arXiv subjects

Yibo Yan

Publications and source records attributed to Yibo Yan.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

MMUnlearner: Reformulating Multimodal Machine Unlearning in the Era of Multimodal Large Language Models

Recent progress in Machine Unlearning (MU) has introduced solutions for the selective removal of private or sensitive information encoded within deep neural networks. Nonetheless, MU for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) remains in its nascent phase. Therefore, we propose to reformulate the task of multimodal MU in the era of MLLMs, which aims to erase only the visual patterns associated with a given entity while preserving the corresponding textual knowledge encoded within the original parameters of the language model backbone. Furthermore, we develop a novel geometry-constrained gradient ascent method MMUnlearner. It updates the weights of MLLMs with a weight saliency map jointly restricted by the remaining concepts and textual knowledge during unlearning, thereby preserving parameters essential for non-target knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MMUnlearner surpasses baselines that finetuning MLLMs with VQA data directly through Gradient Ascent (GA) or Negative Preference Optimization (NPO), across all evaluation dimensions. Our code can be found in [this URL](https://github.com/Z1zs/MMUnlearner).

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arXiv2025

Unveiling Instruction-Specific Neurons & Experts: An Analytical Framework for LLM's Instruction-Following Capabilities

The finetuning of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly advanced their instruction-following capabilities, yet the underlying computational mechanisms driving these improvements remain poorly understood. This study systematically examines how fine-tuning reconfigures LLM computations by isolating and analyzing instruction-specific sparse components, i.e., neurons in dense models and both neurons and experts in Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures. In particular, we introduce HexaInst, a carefully curated and balanced instructional dataset spanning six distinct categories, and propose SPARCOM, a novel analytical framework comprising three key contributions: (1) a method for identifying these sparse components, (2) an evaluation of their functional generality and uniqueness, and (3) a systematic comparison of their alterations. Through experiments, we demonstrate functional generality, uniqueness, and the critical role of these components in instruction execution. By elucidating the relationship between fine-tuning-induced adaptations and sparse computational substrates, this work provides deeper insights into how LLMs internalize instruction-following behavior for the trustworthy LLM community.

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arXiv2025

PhysicsArena: The First Multimodal Physics Reasoning Benchmark Exploring Variable, Process, and Solution Dimensions

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in diverse reasoning tasks, yet their application to complex physics reasoning remains underexplored. Physics reasoning presents unique challenges, requiring grounding in physical conditions and the interpretation of multimodal information. Current physics benchmarks are limited, often focusing on text-only inputs or solely on problem-solving, thereby overlooking the critical intermediate steps of variable identification and process formulation. To address these limitations, we introduce PhysicsArena, the first multimodal physics reasoning benchmark designed to holistically evaluate MLLMs across three critical dimensions: variable identification, physical process formulation, and solution derivation. PhysicsArena aims to provide a comprehensive platform for assessing and advancing the multimodal physics reasoning abilities of MLLMs.

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arXiv2025

A Survey of Mathematical Reasoning in the Era of Multimodal Large Language Model: Benchmark, Method & Challenges

Mathematical reasoning, a core aspect of human cognition, is vital across many domains, from educational problem-solving to scientific advancements. As artificial general intelligence (AGI) progresses, integrating large language models (LLMs) with mathematical reasoning tasks is becoming increasingly significant. This survey provides the first comprehensive analysis of mathematical reasoning in the era of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). We review over 200 studies published since 2021, and examine the state-of-the-art developments in Math-LLMs, with a focus on multimodal settings. We categorize the field into three dimensions: benchmarks, methodologies, and challenges. In particular, we explore multimodal mathematical reasoning pipeline, as well as the role of (M)LLMs and the associated methodologies. Finally, we identify five major challenges hindering the realization of AGI in this domain, offering insights into the future direction for enhancing multimodal reasoning capabilities. This survey serves as a critical resource for the research community in advancing the capabilities of LLMs to tackle complex multimodal reasoning tasks.

