arXiv subjects

Hisham Cholakkal

Publications and source records attributed to Hisham Cholakkal.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Omni-Embed-Mini: Binding Modalities Without Forgetting via Dense Distillation

Extending a text embedding model to new modalities typically degrades text retrieval quality, and existing omni-modal embedders compensate with multi-billion parameters. We present Omni-Embed-Mini, a 0.9B-parameter model that maps text, speech, audio, images, video, and visually-rich documents into a single shared cosine space without updating any text-side parameter. Our key insight is that the teacher signal requires no separate embedding model: each media sample is paired with a dense cascaded caption, and the teacher target is simply the frozen backbone's own embedding of that caption. Because teacher and student share the same backbone weights, they inhabit byte-identical geometry, and lightweight projectors plus phased LoRA adapters on the modality encoders suffice for alignment. Training combines a Matryoshka SigLIP contrastive loss with an online hybrid hard-negative miner whose negatives sharpen as the encoder improves. The recipe carries over to a 2.3B variant by swapping in a native vision-language backbone. Omni-Embed-Mini-0.9B keeps its text weights bit-identical to the backbone, so training cannot regress text retrieval (49.57 nDCG@10 on MTEB-v2 BEIR-8), while extending it to five additional modalities, and is ~2.7x to 9.5x smaller than every open omni embedder we compare against. The 2.3B variant is competitive with the closed gemini-embedding-2, edging ahead of it on the overall-modality average. Models, code, data and evaluation harness are on our project page: https://omniembed.cvmbzuai.com

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arXiv2026

Hard Vision, Easy Vision: What GPT-6 Astra Reveals Across Computer Vision

Frontier general-purpose systems are rapidly expanding beyond visual understanding into capabilities traditionally handled by dedicated computer-vision models. As these capabilities expand, a central question for the computer-vision community is how far this reach extends, and what remains hard. We evaluate GPT-6 Astra alongside five frontier general-purpose AI systems across 34 capabilities and 55 benchmarks spanning nine areas of computer vision. We compare their performance with dedicated models and humans where suitable references are available. Astra demonstrates broad visual capability, with substantial gains over other frontier systems in visual and spatial reasoning and several forms of structured prediction. Across the state-of-the-art systems, a consistent pattern emerges. Capabilities involving semantic interpretation, reasoning, and object-centric prediction increasingly approach or reach available reference levels. In contrast, larger gaps remain when tasks require metric geometric accuracy, faithful reconstruction, temporally consistent dense prediction, or specialized fine-grained visual knowledge. Additional reasoning and specialist tools close selected gaps, but their benefits vary across capabilities. These results map a changing landscape of computer vision in which increasingly sophisticated visual tasks are accessible through a general-purpose interface, while precise and fidelity-sensitive perception remains an important frontier.

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arXiv2026

Small yet Assistive: Spatially-Aware Post-Training for Low Vision

An estimated 1 billion people worldwide live with vision impairment, yet current vision-language models (VLMs) produce descriptions too vague for safe navigation by blind and low-vision (BLV) users. Large VLMs can generate high-quality audio-description-compliant narrations but cannot run on mobile devices; small VLMs offer competitive latency but lack spatial detail, directional cues, and hazard awareness for navigational assistance. We present Smol-VL-BLV, a compact VLM for blind and low-vision users that closes this gap using a 500M decoder transformer model and two post-training mechanisms: (1) teacher-student distillation and (2) Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with a composite BLV reward targeting directional language, metric distances, and hazard detection. Because multi-stage post-training can induce catastrophic forgetting, we add a lightweight finetuning stage after the last stage GRPO finetuning to recover general descriptive quality while preserving BLV-specific spatial grounding. Our best model substantially outperforms the baseline across various benchmarks, including tasks: VQA, BLV captioning, OCR, and latency. Compared with the baseline for relative improvement, it improves the Spatial score gain of 19.3%, and the Social score gain of 14.8%. It also increases OCR-Bench by 101.5%, and raises TextVQA accuracy by 44.2%. These results show that BLV-focused post-training improves both accessibility-specific spatial grounding and general visual-text reasoning. Deployed on a mid-range Android smartphone via Mixed-Precision Quantization, the model remains approx. 450 MB and runs entirely on-device, offline and without network dependency, generating descriptions with latency dependent on host hardware capabilities. Our model, dataset, and code is publicly released at https://smol-vl-blv.github.io/Smol-VL-BLV-website/

