Existing image-text modality alignment in Vision Language Models (VLMs) treats each text token equally in an autoregressive manner. Despite being simple and effective, this method results in sub-optimal cross-modal alignment by over-emphasizing the text tokens that are less correlated with or even contradictory with the input images. In this paper, we advocate for distinct contributions for each text token based on its visual correlation. Specifically, we present by contrasting image inputs, the difference in prediction logits on each text token provides strong guidance of visual correlation. We therefore introduce Contrastive Alignment (CAL), a simple yet effective re-weighting strategy that prioritizes training visually correlated tokens. Our experimental results demonstrate that CAL consistently improves different types of VLMs across different resolutions and model sizes on various benchmark datasets. Importantly, our method incurs minimal additional computational overhead, rendering it highly efficient compared to alternative data scaling strategies.

Recent advancement in multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) has demonstrated their remarkable capability to generate descriptive captions for input videos. However, these models suffer from factual inaccuracies in the generated descriptions, causing severe hallucination issues. While prior works have explored alleviating hallucinations for static images, jointly mitigating visual object and temporal action hallucinations for dynamic videos remains a challenging and unsolved task. T o tackle this challenge, we propose a Self-Augmented Contrastive Alignment (SANTA) framework for enabling object and action faithfulness by exempting the spurious correlations and enforcing the emphasis on visual facts. SANTA employs a hallucinative self-augmentation scheme to identify the potential hallucinations that lie in the MLLM and transform the original captions to the contrasted negatives. Furthermore, we develop a tracklet-phrase contrastive alignment to match the regional objects and relation-guided actions with their corresponding visual and temporal phrases. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SANTA outperforms existing methods in alleviating object and action hallucinations, yielding superior performance on the hallucination examination benchmarks.

Abstract--The recognition of Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) from event-triggered ambient sensors is an essential task in Ambient Assisted Living, yet existing methods remain constrained by representation-level limitations. Sequence-based approaches preserve temporal order of sensor activations but are sensitive to noise and lack spatial awareness, while image-based approaches capture global patterns and implicit spatial correlations but compress fine-grained temporal dynamics and distort sensor layouts. Na ıve fusion (e.g., feature concatenation) fail to enforce alignment between sequence-and image-based representation views, under-utilizing their complementary strengths. We propose C ontrastive A lignment for ADL R ecognition from E vent-Triggered Sensor Streams (CARE), an end-to-end framework that jointly optimizes representation learning via Sequence-Image Contrastive Alignment (SICA) and classification via cross-entropy, ensuring both cross-representation alignment and task-specific discriminability. CARE integrates (i) time-aware, noise-resilient sequence encoding with (ii) spatially-informed and frequency-sensitive image representations, and employs (iii) a joint contrastive-classification objective for end-to-end learning of aligned and discriminative embeddings. Evaluated on three CASAS datasets, CARE achieves state-of-the-art performance (89.8% on Milan, 88.9% on Cairo, and 73.3% on Kyoto7) and demonstrates robustness to sensor malfunctions and layout variability, highlighting its potential for reliable ADL recognition in smart homes. Global increases in life expectancy are leading to aging societies, with a rising number of older adults who require continuous support from healthcare providers and their family members [30]. However, given the critical shortage of healthcare personnel, it is essential to support older adults in maintaining independence for as long as possible. These functional abilities often decline with aging, and can be further deteriorated by aging-related chronic conditions [32]. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) technologies have emerged to support ADL performance, encompassing systems for activity recognition, anomaly detection, and personalized prompting.

ABSTRACT Multimodal intent recognition (MMIR) suffers from weak semantic grounding and poor robustness under noisy or rare-class conditions. We propose MVCL-DAF++, which extends MVCL-DAF with two key modules: (1) Prototype-aware contrastive alignment, aligning instances to class-level prototypes to enhance semantic consistency; and (2) Coarse-to-fine attention fusion, integrating global modality summaries with token-level features for hierarchical cross-modal interaction. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of prototype-guided learning and coarse-to-fine fusion for robust multimodal understanding. Index T erms-- Multimodal intent recognition, Prototype-aware contrastive alignment, Coarse-to-fine dynamic attention fusion 1. INTRODUCTION Multimodal intent recognition (MMIR) [1] aims to infer user intentions by integrating heterogeneous signals such as spoken language, facial expressions, and vocal intonations. With the rapid adoption of human-centered AI systems [2], robust and generalizable multimodal understanding has become a cornerstone for building intelligent conversational agents [3, 4].

