition data to improve predictions of both average and extreme pollution levels. Built on a regionally adapted transformer backbone and enhanced with a diffusion-based stochastic refinement module, SynCast captures the nonlinear dynamics driving PM spikes more accurately than existing approaches. Leveraging on harmonized ERA5 and CAMS datasets, our model shows substantial gains in forecasting fidelity across multiple PM variables (PM$_1$, PM$_{2.5}$, PM$_{10}$), especially under extreme conditions. We demonstrate that conventional loss functions underrepresent distributional tails (rare pollution events) and show that SynCast, guided by domain-aware objectives and extreme value theory, significantly enhances performance in highly impacted regions without compromising global accuracy. This approach provides a scalable foundation for next-generation air quality early warning systems and supports climate-health risk mitigation in vulnerable regions.

cs.LG↗

MATRIX: Multimodal Agent Tuning for Robust Tool-Use Reasoning

Vision language models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed as controllers with access to external tools for complex reasoning and decision-making, yet their effectiveness remains limited by the scarcity of high-quality multimodal trajectories and the cost of manual annotation. We address this challenge with a vision-centric agent tuning framework that automatically synthesizes multimodal trajectories, generates step-wise preference pairs, and trains a VLM controller for robust tool-use reasoning. Our pipeline first constructs M-TRACE, a large-scale dataset of 28.5K multimodal tasks with 177K verified trajectories, enabling imitation-based trajectory tuning. Building on this, we develop MATRIX Agent, a controller finetuned on M-TRACE for step-wise tool reasoning. To achieve finer alignment, we further introduce Pref-X, a set of 11K automatically generated preference pairs, and optimize MATRIX on it via step-wise preference learning. Across three benchmarks, Agent-X, GTA, and GAIA, MATRIX consistently surpasses both open- and closed-source VLMs, demonstrating scalable and effective multimodal tool use. Our data and code is avaliable at https://github.com/mbzuai-oryx/MATRIX.

cs.CV↗

Planner and Executor: Collaboration between Discrete Diffusion And Autoregressive Models in Reasoning

Current autoregressive language models (ARMs) achieve high accuracy but require long token sequences, making them costly. Discrete diffusion language models (DDLMs) enable parallel and flexible generation within a fixed number of steps and have recently emerged for their strong performance in complex reasoning and long-term planning tasks. We present a study exploring hybrid architectures that couple DDLMs with ARMs to assess whether their collaboration can yield complementary benefits. We first examine collaboration in text space, where one model plans the reasoning process and another executes the final answer based on that plan. We then extend this setup to latent-space communication, introducing a learned projector that maps DDLM latents into the ARM's embedding space, potentially bypassing some of the text-generation limitations of diffusion models. We find that shifting DDLM --> ARM communication from text space to latent space yields significant accuracy gains, for example increasing from 27.0% to 54.0% on DART-5 and from 0.0% to 14.0% on AIME24. We also find that combining a DDLM planner with an ARM executor can provide substantial computational savings with little to no impact on accuracy. For example, the latent-space pipeline, using 64 tokens for planning and roughly 5 for execution, surpasses Qwen3.1-7B on DART-5 and AIME, despite Qwen using 44 times more tokens. Overall, our study offers new insights into reasoning with DDLMs and highlights their potential in hybrid architectures.

cs.CL↗

RainDiff: End-to-end Precipitation Nowcasting Via Token-wise Attention Diffusion

Precipitation nowcasting, predicting future radar echo sequences from current observations, is a critical yet challenging task due to the inherently chaotic and tightly coupled spatio-temporal dynamics of the atmosphere. While recent advances in diffusion-based models attempt to capture both large-scale motion and fine-grained stochastic variability, they often suffer from scalability issues: latent-space approaches require a separately trained autoencoder, adding complexity and limiting generalization, while pixel-space approaches are computationally intensive and often omit attention mechanisms, reducing their ability to model long-range spatio-temporal dependencies. To address these limitations, we propose a Token-wise Attention integrated into not only the U-Net diffusion model but also the spatio-temporal encoder that dynamically captures multi-scale spatial interactions and temporal evolution. Unlike prior approaches, our method natively integrates attention into the architecture without incurring the high resource cost typical of pixel-space diffusion, thereby eliminating the need for separate latent modules. Our extensive experiments and visual evaluations across diverse datasets demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, yielding superior local fidelity, generalization, and robustness in complex precipitation forecasting scenarios.

cs.CV↗

GeoVLM-R1: Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Improved Remote Sensing Reasoning

Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) have delivered strong reasoning capabilities in natural image domains, yet their potential for Earth Observation (EO) remains largely unexplored. EO tasks introduce unique challenges, spanning referred object detection, image or region captioning, change detection, grounding, and temporal analysis, that demand task aware reasoning. We propose a novel post training framework that incorporates task aware rewards to enable effective adaptation of reasoning based RL models to diverse EO tasks. This training strategy enhances reasoning capabilities for remote sensing images, stabilizes optimization, and improves robustness. Extensive experiments across multiple EO benchmarks show consistent performance gains over state of the art generic and specialized vision language models. Code and models will be released publicly at https://mustansarfiaz.github.io/GeoVLM-R1/ .