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arXiv2026

Ground3D-LMM: Fine-Grained 3D Point Grounding and Spatial Reasoning with LMM

Natural-language queries about 3D environments become actionable when responses are verifiable and metric. Verifiability requires explicit grounding to the referred 3D region, while metric answers report physical measurements in real-world units (e.g., size, thickness, clearance, and distance). Existing 3D large multimodal models (LMMs) approaches remain limited: conversational systems typically respond without explicit 3D grounding, while 3D grounding models are not designed for interactive, metric-aware dialogue. In this paper, we present Ground3D-LMM, a unified model that takes a point cloud and an optional RGB image as input and supports 3D spatial conversation with (i) point-grounded responses and (ii) metric numeric outputs at both object and part granularity, including multi-object queries. To evaluate this intersection of grounding and measurement, we define the 3D Grounded Measurement task, which requires predicting the referred 3D region and the corresponding metric quantities in real-world units. We introduce a large-scale dataset built on ScanNet and ScanNet++ datasets with dense object and part annotations and roughly 2.5M question-answer pairs spanning eight tasks, along with a manually verified test set. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets and tasks show that our proposed Ground3D-LMM model provides a strong baseline for grounded, metric-aware 3D conversational understanding. Our dataset and model are publicly available.

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arXiv2026

Paying More Attention to Visual Tokens in Self-Evolving Large Multimodal Models

Recently, self-evolving large multimodal models (LMMs) have received attention for improving visual reasoning in a purely unsupervised setting. However, multi-role self-play and self-consistency reward schemes in existing self-evolving LMMs optimize answer agreement without ensuring the decoder attends to visual content, relying instead on statistical language priors to produce self consistent outputs. This leads to a persistent failure mode we term visual under-conditioning, where the decoder relies on language priors rather than the image during generation, manifesting as insufficient attention to visual tokens. As a result, current self-evolving LMMs struggle on vision--language understanding tasks such as image captioning and visual question answering. To address this, we propose VISE (Visual Invariance Self-Evolution), a purely unsupervised self-evolving framework that directly regularizes the model's visual conditioning policy through two complementary invariance-based rewards: a geometric invariance reward that enforces spatial consistency under known transformations, and a semantic invariance reward that penalizes evidence-agnostic generation by requiring the model to recognize the absence of evidence when predicted regions are perturbed. VISE operates within a single model without specialist roles, external reward models, or annotations, and is trained on raw unlabeled images. Experiments on 18 benchmarks demonstrate the efficacy of our approach. Using Qwen3-VL-2B as the base model, VISE achieves gains of $+16.85$ CIDEr on COCO and $+19.66$ CIDEr on TextCaps, reduces object hallucination by $5.0$ Chair-I points, and generalizes across four model families and scales. Our code and models are available at https://mbzuai-oryx.github.io/VISE

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arXiv2026

Ask, Solve, Generate: Self-Evolving Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation via Self-Consistency Rewards

Most unified large multimodal models (LMMs) that support both visual understanding and image generation still rely on curated post-training supervision, such as human annotations, preference labels, or external reward models. We ask whether a unified LMM can improve both abilities autonomously using only unlabeled images. We propose a self-evolving training framework with three internal roles: a Proposer that generates visual questions, a Solver that answers and evaluates them, and a Generator that synthesizes images. Training uses only self-derived consistency signals, without human annotations, preference labels, or task-trained external reward/judge models. To stabilize learning, we introduce Solver Token Entropy (STE), a continuous difficulty signal based on token-level prediction uncertainty that remains useful even when sample-level consistency becomes unreliable. For image generation, we design a multi-scale internal evaluation scheme that combines question-answer fidelity scoring with cycle-consistent captioning. This creates a solver-mediated coupling, where better visual understanding enables more reliable generation assessment and stronger internal training signals. The framework preserves the same role decomposition, reward logic, and training schedule across diffusion-based BLIP3o, rectified-flow BAGEL, and autoregressive VARGPT-v1.1 architectures, requiring only each backbone's native prompting and generation interface. Across eight understanding metrics, our method consistently improves over the corresponding base models. On BAGEL, it achieves a $+3.5\%$ absolute gain on MMMU and improves GenEval image generation performance from $82\%$ to $85\%$. Code and models are publicly released.