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arXiv2025

EssayJudge: A Multi-Granular Benchmark for Assessing Automated Essay Scoring Capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) plays a crucial role in educational assessment by providing scalable and consistent evaluations of writing tasks. However, traditional AES systems face three major challenges: (1) reliance on handcrafted features that limit generalizability, (2) difficulty in capturing fine-grained traits like coherence and argumentation, and (3) inability to handle multimodal contexts. In the era of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), we propose EssayJudge, the first multimodal benchmark to evaluate AES capabilities across lexical-, sentence-, and discourse-level traits. By leveraging MLLMs' strengths in trait-specific scoring and multimodal context understanding, EssayJudge aims to offer precise, context-rich evaluations without manual feature engineering, addressing longstanding AES limitations. Our experiments with 18 representative MLLMs reveal gaps in AES performance compared to human evaluation, particularly in discourse-level traits, highlighting the need for further advancements in MLLM-based AES research.

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arXiv2025

MathAgent: Leveraging a Mixture-of-Math-Agent Framework for Real-World Multimodal Mathematical Error Detection

Mathematical error detection in educational settings presents a significant challenge for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), requiring a sophisticated understanding of both visual and textual mathematical content along with complex reasoning capabilities. Though effective in mathematical problem-solving, MLLMs often struggle with the nuanced task of identifying and categorizing student errors in multimodal mathematical contexts. Therefore, we introduce MathAgent, a novel Mixture-of-Math-Agent framework designed specifically to address these challenges. Our approach decomposes error detection into three phases, each handled by a specialized agent: an image-text consistency validator, a visual semantic interpreter, and an integrative error analyzer. This architecture enables more accurate processing of mathematical content by explicitly modeling relationships between multimodal problems and student solution steps. We evaluate MathAgent on real-world educational data, demonstrating approximately 5% higher accuracy in error step identification and 3% improvement in error categorization compared to baseline models. Besides, MathAgent has been successfully deployed in an educational platform that has served over one million K-12 students, achieving nearly 90% student satisfaction while generating significant cost savings by reducing manual error detection.

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arXiv2025

CAFES: A Collaborative Multi-Agent Framework for Multi-Granular Multimodal Essay Scoring

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) is crucial for modern education, particularly with the increasing prevalence of multimodal assessments. However, traditional AES methods struggle with evaluation generalizability and multimodal perception, while even recent Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM)-based approaches can produce hallucinated justifications and scores misaligned with human judgment. To address the limitations, we introduce CAFES, the first collaborative multi-agent framework specifically designed for AES. It orchestrates three specialized agents: an Initial Scorer for rapid, trait-specific evaluations; a Feedback Pool Manager to aggregate detailed, evidence-grounded strengths; and a Reflective Scorer that iteratively refines scores based on this feedback to enhance human alignment. Extensive experiments, using state-of-the-art MLLMs, achieve an average relative improvement of 21% in Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK) against ground truth, especially for grammatical and lexical diversity. Our proposed CAFES framework paves the way for an intelligent multimodal AES system. The code will be available upon acceptance.

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arXiv2025

Learning Robust Anymodal Segmentor with Unimodal and Cross-modal Distillation

Simultaneously using multimodal inputs from multiple sensors to train segmentors is intuitively advantageous but practically challenging. A key challenge is unimodal bias, where multimodal segmentors over rely on certain modalities, causing performance drops when others are missing, common in real world applications. To this end, we develop the first framework for learning robust segmentor that can handle any combinations of visual modalities. Specifically, we first introduce a parallel multimodal learning strategy for learning a strong teacher. The cross-modal and unimodal distillation is then achieved in the multi scale representation space by transferring the feature level knowledge from multimodal to anymodal segmentors, aiming at addressing the unimodal bias and avoiding over-reliance on specific modalities. Moreover, a prediction level modality agnostic semantic distillation is proposed to achieve semantic knowledge transferring for segmentation. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world multi-sensor benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance.

