Existing video segmenter and grounder approaches, exemplified by Sa2VA, directly fuse features within segmentation models. This often results in an undesirable entanglement of dynamic visual information and static semantics, thereby degrading segmentation accuracy. To systematically mitigate this issue, we propose DeSa2VA, a decoupling-enhanced prompting scheme integrating text pre-training and a linear decoupling module to address the information processing limitations inherent in SAM-2. Specifically, first, we devise a pre-training paradigm that converts textual ground-truth labels into point-level prompts while generating corresponding text masks. These masks are refined through a hybrid loss function to strengthen the model's semantic grounding capabilities. Next, we employ linear projection to disentangle hidden states that generated by a large language model into distinct textual and visual feature subspaces. Finally, a dynamic mask fusion strategy synergistically combines these decoupled features through triple supervision from predicted text/visual masks and ground-truth annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across diverse tasks, including image segmentation, image question answering, video segmentation, and video question answering. Our codes are available at https://github.com/longmalongma/DeSa2VA.

In a conversational system, dynamically generating follow-up questions based on context can help users explore information and provide a better user experience. Humans are usually able to ask questions that involve some general life knowledge and demonstrate higher order cognitive skills. However, the questions generated by existing methods are often limited to shallow contextual questions that are uninspiring and have a large gap to the human level. In this paper, we propose a three-stage external knowledge-enhanced follow-up question generation method, which generates questions by identifying contextual topics, constructing a knowledge graph (KG) online, and finally combining these with a large language model to generate the final question. The model generates information-rich and exploratory follow-up questions by introducing external common sense knowledge and performing a knowledge fusion operation. Experiments show that compared to baseline models, our method generates questions that are more informative and closer to human questioning levels while maintaining contextual relevance.

Grounded Video Question Answering (Grounded VideoQA) requires aligning textual answers with explicit visual evidence. However, modern multimodal models often rely on linguistic priors and spurious correlations, resulting in poorly grounded predictions. In this work, we propose MUPA, a cooperative MUlti-Path Agentic approach that unifies video grounding, question answering, answer reflection and aggregation to tackle Grounded VideoQA. MUPA features three distinct reasoning paths on the interplay of grounding and QA agents in different chronological orders, along with a dedicated reflection agent to judge and aggregate the multi-path results to accomplish consistent QA and grounding. This design markedly improves grounding fidelity without sacrificing answer accuracy. Despite using only 2B parameters, our method outperforms all 7B-scale competitors. When scaled to 7B parameters, MUPA establishes new state-of-the-art results, with Acc@GQA of 30.3% and 47.4% on NExT-GQA and DeVE-QA respectively, demonstrating MUPA' effectiveness towards trustworthy video-language understanding. Our code is available in https://github.com/longmalongma/MUPA.

This paper presents Team Marikarp's solution for the SIGIR 2025 LiveRAG competition. The competition's evaluation set, automatically generated by DataMorgana from internet corpora, encompassed a wide range of target topics, question types, question formulations, audience types, and knowledge organization methods. It offered a fair evaluation of retrieving question-relevant supporting documents from a 15M documents subset of the FineWeb corpus. Our proposed knowledge-aware diverse reranking RAG pipeline achieved first place in the competition.

Visual question answering (VQA) systems face significant challenges when adapting to real-world data shifts, especially in multi-modal contexts. While robust fine-tuning strategies are essential for maintaining performance across in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios, current evaluation settings are primarily unimodal or particular to some types of OOD, offering limited insight into the complexities of multi-modal contexts. In this work, we propose a new benchmark FRAMES-VQA (Fine-Tuning Robustness across Multi-Modal Shifts in VQA) for evaluating robust fine-tuning for VQA tasks. We utilize ten existing VQA benchmarks, including VQAv2, IV-VQA, VQA-CP, OK-VQA and others, and categorize them into ID, near and far OOD datasets covering uni-modal, multi-modal and adversarial distribution shifts. We first conduct a comprehensive comparison of existing robust fine-tuning methods. We then quantify the distribution shifts by calculating the Mahalanobis distance using uni-modal and multi-modal embeddings extracted from various models. Further, we perform an extensive analysis to explore the interactions between uni- and multi-modal shifts as well as modality importance for ID and OOD samples. These analyses offer valuable guidance on developing more robust fine-tuning methods to handle multi-modal distribution shifts. The code is available at https://github.com/chengyuehuang511/FRAMES-VQA .

