Papers for

multimedia content developers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Video reasoning improved by adaptive token selection and counterfactual learning

Beyond Entropy: Self-Diagnostic Multi-Role Token Optimization for Video Reasoning

Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has substantially advanced multimodal reasoning, yet it remains fundamentally limited by ambiguous token-level credit assignment. While high-entropy token heuristics encourage possibility exploration, naively extending them to video reasoning tends to induce lengthy reasoning, as the model becomes overly reliant on high-entropy visual activations. Alternative approaches that rely on counterfactual-based visual token localization for credit assignment also tend to over-prioritize visual exploration at the expense of decisive reasoning cues for answer derivation, thereby exacerbating the interference from spurious visual nuances. Moreover, these methods employ static counterfactual strategies that fail to co-evolve with the policy during training. In this paper, we introduce DyCPO, a co-evolutionary framework that jointly optimizes reliable token selection and adaptive counterfactual intervention. It constructs a multi-role dependence metric to balance visual exploration and answer-relevance mining in token-wise contrastive learning, while suppressing exploration-only filler tokens and spurious visual noise. Rather than relying on static counterfactual priors, DyCPO dynamically derives counterfactual signals from the model's own successful and failed rollouts, enabling self-diagnostic analysis and co-evolution of the optimization objective with the policy. Extensive experiments on complex video reasoning and general video understanding benchmarks demonstrate consistent performance improvements, establishing DyCPO as a robust token-level credit assignment paradigm for multimodal reinforcement learning.

Fri 2 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Figuring out which parts of a video help answer questions is hard because some details might seem important but aren’t. The researchers created a new way called DyCPO that helps computers focus on the right visual clues by learning from their own successes and mistakes. This method balances exploring new ideas with zeroing in on the parts of the video that really matter for giving correct answers. Their tests show this approach helps computers understand videos better and make smarter decisions when reasoning about them.
Open → 2610.03400v1

Pixelumm unifies image and video understanding and generation in pixels

PixelUMM: Encoder-Free Unified Image and Video Understanding and Generation

Abstract: Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) often rely on separate visual representations for understanding and generation, increasing visual context length and complicating integration with established vision-language pretraining pipelines. Recent advances in pixel-space modeling offer an encoder-free alternative, but extending this paradigm from images to videos is non-trivial: video understanding and generation adopt different temporal representations, leaving the design of a unified visual interface an open question. We present PixelUMM, an encoder-free model for unified image and video understanding and generation directly in pixel space. PixelUMM represents images as spatial patches and videos as spatiotemporal tubelets, connecting raw pixels to a shared multimodal backbone through single-layer linear projections. Its Mixture-of-Transformers architecture combines shared attention with task-specific parameters and extends clean-pixel prediction to video generation, jointly supporting autoregressive text prediction and pixel-space flow matching. Experiments show that PixelUMM achieves competitive performance across image and video understanding and generation tasks. We further conduct empirical studies of key design choices, including decoder design and spatial-temporal patch size, providing insights for future pixel-space unified multimodal models.

Tue 29 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Understanding and creating images and videos usually require different methods, which can be complex and slow. The authors present PixelUMM, a new model that handles both images and videos directly using raw pixel data, without needing complex encoding steps. This model uses a unique approach to break down pixels spatially and temporally, allowing it to understand and generate visual content in a unified way. Their tests show PixelUMM works well across multiple tasks involving images and videos.
Open → 2609.38597v1

Benchmark measures story continuity across text image and speech

What Comes Next? Omni-StoryBench for Evaluating Story-Grounded Omnimodal Generation

Abstract: Omnimodal evaluation should go beyond independent text, image, and speech production: individually plausible outputs may not express a coherent shared event. We introduce Omni-StoryBench, a story-grounded omnimodal benchmark evaluating whether models can coherently continue stories across image, narration, and speech. Each instance provides a current storybook page and structured next-page conditions, requiring models to generate the next illustration, narration, and spoken character utterance. Omni-StoryBench contains 900 rigorously validated story transitions from openly licensed children's books, with ground-truth next-page references and speech metadata. We evaluate systems with modality-specific metrics and consistency-centered LLM-as-a-judge rubrics for context preservation, condition following, reference consistency, and cross-modal coherence. Across 32 baseline configurations spanning orchestration, semi-orchestration, and native any-to-any paradigms, we find orchestration with strong VLM planning most reliable, while current native omnimodal models often struggle with output completeness and controllability. Our analysis shows text-side performance is associated with image and speech quality, but image generation and visual continuity form the clearest observed bottleneck among the evaluated configurations. These results position Omni-StoryBench as a system-level benchmark measuring coherent omnimodal generation beyond isolated modality quality.

Tue 29 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionMultimedia
The gist
It is hard for computers to create stories that make sense using words, pictures, and sounds all together. The authors made a test called Omni-StoryBench that checks if a computer can continue a story in all three ways at once. They used real children’s books and tested many computer setups, finding that some methods worked better for keeping the story consistent. The biggest difficulty was making pictures that match the story well. This benchmark helps measure how well computers keep stories coherent across different types of media.
Open → 2609.37317v1