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arXiv2025

Look Twice Before You Answer: Memory-Space Visual Retracing for Hallucination Mitigation in Multimodal Large Language Models

Despite their impressive capabilities, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are prone to hallucinations, i.e., the generated content that is nonsensical or unfaithful to input sources. Unlike in LLMs, hallucinations in MLLMs often stem from the sensitivity of text decoder to visual tokens, leading to a phenomenon akin to "amnesia" about visual information. To address this issue, we propose MemVR, a novel decoding paradigm inspired by common cognition: when the memory of an image seen the moment before is forgotten, people will look at it again for factual answers. Following this principle, we treat visual tokens as supplementary evidence, re-injecting them into the MLLM through Feed Forward Network (FFN) as "key-value memory" at the middle trigger layer. This "look-twice" mechanism occurs when the model exhibits high uncertainty during inference, effectively enhancing factual alignment. Comprehensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that MemVR significantly mitigates hallucination across various MLLMs and excels in general benchmarks without incurring additional time overhead. The implementation is available from https://github.com/1zhou-Wang/MemVR

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arXiv2025

Aligning Multimodal LLM with Human Preference: A Survey

Large language models (LLMs) can handle a wide variety of general tasks with simple prompts, without the need for task-specific training. Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), built upon LLMs, have demonstrated impressive potential in tackling complex tasks involving visual, auditory, and textual data. However, critical issues related to truthfulness, safety, o1-like reasoning, and alignment with human preference remain insufficiently addressed. This gap has spurred the emergence of various alignment algorithms, each targeting different application scenarios and optimization goals. Recent studies have shown that alignment algorithms are a powerful approach to resolving the aforementioned challenges. In this paper, we aim to provide a comprehensive and systematic review of alignment algorithms for MLLMs. Specifically, we explore four key aspects: (1) the application scenarios covered by alignment algorithms, including general image understanding, multi-image, video, and audio, and extended multimodal applications; (2) the core factors in constructing alignment datasets, including data sources, model responses, and preference annotations; (3) the benchmarks used to evaluate alignment algorithms; and (4) a discussion of potential future directions for the development of alignment algorithms. This work seeks to help researchers organize current advancements in the field and inspire better alignment methods. The project page of this paper is available at https://github.com/BradyFU/Awesome-Multimodal-Large-Language-Models/tree/Alignment.

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arXiv2025

Mitigating Modality Prior-Induced Hallucinations in Multimodal Large Language Models via Deciphering Attention Causality

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have emerged as a central focus in both industry and academia, but often suffer from biases introduced by visual and language priors, which can lead to multimodal hallucination. These biases arise from the visual encoder and the Large Language Model (LLM) backbone, affecting the attention mechanism responsible for aligning multimodal inputs. Existing decoding-based mitigation methods focus on statistical correlations and overlook the causal relationships between attention mechanisms and model output, limiting their effectiveness in addressing these biases. To tackle this issue, we propose a causal inference framework termed CausalMM that applies structural causal modeling to MLLMs, treating modality priors as a confounder between attention mechanisms and output. Specifically, by employing backdoor adjustment and counterfactual reasoning at both the visual and language attention levels, our method mitigates the negative effects of modality priors and enhances the alignment of MLLM's inputs and outputs, with a maximum score improvement of 65.3% on 6 VLind-Bench indicators and 164 points on MME Benchmark compared to conventional methods. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our approach while being a plug-and-play solution. Our code is available at: https://github.com/The-Martyr/CausalMM

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arXiv2025

UrbanVLP: Multi-Granularity Vision-Language Pretraining for Urban Socioeconomic Indicator Prediction