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arXiv2026

A Benchmark for Omni-Modal Reasoning in Long Videos

Long-form omni-modal video understanding requires integrating vision, speech, and ambient audio with coherent long-context reasoning. Existing video benchmarks often trade off temporal scale, modality coverage, open-ended interaction, and interpretable scoring. To address this gap, we introduce LongShOTBench, a long video understanding benchmark designed around three coupled goals: holistic omni-modal integration, intent-driven open-ended interaction, and rubric-level diagnosis. It builds single- and multi-turn questions from real viewing scenarios, with systematic tasks probing visual, speech, ambient-audio, temporal, and cross-modal reasoning. Each item includes a reference answer and a weighted criterion-level rubric, letting evaluation identify which perceptual facts, temporal links, modality-grounding requirements, and reasoning steps are satisfied or missed. All samples are manually verified to improve grounding, clarity, and rubric reliability. We also introduce LongShOTAgent, a training-free omni-modal evidence-seeking agent coupling full-video preprocessing with targeted retrieval, query-adaptive segment refinement, and explicit claim verification over visual, speech, and non-speech audio evidence. Its iterative search-refine-verify loop exposes intermediate evidence and lets modality-specific specialists re-analyze relevant moments before answering. We evaluate 105 video-capable models spanning open-source omni-modal models, vision-language systems, audio LLMs, agentic pipelines and closed-source APIs. Current MLLMs remain far from saturating LongShOTBench, while our LongShOTAgent is the strongest training-free system, reaching 66.64% overall. By releasing the benchmark, leaderboard, and method, we provide a shared, interpretable testbed for advancing long-form omni-modal video reasoning. Code, data, and the leaderboard are available at https://longshot.cvmbzuai.com/.

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arXiv2026

EvoLMM: Self-Evolving Large Multimodal Models with Continuous Rewards

Recent advances in large multimodal models (LMMs) have enabled impressive reasoning and perception abilities, yet most existing training pipelines still depend on human-curated data or externally verified reward models, limiting their autonomy and scalability. In this work, we strive to improve LMM reasoning capabilities in a purely unsupervised fashion (without any annotated data or reward distillation). To this end, we propose a self-evolving framework, named EvoLMM, that instantiates two cooperative agents from a single backbone model: a Proposer, which generates diverse, image-grounded questions, and a Solver, which solves them through internal consistency, where learning proceeds through a continuous self-rewarding process. This dynamic feedback encourages both the generation of informative queries and the refinement of structured reasoning without relying on ground-truth or human judgments. When using the popular Qwen2.5-VL as the base model, our EvoLMM yields consistent gains upto $\sim$3\% on multimodal math-reasoning benchmarks, including ChartQA, MathVista, and MathVision, using only raw training images. We hope our simple yet effective approach will serve as a solid baseline easing future research in self-improving LMMs in a fully-unsupervised fashion. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/mbzuai-oryx/EvoLMM.

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arXiv2026

MAviS: A Multimodal Conversational Assistant For Avian Species

Fine-grained understanding and species-specific multimodal question answering are vital for advancing biodiversity conservation and ecological monitoring. However, existing multimodal large language models face challenges when it comes to specialized topics like avian species, making it harder to provide accurate and contextually relevant information in these areas. To address this limitation, we introduce the MAviS-Dataset, a large-scale multimodal avian species dataset that integrates image, audio, and text modalities for over 1,000 bird species, comprising both pretraining and instruction-tuning subsets enriched with structured question-answer pairs. Building on the MAviS-Dataset, we introduce MAviS-Chat, a multimodal LLM that supports audio, vision, and text and is designed for fine-grained species understanding, multimodal question answering, and scene-specific description generation. Finally, for quantitative evaluation, we present MAviS-Bench, a benchmark of over 25,000 QA pairs designed to assess avian species-specific perceptual and reasoning abilities across modalities. Experimental results show that MAviS-Chat outperforms the baseline MiniCPM-o-2.6 by a large margin, achieving state-of-the-art open-source results and demonstrating the effectiveness of our instruction-tuned MAviS-Dataset. Our findings highlight the necessity of domain-adaptive multimodal LLMs for ecological applications.