Modern app store recommender systems struggle with multiple-category apps, as traditional taxonomies fail to capture overlapping semantics, leading to suboptimal personalization. We propose PCR-CA (Parallel Codebook Representations with Contrastive Alignment), an end-to-end framework for improved CTR prediction. PCR-CA first extracts compact multimodal embeddings from app text, then introduces a Parallel Codebook VQ-AE module that learns discrete semantic representations across multiple codebooks in parallel -- unlike hierarchical residual quantization (RQ-VAE). This design enables independent encoding of diverse aspects (e.g., gameplay, art style), better modeling multiple-category semantics. To bridge semantic and collaborative signals, we employ a contrastive alignment loss at both the user and item levels, enhancing representation learning for long-tail items. Additionally, a dual-attention fusion mechanism combines ID-based and semantic features to capture user interests, especially for long-tail apps. Experiments on a large-scale dataset show PCR-CA achieves a +0.76% AUC improvement over strong baselines, with +2.15% AUC gains for long-tail apps. Online A/B testing further validates our approach, showing a +10.52% lift in CTR and a +16.30% improvement in CVR, demonstrating PCR-CA's effectiveness in real-world deployment. The new framework has now been fully deployed on the Microsoft Store.

We propose Pure and Lightning ID customization (PuLID), a novel tuning-free ID customization method for text-to-image generation. By incorporating a Lightning T2I branch with a standard diffusion one, PuLID introduces both contrastive alignment loss and accurate ID loss, minimizing disruption to the original model and ensuring high ID fidelity. Experiments show that PuLID achieves superior performance in both ID fidelity and editability. Another attractive property of PuLID is that the image elements (\eg, background, lighting, composition, and style) before and after the ID insertion are kept as consistent as possible.

Existing image-text modality alignment in Vision Language Models (VLMs) treats each text token equally in an autoregressive manner. Despite being simple and effective, this method results in sub-optimal cross-modal alignment by over-emphasizing the text tokens that are less correlated with or even contradictory with the input images. In this paper, we advocate for distinct contributions for each text token based on its visual correlation. Specifically, we present by contrasting image inputs, the difference in prediction logits on each text token provides strong guidance of visual correlation. We therefore introduce Contrastive Alignment (CAL), a simple yet effective re-weighting strategy that prioritizes training visually correlated tokens.

--Multimodal neuroimaging provides complementary structural and functional insights into both human brain organization and disease-related dynamics. Recent studies demonstrate enhanced diagnostic sensitivity for Alzheimer's disease (AD) through synergistic integration of neuroimaging data (e.g., sMRI, fMRI) with behavioral cognitive scores tabular data biomarkers. However, the intrinsic heterogeneity across modalities (e.g., 4D spatiotemporal fMRI dynamics vs. 3D anatomical sMRI structure) presents critical challenges for discriminative feature fusion. T o bridge this gap, we propose M2M-AlignNet: a geometry-aware multimodal co-attention network with latent alignment for early AD diagnosis using sMRI and fMRI. At the core of our approach is a multi-patch-to-multi-patch (M2M) contrastive loss function that quantifies and reduces representational discrepancies via geometry-weighted patch correspondence, explicitly aligning fMRI components across brain regions with their sMRI structural substrates without one-to-one constraints. Additionally, we propose a latent-as-query co-attention module to autonomously discover fusion patterns, circumventing modality prioritization biases while minimizing feature redundancy. We conduct extensive experiments to confirm the effectiveness of our method and highlight the correspondance between fMRI and sMRI as AD biomarkers.