Recent advances in personalized MLLMs enable effective capture of user-specific concepts, supporting both recognition of personalized concepts and contextual captioning. However, humans typically explore and reason over relations among objects and individuals, transcending surface-level information to achieve more personalized and contextual understanding. To this end, existing methods may face three main limitations: Their training data lacks multi-object sets in which relations among objects are learnable. Building on the limited training data, their models overlook the relations between different personalized concepts and fail to reason over them. Their experiments mainly focus on a single personalized concept, where evaluations are limited to recognition and captioning tasks. To address the limitations, we present a new dataset named ReGraP, consisting of 120 sets of personalized knowledge. Each set includes images, KGs, and CoT QA pairs derived from the KGs, enabling more structured and sophisticated reasoning pathways. We propose ReGraP-LLaVA, an MLLM trained with the corresponding KGs and CoT QA pairs, where soft and hard graph prompting methods are designed to align KGs within the model's semantic space. We establish the ReGraP Benchmark, which contains diverse task types: multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, True/False, and descriptive questions in both open- and closed-ended settings. The proposed benchmark is designed to evaluate the relational reasoning and knowledge-connection capability of personalized MLLMs. We conduct experiments on the proposed ReGraP-LLaVA and other competitive MLLMs. Results show that the proposed model not only learns personalized knowledge but also performs relational reasoning in responses, achieving the SoTA performance compared with the competitive methods. All the codes and datasets are released at: https://github.com/xyfyyds/ReGraP.

Geometric embedding methods have shown to be useful for multi-hop reasoning on knowledge graphs by mapping entities and logical operations to geometric regions and geometric transformations, respectively. Geometric embeddings provide direct interpretability framework for queries. However, current methods have only leveraged the geometric construction of entities, failing to map logical operations to geometric transformations and, instead, using neural components to learn these operations. We introduce GeometrE, a geometric embedding method for multi-hop reasoning, which does not require learning the logical operations and enables full geometric interpretability. Additionally, unlike previous methods, we introduce a transitive loss function and show that it can preserve the logical rule $\forall a,b,c: r(a,b) \land r(b,c) \to r(a,c)$. Our experiments show that GeometrE outperforms current state-of-the-art methods on standard benchmark datasets.

This study addresses the critical challenge of hallucination mitigation in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) for Visual Question Answering (VQA) tasks through a Split Conformal Prediction (SCP) framework. While LVLMs excel in multi-modal reasoning, their outputs often exhibit hallucinated content with high confidence, posing risks in safety-critical applications. We propose a model-agnostic uncertainty quantification method that integrates dynamic threshold calibration and cross-modal consistency verification. By partitioning data into calibration and test sets, the framework computes nonconformity scores to construct prediction sets with statistical guarantees under user-defined risk levels ($α$). Key innovations include: (1) rigorous control of \textbf{marginal coverage} to ensure empirical error rates remain strictly below $α$; (2) dynamic adjustment of prediction set sizes inversely with $α$, filtering low-confidence outputs; (3) elimination of prior distribution assumptions and retraining requirements. Evaluations on benchmarks (ScienceQA, MMMU) with eight LVLMs demonstrate that SCP enforces theoretical guarantees across all $α$ values. The framework achieves stable performance across varying calibration-to-test split ratios, underscoring its robustness for real-world deployment in healthcare, autonomous systems, and other safety-sensitive domains. This work bridges the gap between theoretical reliability and practical applicability in multi-modal AI systems, offering a scalable solution for hallucination detection and uncertainty-aware decision-making.

Large multimodal models (LMMs) have achieved high performance in vision-language tasks involving single image but they struggle when presented with a collection of multiple images (Multiple Image Question Answering scenario). These tasks, which involve reasoning over large number of images, present issues in scalability (with increasing number of images) and retrieval performance. In this work, we propose an enhancement for retriever framework introduced in MIRAGE model using submodular subset selection techniques. Our method leverages query-aware submodular functions, such as GraphCut, to pre-select a subset of semantically relevant images before main retrieval component. We demonstrate that using anchor-based queries and augmenting the data improves submodular-retriever pipeline effectiveness, particularly in large haystack sizes.

The rapid progress in question-answering (QA) systems has predominantly benefited high-resource languages, leaving Indic languages largely underrepresented despite their vast native speaker base. In this paper, we present IndicSQuAD, a comprehensive multi-lingual extractive QA dataset covering nine major Indic languages, systematically derived from the SQuAD dataset. Building on previous work with MahaSQuAD for Marathi, our approach adapts and extends translation techniques to maintain high linguistic fidelity and accurate answer-span alignment across diverse languages. IndicSQuAD comprises extensive training, validation, and test sets for each language, providing a robust foundation for model development. We evaluate baseline performances using language-specific monolingual BERT models and the multilingual MuRIL-BERT. The results indicate some challenges inherent in low-resource settings. Moreover, our experiments suggest potential directions for future work, including expanding to additional languages, developing domain-specific datasets, and incorporating multimodal data. The dataset and models are publicly shared at https://github.com/l3cube-pune/indic-nlp