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arXiv2026

Agent-X: Evaluating Deep Multimodal Reasoning in Vision-Centric Agentic Tasks

Deep reasoning is fundamental for solving complex tasks, especially in vision-centric scenarios that demand sequential, multimodal understanding. However, existing benchmarks typically evaluate agents with fully synthetic, single-turn queries, limited visual modalities, and lack a framework to assess reasoning quality over multiple steps as required in real-world settings. To address this, we introduce Agent-X, a large-scale benchmark for evaluating vision-centric agents multi-step and deep reasoning capabilities in real-world, multimodal settings. Agent- X features 828 agentic tasks with authentic visual contexts, including images, multi-image comparisons, videos, and instructional text. These tasks span six major agentic environments: general visual reasoning, web browsing, security and surveillance, autonomous driving, sports, and math reasoning. Our benchmark requires agents to integrate tool use with explicit, stepwise decision-making in these diverse settings. In addition, we propose a fine-grained, step-level evaluation framework that assesses the correctness and logical coherence of each reasoning step and the effectiveness of tool usage throughout the task. Our results reveal that even the best-performing models, including GPT, Gemini, and Qwen families, struggle to solve multi-step vision tasks, achieving less than 50% full-chain success. These findings highlight key bottlenecks in current LMM reasoning and tool-use capabilities and identify future research directions in vision-centric agentic reasoning models. Our data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/mbzuai-oryx/Agent-X

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arXiv2026

SafeDiffusion-R1: Online Reward Steering for Safe Diffusion Post-Training

Diffusion models have been widely studied for removing unsafe content learned during pre-training. Existing methods require expensive supervised data, either unsafe-text paired with safe-image groundtruth or negative/positive image pairs, making them impractical to scale. Furthermore, offline reinforcement learning and supervised fine-tuning approaches that generate synthetic data offline suffer from catastrophic forgetting, degrading generation quality. We propose a novel online reinforcement learning framework that addresses both data scarcity and model degradation through post-training with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) on both negative and positive text prompts. To eliminate the need for fine-tuning specialized safe/unsafe reward models, we introduce a \textit{steering reward mechanism} that exploits an inherent property of CLIP embeddings: steering text representations toward positive safety directions and away from negative ones in the embedding space. Our online-policy approach enables the model to learn from diverse prompts, including explicit unsafe content, without catastrophic forgetting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method reduces inappropriate content to 18.07\% (vs. 48.9\% for SD v1.4) and nudity detections to 15 (vs. 646 baseline) while improving compositional generation quality from 42.08\% to 47.83\% on GenEval. Remarkably, these safety gains generalize to out-of-domain unsafe prompts across seven harm categories, achieving state-of-the-art performance without supervised paired data or reward tuning. Github: https://github.com/MAXNORM8650/SafeDiffusion-R1.

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arXiv2026

AI in Agriculture: A Survey of Deep Learning Techniques for Crops, Fisheries and Livestock

Crops, fisheries and livestock form the backbone of global food production, essential to feed the ever-growing global population. However, these sectors face considerable challenges, including climate variability, resource limitations, and the need for sustainable management. Addressing these issues requires efficient, accurate, and scalable technological solutions, highlighting the importance of artificial intelligence (AI). This survey presents a systematic and thorough review of more than 200 research works covering conventional machine learning approaches, advanced deep learning techniques (e.g., vision transformers), and recent vision-language foundation models (e.g., CLIP) in the agriculture domain, focusing on diverse tasks such as crop disease detection, livestock health management, and aquatic species monitoring. We further cover major implementation challenges such as data variability and experimental aspects: datasets, performance evaluation metrics, and geographical focus. We finish the survey by discussing potential open research directions emphasizing the need for multimodal data integration, efficient edge-device deployment, and domain-adaptable AI models for diverse farming environments. Rapid growth of evolving developments in this field can be actively tracked on our project page: https://github.com/umair1221/AI-in-Agriculture