cs.CV↗

A Culturally-diverse Multilingual Multimodal Video Benchmark & Model

Large multimodal models (LMMs) have recently gained attention due to their effectiveness to understand and generate descriptions of visual content. Most existing LMMs are in English language. While few recent works explore multilingual image LMMs, to the best of our knowledge, moving beyond the English language for cultural and linguistic inclusivity is yet to be investigated in the context of video LMMs. In pursuit of more inclusive video LMMs, we introduce a multilingual Video LMM benchmark, named ViMUL-Bench, to evaluate Video LMMs across 14 languages, including both low- and high-resource languages: English, Chinese, Spanish, French, German, Hindi, Arabic, Russian, Bengali, Urdu, Sinhala, Tamil, Swedish, and Japanese. Our ViMUL-Bench is designed to rigorously test video LMMs across 15 categories including eight culturally diverse categories, ranging from lifestyles and festivals to foods and rituals and from local landmarks to prominent cultural personalities. ViMUL-Bench comprises both open-ended (short and long-form) and multiple-choice questions spanning various video durations (short, medium, and long) with 8k samples that are manually verified by native language speakers. In addition, we also introduce a machine translated multilingual video training set comprising 1.2 million samples and develop a simple multilingual video LMM, named ViMUL, that is shown to provide a better tradeoff between high-and low-resource languages for video understanding. We hope our ViMUL-Bench and multilingual video LMM along with a large-scale multilingual video training set will help ease future research in developing cultural and linguistic inclusive multilingual video LMMs. Our proposed benchmark, video LMM and training data will be publicly released at https://mbzuai-oryx.github.io/ViMUL/.

cs.CL↗

DEFT: Decompositional Efficient Fine-Tuning for Text-to-Image Models

Efficient fine-tuning of pre-trained Text-to-Image (T2I) models involves adjusting the model to suit a particular task or dataset while minimizing computational resources and limiting the number of trainable parameters. However, it often faces challenges in striking a trade-off between aligning with the target distribution: learning a novel concept from a limited image for personalization and retaining the instruction ability needed for unifying multiple tasks, all while maintaining editability (aligning with a variety of prompts or in-context generation). In this work, we introduce DEFT, Decompositional Efficient Fine-Tuning, an efficient fine-tuning framework that adapts a pre-trained weight matrix by decomposing its update into two components with two trainable matrices: (1) a projection onto the complement of a low-rank subspace spanned by a low-rank matrix, and (2) a low-rank update. The single trainable low-rank matrix defines the subspace, while the other trainable low-rank matrix enables flexible parameter adaptation within that subspace. We conducted extensive experiments on the Dreambooth and Dreambench Plus datasets for personalization, the InsDet dataset for object and scene adaptation, and the VisualCloze dataset for a universal image generation framework through visual in-context learning with both Stable Diffusion and a unified model. Our results demonstrated state-of-the-art performance, highlighting the emergent properties of efficient fine-tuning. Our code is available on \href{https://github.com/MAXNORM8650/DEFT}{DEFTBase}.

cs.CV↗

How Good are Foundation Models in Step-by-Step Embodied Reasoning?

Embodied agents operating in the physical world must make decisions that are not only effective but also safe, spatially coherent, and grounded in context. While recent advances in large multimodal models (LMMs) have shown promising capabilities in visual understanding and language generation, their ability to perform structured reasoning for real-world embodied tasks remains underexplored. In this work, we aim to understand how well foundation models can perform step-by-step reasoning in embodied environments. To this end, we propose the Foundation Model Embodied Reasoning (FoMER) benchmark, designed to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of LMMs in complex embodied decision-making scenarios. Our benchmark spans a diverse set of tasks that require agents to interpret multimodal observations, reason about physical constraints and safety, and generate valid next actions in natural language. We present (i) a large-scale, curated suite of embodied reasoning tasks, (ii) a novel evaluation framework that disentangles perceptual grounding from action reasoning, and (iii) empirical analysis of several leading LMMs under this setting. Our benchmark includes over 1.1k samples with detailed step-by-step reasoning across 10 tasks and 8 embodiments, covering three different robot types. Our results highlight both the potential and current limitations of LMMs in embodied reasoning, pointing towards key challenges and opportunities for future research in robot intelligence. Our data and code will be made publicly available.

cs.CV↗

Promptception: How Sensitive Are Large Multimodal Models to Prompts?

Despite the success of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) in recent years, prompt design for LMMs in Multiple-Choice Question Answering (MCQA) remains poorly understood. We show that even minor variations in prompt phrasing and structure can lead to accuracy deviations of up to 15% for certain prompts and models. This variability poses a challenge for transparent and fair LMM evaluation, as models often report their best-case performance using carefully selected prompts. To address this, we introduce Promptception, a systematic framework for evaluating prompt sensitivity in LMMs. It consists of 61 prompt types, spanning 15 categories and 6 supercategories, each targeting specific aspects of prompt formulation, and is used to evaluate 10 LMMs ranging from lightweight open-source models to GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro, across 3 MCQA benchmarks: MMStar, MMMU-Pro, MVBench. Our findings reveal that proprietary models exhibit greater sensitivity to prompt phrasing, reflecting tighter alignment with instruction semantics, while open-source models are steadier but struggle with nuanced and complex phrasing. Based on this analysis, we propose Prompting Principles tailored to proprietary and open-source LMMs, enabling more robust and fair model evaluation.

cs.CV↗