Urban socioeconomic indicator prediction aims to infer various metrics related to sustainable development in diverse urban landscapes using data-driven methods. However, prevalent pretrained models, particularly those reliant on satellite imagery, face dual challenges. Firstly, concentrating solely on macro-level patterns from satellite data may introduce bias, lacking nuanced details at micro levels, such as architectural details at a place. Secondly, the text generated by the precursor work UrbanCLIP, which fully utilizes the extensive knowledge of LLMs, frequently exhibits issues such as hallucination and homogenization, resulting in a lack of reliable quality. In response to these issues, we devise a novel framework entitled UrbanVLP based on Vision-Language Pretraining. Our UrbanVLP seamlessly integrates multi-granularity information from both macro (satellite) and micro (street-view) levels, overcoming the limitations of prior pretrained models. Moreover, it introduces automatic text generation and calibration, providing a robust guarantee for producing high-quality text descriptions of urban imagery. Rigorous experiments conducted across six socioeconomic indicator prediction tasks underscore its superior performance.

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arXiv2024

SAVEn-Vid: Synergistic Audio-Visual Integration for Enhanced Understanding in Long Video Context

Endeavors have been made to explore Large Language Models for video analysis (Video-LLMs), particularly in understanding and interpreting long videos. However, existing Video-LLMs still face challenges in effectively integrating the rich and diverse audio-visual information inherent in long videos, which is crucial for comprehensive understanding. This raises the question: how can we leverage embedded audio-visual information to enhance long video understanding? Therefore, (i) we introduce SAVEn-Vid, the first-ever long audio-visual video dataset comprising over 58k audio-visual instructions. (ii) From the model perspective, we propose a time-aware Audio-Visual Large Language Model (AV-LLM), SAVEnVideo, fine-tuned on SAVEn-Vid. (iii) Besides, we present AVBench, a benchmark containing 2,500 QAs designed to evaluate models on enhanced audio-visual comprehension tasks within long video, challenging their ability to handle intricate audio-visual interactions. Experiments on AVBench reveal the limitations of current AV-LLMs. Experiments also demonstrate that SAVEnVideo outperforms the best Video-LLM by 3.61% on the zero-shot long video task (Video-MME) and surpasses the leading audio-visual LLM by 1.29% on the zero-shot audio-visual task (Music-AVQA). Consequently, at the 7B parameter scale, SAVEnVideo can achieve state-of-the-art performance. Our dataset and code will be released at https://ljungang.github.io/SAVEn-Vid/ upon acceptance.

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arXiv2024

Explainable and Interpretable Multimodal Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey

The rapid development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has revolutionized numerous fields, with large language models (LLMs) and computer vision (CV) systems driving advancements in natural language understanding and visual processing, respectively. The convergence of these technologies has catalyzed the rise of multimodal AI, enabling richer, cross-modal understanding that spans text, vision, audio, and video modalities. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs), in particular, have emerged as a powerful framework, demonstrating impressive capabilities in tasks like image-text generation, visual question answering, and cross-modal retrieval. Despite these advancements, the complexity and scale of MLLMs introduce significant challenges in interpretability and explainability, essential for establishing transparency, trustworthiness, and reliability in high-stakes applications. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on the interpretability and explainability of MLLMs, proposing a novel framework that categorizes existing research across three perspectives: (I) Data, (II) Model, (III) Training \& Inference. We systematically analyze interpretability from token-level to embedding-level representations, assess approaches related to both architecture analysis and design, and explore training and inference strategies that enhance transparency. By comparing various methodologies, we identify their strengths and limitations and propose future research directions to address unresolved challenges in multimodal explainability. This survey offers a foundational resource for advancing interpretability and transparency in MLLMs, guiding researchers and practitioners toward developing more accountable and robust multimodal AI systems.

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arXiv2024

Optimizing Multispectral Object Detection: A Bag of Tricks and Comprehensive Benchmarks