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arXiv2026

Paper Circle: An Open-source Multi-agent Research Discovery and Analysis Framework

The rapid growth of scientific literature has made it increasingly difficult for researchers to efficiently discover, evaluate, and synthesize relevant work. Recent advances in multi-agent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong potential for understanding user intent and are being trained to utilize various tools. In this paper, we introduce Paper Circle, a multi-agent research discovery and analysis system designed to reduce the effort required to find, assess, organize, and understand academic literature. The system comprises two complementary pipelines: (1) a Discovery Pipeline that integrates offline and online retrieval from multiple sources, multi-criteria scoring, diversity-aware ranking, and structured outputs; and (2) an Analysis Pipeline that transforms individual papers into structured knowledge graphs with typed nodes such as concepts, methods, experiments, and figures, enabling graph-aware question answering and coverage verification. Both pipelines are implemented within a coder LLM-based multi-agent orchestration framework and produce fully reproducible, synchronized outputs including JSON, CSV, BibTeX, Markdown, and HTML at each agent step. This paper describes the system architecture, agent roles, retrieval and scoring methods, knowledge graph schema, and evaluation interfaces that together form the Paper Circle research workflow. We benchmark Paper Circle on both paper retrieval and paper review generation, reporting hit rate, MRR, and Recall at K. Results show consistent improvements with stronger agent models. We have publicly released the website at https://papercircle.vercel.app/ and the code at https://github.com/MAXNORM8650/papercircle.

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arXiv2026

CoME-VL: Scaling Complementary Multi-Encoder Vision-Language Learning

Recent vision-language models (VLMs) typically rely on a single vision encoder trained with contrastive image-text objectives, such as CLIP-style pretraining. While contrastive encoders are effective for cross-modal alignment and retrieval, self-supervised visual encoders often capture richer dense semantics and exhibit stronger robustness on recognition and understanding tasks. In this work, we investigate how to scale the fusion of these complementary visual representations for vision-language modeling. We propose CoME-VL: Complementary Multi-Encoder Vision-Language, a modular fusion framework that integrates a contrastively trained vision encoder with a self-supervised DINO encoder. Our approach performs representation-level fusion by (i) entropy-guided multi-layer aggregation with orthogonality-constrained projections to reduce redundancy, and (ii) RoPE-enhanced cross-attention to align heterogeneous token grids and produce compact fused visual tokens. The fused tokens can be injected into a decoder-only LLM with minimal changes to standard VLM pipelines. Extensive experiments across diverse vision-language benchmarks demonstrate that CoME-VL consistently outperforms single-encoder baselines. In particular, we observe an average improvement of 4.9% on visual understanding tasks and 5.4% on grounding tasks. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on RefCOCO for detection while improving over the baseline by a large margin. Finally, we conduct ablation studies on layer merging, non-redundant feature mixing, and fusion capacity to evaluate how complementary contrastive and self-supervised signals affect VLM performance.

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arXiv2026

MediX-R1: Open Ended Medical Reinforcement Learning

We introduce MediX-R1, an open-ended Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework for medical multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that enables clinically grounded, free-form answers beyond multiple-choice formats. MediX-R1 fine-tunes a baseline vision-language backbone with Group Based RL and a composite reward tailored for medical reasoning: an LLM-based accuracy reward that judges semantic correctness with a strict YES/NO decision, a medical embedding-based semantic reward to capture paraphrases and terminology variants, and lightweight format and modality rewards that enforce interpretable reasoning and modality recognition. This multi-signal design provides stable, informative feedback for open-ended outputs where traditional verifiable or MCQ-only rewards fall short. To measure progress, we propose a unified evaluation framework for both text-only and image+text tasks that uses a Reference-based LLM-as-judge in place of brittle string-overlap metrics, capturing semantic correctness, reasoning, and contextual alignment. Despite using only $\sim51$K instruction examples, MediX-R1 achieves excellent results across standard medical LLM (text-only) and VLM (image + text) benchmarks, outperforming strong open-source baselines and delivering particularly large gains on open-ended clinical tasks. Our results demonstrate that open-ended RL with comprehensive reward signals and LLM-based evaluation is a practical path toward reliable medical reasoning in multimodal models. Our trained models, curated datasets and source code are available at https://medix.cvmbzuai.com