Following the successful hosts of the 1-st (NLPCC 2023 Foshan) CMIVQA and the 2-rd (NLPCC 2024 Hangzhou) MMIVQA challenges, this year, a new task has been introduced to further advance research in multi-modal, multilingual, and multi-hop medical instructional question answering (M4IVQA) systems, with a specific focus on medical instructional videos. The M4IVQA challenge focuses on evaluating models that integrate information from medical instructional videos, understand multiple languages, and answer multi-hop questions requiring reasoning over various modalities. This task consists of three tracks: multi-modal, multilingual, and multi-hop Temporal Answer Grounding in Single Video (M4TAGSV), multi-modal, multilingual, and multi-hop Video Corpus Retrieval (M4VCR) and multi-modal, multilingual, and multi-hop Temporal Answer Grounding in Video Corpus (M4TAGVC). Participants in M4IVQA are expected to develop algorithms capable of processing both video and text data, understanding multilingual queries, and providing relevant answers to multi-hop medical questions. We believe the newly introduced M4IVQA challenge will drive innovations in multimodal reasoning systems for healthcare scenarios, ultimately contributing to smarter emergency response systems and more effective medical education platforms in multilingual communities. Our official website is https://cmivqa.github.io/

We present Task 5 of the DCASE 2025 Challenge: an Audio Question Answering (AQA) benchmark spanning multiple domains of sound understanding. This task defines three QA subsets (Bioacoustics, Temporal Soundscapes, and Complex QA) to test audio-language models on interactive question-answering over diverse acoustic scenes. We describe the dataset composition (from marine mammal calls to soundscapes and complex real-world clips), the evaluation protocol (top-1 accuracy with answer-shuffling robustness), and baseline systems (Qwen2-Audio-7B, AudioFlamingo 2, Gemini-2-Flash). Preliminary results on the development set are compared, showing strong variation across models and subsets. This challenge aims to advance the audio understanding and reasoning capabilities of audio-language models toward human-level acuity, which are crucial for enabling AI agents to perceive and interact about the world effectively.

We propose DocVXQA, a novel framework for visually self-explainable document question answering. The framework is designed not only to produce accurate answers to questions but also to learn visual heatmaps that highlight contextually critical regions, thereby offering interpretable justifications for the model's decisions. To integrate explanations into the learning process, we quantitatively formulate explainability principles as explicit learning objectives. Unlike conventional methods that emphasize only the regions pertinent to the answer, our framework delivers explanations that are \textit{contextually sufficient} while remaining \textit{representation-efficient}. This fosters user trust while achieving a balance between predictive performance and interpretability in DocVQA applications. Extensive experiments, including human evaluation, provide strong evidence supporting the effectiveness of our method. The code is available at https://github.com/dali92002/DocVXQA.

Motivated by the emerging demand in the financial industry for the automatic analysis of unstructured and structured data at scale, Question Answering (QA) systems can provide lucrative and competitive advantages to companies by facilitating the decision making of financial advisers. Consequently, we propose a novel financial QA system using the transformer-based pre-trained BERT language model to address the limitations of data scarcity and language specificity in the financial domain. Our system focuses on financial non-factoid answer selection, which retrieves a set of passage-level texts and selects the most relevant as the answer. To increase efficiency, we formulate the answer selection task as a re-ranking problem, in which our system consists of an Answer Retriever using BM25, a simple information retrieval approach, to first return a list of candidate answers, and an Answer Re-ranker built with variants of pre-trained BERT language models to re-rank and select the most relevant answers. We investigate various learning, further pre-training, and fine-tuning approaches for BERT. Our experiments suggest that FinBERT-QA, a model built from applying the Transfer and Adapt further fine-tuning and pointwise learning approach, is the most effective, improving the state-of-the-art results of task 2 of the FiQA dataset by 16% on MRR, 17% on NDCG, and 21% on Precision@1.

Educational question generation (EQG) is a crucial component of intelligent educational systems, significantly aiding self-assessment, active learning, and personalized education. While EQG systems have emerged, existing datasets typically rely on predefined, carefully edited texts, failing to represent real-world classroom content, including lecture speech with a set of complementary slides. To bridge this gap, we collect a dataset of educational questions based on lectures from real-world classrooms. On this realistic dataset, we find that current methods for EQG struggle with accurately generating questions from educational videos, particularly in aligning with specific timestamps and target answers. Common challenges include selecting informative contexts from extensive transcripts and ensuring generated questions meaningfully incorporate the target answer. To address the challenges, we introduce a novel framework utilizing large language models for dynamically selecting and rewriting contexts based on target timestamps and answers. First, our framework selects contexts from both lecture transcripts and video keyframes based on answer relevance and temporal proximity. Then, we integrate the contexts selected from both modalities and rewrite them into answer-containing knowledge statements, to enhance the logical connection between the contexts and the desired answer. This approach significantly improves the quality and relevance of the generated questions. Our dataset and code are released in https://github.com/mengxiayu/COSER.