This paper presents an advancement in Question-Answering (QA) systems using a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) framework to enhance information extraction from PDF files. Recognizing the richness and diversity of data within PDFs--including text, images, vector diagrams, graphs, and tables--poses unique challenges for existing QA systems primarily designed for textual content. We seek to develop a comprehensive RAG-based QA system that will effectively address complex multimodal questions, where several data types are combined in the query. This is mainly achieved by refining approaches to processing and integrating non-textual elements in PDFs into the RAG framework to derive precise and relevant answers, as well as fine-tuning large language models to better adapt to our system. We provide an in-depth experimental evaluation of our solution, demonstrating its capability to extract accurate information that can be applied to different types of content across PDFs. This work not only pushes the boundaries of retrieval-augmented QA systems but also lays a foundation for further research in multimodal data integration and processing.

Recent advancements in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) have enhanced large language models in question answering by integrating external knowledge. However, challenges persist in achieving global understanding and aligning responses with human ethical and quality preferences. To address these issues, we propose GraphMPA, a comprehensive graph-based framework with mode-seeking preference alignment. Our approach constructs a hierarchical document graph using a general similarity measurement, mimicking human cognitive processes for information understanding and synthesis. Additionally, we introduce mode-seeking preference optimization to better align model outputs with human preferences through probability-matching constraints. Extensive experiments on six datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our \href{https://github.com/tangquanwei/GraphMPA}{GraphMPA}.

Existing Medical Visual Question Answering (Med-VQA) models often suffer from language biases, where spurious correlations between question types and answer categories are inadvertently established. To address these issues, we propose a novel Cause-Effect Driven Optimization framework called CEDO, that incorporates three well-established mechanisms, i.e., Modality-driven Heterogeneous Optimization (MHO), Gradient-guided Modality Synergy (GMS), and Distribution-adapted Loss Rescaling (DLR), for comprehensively mitigating language biases from both causal and effectual perspectives. Specifically, MHO employs adaptive learning rates for specific modalities to achieve heterogeneous optimization, thus enhancing robust reasoning capabilities. Additionally, GMS leverages the Pareto optimization method to foster synergistic interactions between modalities and enforce gradient orthogonality to eliminate bias updates, thereby mitigating language biases from the effect side, i.e., shortcut bias. Furthermore, DLR is designed to assign adaptive weights to individual losses to ensure balanced learning across all answer categories, effectively alleviating language biases from the cause side, i.e., imbalance biases within datasets. Extensive experiments on multiple traditional and bias-sensitive benchmarks consistently demonstrate the robustness of CEDO over state-of-the-art competitors.

Knowledge-intensive multi-hop question answering (QA) tasks, which require integrating evidence from multiple sources to address complex queries, often necessitate multiple rounds of retrieval and iterative generation by large language models (LLMs). However, incorporating many documents and extended contexts poses challenges -such as hallucinations and semantic drift-for lightweight LLMs with fewer parameters. This work proposes a novel framework called DEC (Dynamic Enhancement Chain). DEC first decomposes complex questions into logically coherent subquestions to form a hallucination-free reasoning chain. It then iteratively refines these subquestions through context-aware rewriting to generate effective query formulations. For retrieval, we introduce a lightweight discriminative keyword extraction module that leverages extracted keywords to achieve targeted, precise document recall with relatively low computational overhead. Extensive experiments on three multi-hop QA datasets demonstrate that DEC performs on par with or surpasses state-of-the-art benchmarks while significantly reducing token consumption. Notably, our approach attains state-of-the-art results on models with 8B parameters, showcasing its effectiveness in various scenarios, particularly in resource-constrained environments.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) acquire real-world knowledge and general reasoning ability through Internet-scale image-text corpora. They can augment robotic systems with scene understanding and task planning, and assist visuomotor policies that are trained on robot trajectory data. We explore the reverse paradigm - using rich, real, multi-modal robot trajectory data to enhance and evaluate VLMs. In this paper, we present Robo2VLM, a Visual Question Answering (VQA) dataset generation framework for VLMs. Given a human tele-operated robot trajectory, Robo2VLM derives ground-truth from non-visual and non-descriptive sensory modalities, such as end-effector pose, gripper aperture, and force sensing. Based on these modalities, it segments the robot trajectory into a sequence of manipulation phases. At each phase, Robo2VLM uses scene and interaction understanding to identify 3D properties of the robot, task goal, and the target object. The properties are used to generate representative VQA queries - images with textural multiple-choice questions - based on spatial, goal-conditioned, and interaction reasoning question templates. We curate Robo2VLM-1, a large-scale in-the-wild dataset with 684,710 questions covering 463 distinct scenes and 3,396 robotic manipulation tasks from 176k real robot trajectories. Results suggest that Robo2VLM-1 can benchmark and improve VLM capabilities in spatial and interaction reasoning.