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arXiv2026

Mobile-O: Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation on Mobile Device

Unified multimodal models can both understand and generate visual content within a single architecture. Existing models, however, remain data-hungry and too heavy for deployment on edge devices. We present Mobile-O, a compact vision-language-diffusion model that brings unified multimodal intelligence to a mobile device. Its core module, the Mobile Conditioning Projector (MCP), fuses vision-language features with a diffusion generator using depthwise-separable convolutions and layerwise alignment. This design enables efficient cross-modal conditioning with minimal computational cost. Trained on only a few million samples and post-trained in a novel quadruplet format (generation prompt, image, question, answer), Mobile-O jointly enhances both visual understanding and generation capabilities. Despite its efficiency, Mobile-O attains competitive or superior performance compared to other unified models, achieving 74% on GenEval and outperforming Show-O and JanusFlow by 5% and 11%, while running 6x and 11x faster, respectively. For visual understanding, Mobile-O surpasses them by 15.3% and 5.1% averaged across seven benchmarks. Running in only ~3s per 512x512 image on an iPhone, Mobile-O establishes the first practical framework for real-time unified multimodal understanding and generation on edge devices. We hope Mobile-O will ease future research in real-time unified multimodal intelligence running entirely on-device with no cloud dependency. Our code, models, datasets, and mobile application are publicly available at https://amshaker.github.io/Mobile-O/

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arXiv2026

Audit After Segmentation: Reference-Free Mask Quality Assessment for Language-Referred Audio-Visual Segmentation

Language-referred audio-visual segmentation (Ref-AVS) aims to segment target objects described by natural language by jointly reasoning over video, audio, and text. Beyond generating segmentation masks, providing rich and interpretable diagnoses of mask quality remains largely underexplored. In this work, we introduce Mask Quality Assessment in the Ref-AVS context (MQA-RefAVS), a new task that evaluates the quality of candidate segmentation masks without relying on ground-truth annotations as references at inference time. Given audio-visual-language inputs and each provided segmentation mask, the task requires estimating its IoU with the unobserved ground truth, identifying the corresponding error type, and recommending an actionable quality-control decision. To support this task, we construct MQ-RAVSBench, a benchmark featuring diverse and representative mask error modes that span both geometric and semantic issues. We further propose MQ-Auditor, a multimodal large language model (MLLM)-based auditor that explicitly reasons over multimodal cues and mask information to produce quantitative and qualitative mask quality assessments. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MQ-Auditor outperforms strong open-source and commercial MLLMs and can be integrated with existing Ref-AVS systems to detect segmentation failures and support downstream segmentation improvement. Data and codes will be released at https://github.com/jasongief/MQA-RefAVS.

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arXiv2025

Adapting In-Domain Few-Shot Segmentation to New Domains without Source Domain Retraining

Cross-domain few-shot segmentation (CD-FSS) aims to segment objects of novel classes in new domains, which is often challenging due to the diverse characteristics of target domains and the limited availability of support data. Most CD-FSS methods redesign and retrain in-domain FSS models using abundant base data from the source domain, which are effective but costly to train. To address these issues, we propose adapting informative model structures of the well-trained FSS model for target domains by learning domain characteristics from few-shot labeled support samples during inference, thereby eliminating the need for source domain retraining. Specifically, we first adaptively identify domain-specific model structures by measuring parameter importance using a novel structure Fisher score in a data-dependent manner. Then, we progressively train the selected informative model structures with hierarchically constructed training samples, progressing from fewer to more support shots. The resulting Informative Structure Adaptation (ISA) method effectively addresses domain shifts and equips existing well-trained in-domain FSS models with flexible adaptation capabilities for new domains, eliminating the need to redesign or retrain CD-FSS models on base data. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our method, demonstrating superior performance across multiple CD-FSS benchmarks. Codes are at https://github.com/fanq15/ISA.

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