Multispectral object detection, utilizing RGB and TIR (thermal infrared) modalities, is widely recognized as a challenging task. It requires not only the effective extraction of features from both modalities and robust fusion strategies, but also the ability to address issues such as spectral discrepancies, spatial misalignment, and environmental dependencies between RGB and TIR images. These challenges significantly hinder the generalization of multispectral detection systems across diverse scenarios. Although numerous studies have attempted to overcome these limitations, it remains difficult to clearly distinguish the performance gains of multispectral detection systems from the impact of these "optimization techniques". Worse still, despite the rapid emergence of high-performing single-modality detection models, there is still a lack of specialized training techniques that can effectively adapt these models for multispectral detection tasks. The absence of a standardized benchmark with fair and consistent experimental setups also poses a significant barrier to evaluating the effectiveness of new approaches. To this end, we propose the first fair and reproducible benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the training "techniques", which systematically classifies existing multispectral object detection methods, investigates their sensitivity to hyper-parameters, and standardizes the core configurations. A comprehensive evaluation is conducted across multiple representative multispectral object detection datasets, utilizing various backbone networks and detection frameworks. Additionally, we introduce an efficient and easily deployable multispectral object detection framework that can seamlessly optimize high-performing single-modality models into dual-modality models, integrating our advanced training techniques.

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arXiv2024

MINER: Mining the Underlying Pattern of Modality-Specific Neurons in Multimodal Large Language Models

In recent years, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have significantly advanced, integrating more modalities into diverse applications. However, the lack of explainability remains a major barrier to their use in scenarios requiring decision transparency. Current neuron-level explanation paradigms mainly focus on knowledge localization or language- and domain-specific analyses, leaving the exploration of multimodality largely unaddressed. To tackle these challenges, we propose MINER, a transferable framework for mining modality-specific neurons (MSNs) in MLLMs, which comprises four stages: (1) modality separation, (2) importance score calculation, (3) importance score aggregation, (4) modality-specific neuron selection. Extensive experiments across six benchmarks and two representative MLLMs show that (I) deactivating ONLY 2% of MSNs significantly reduces MLLMs performance (0.56 to 0.24 for Qwen2-VL, 0.69 to 0.31 for Qwen2-Audio), (II) different modalities mainly converge in the lower layers, (III) MSNs influence how key information from various modalities converges to the last token, (IV) two intriguing phenomena worth further investigation, i.e., semantic probing and semantic telomeres. The source code is available at this URL.

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arXiv2024

FastMem: Fast Memorization of Prompt Improves Context Awareness of Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) excel in generating coherent text, but they often struggle with context awareness, leading to inaccuracies in tasks requiring faithful adherence to provided information. We introduce FastMem, a novel method designed to enhance instruction fine-tuned LLMs' context awareness through fast memorization of the prompt. FastMem maximizes the likelihood of the prompt before inference by updating only the last Feed-Forward Network (FFN) module. This targeted approach ensures efficient optimization without overfitting, significantly improving the model's ability to comprehend and accurately follow the context. Our experiments demonstrate substantial gains in reading comprehension, text summarization and adherence to output structures. For instance, FastMem improves the accuracy of Llama 3-8B-Inst on the NQ-SWAP dataset from 59.1% to 71.6%, and reduces the output structure failure rate of Qwen 1.5-4B-Chat from 34.9% to 25.5%. Extensive experimental results highlight FastMem's potential to offer a robust solution to enhance the reliability and accuracy of LLMs in various applications. Our code is available at: https://github.com/IAAR-Shanghai/FastMem

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arXiv2024

MMNeuron: Discovering Neuron-Level Domain-Specific Interpretation in Multimodal Large Language Model

Projecting visual features into word embedding space has become a significant fusion strategy adopted by Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, its internal mechanisms have yet to be explored. Inspired by multilingual research, we identify domain-specific neurons in multimodal large language models. Specifically, we investigate the distribution of domain-specific neurons and the mechanism of how MLLMs process features from diverse domains. Furthermore, we propose a three-stage mechanism for language model modules in MLLMs when handling projected image features, and verify this hypothesis using logit lens. Extensive experiments indicate that while current MLLMs exhibit Visual Question Answering (VQA) capability, they may not fully utilize domain-specific information. Manipulating domain-specific neurons properly will result in a 10% change of accuracy at most, shedding light on the development of cross-domain, all-encompassing MLLMs in the future. The source code is available at https://github.com/Z1zs/MMNeuron.

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