Researchers have introduced VISE (Visual Invariance Self-Evolution), a purely unsupervised framework designed to address 'visual under-conditioning' in self-evolving Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). VISE utilizes geometric and semantic invariance-based rewards to directly regularize the model's visual conditioning, ensuring it attends to visual content rather than relying on language priors. Trained on raw unlabeled images, experiments using Qwen3-VL-2B demonstrate significant performance gains, including +16.85 CIDEr on COCO and a 5.0-point reduction in object hallucination across 18 benchmarks. Why it matters: This research from MBZUAI offers a significant advancement in improving the visual reasoning capabilities and reliability of LMMs in unsupervised settings, making them more robust for real-world applications.
A new approach to composed video retrieval (CoVR) is presented, which leverages large multimodal models to infer causal and temporal consequences implied by an edit. The method aligns reasoned queries to candidate videos without task-specific finetuning. A new benchmark, CoVR-Reason, is introduced to evaluate reasoning in CoVR.
Researchers at MBZUAI have introduced EvoLMM, a self-evolving framework for large multimodal models that enhances reasoning capabilities without human-annotated data or reward distillation. EvoLMM uses two cooperative agents, a Proposer and a Solver, which generate image-grounded questions and solve them through internal consistency, using a continuous self-rewarding process. Evaluations using Qwen2.5-VL as the base model showed performance gains of up to 3% on multimodal math-reasoning benchmarks like ChartQA, MathVista, and MathVision using only raw training images.
Researchers at MBZUAI have introduced a novel approach to enhance Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) for autonomous driving by integrating 3D tracking information. This method uses a track encoder to embed spatial and temporal data, enriching visual queries and improving the LMM's understanding of driving scenarios. Experiments on DriveLM-nuScenes and DriveLM-CARLA benchmarks demonstrate significant improvements in perception, planning, and prediction tasks compared to baseline models.
Researchers introduce TimeTravel, a benchmark dataset for evaluating large multimodal models (LMMs) on historical and cultural artifacts. The benchmark comprises 10,250 expert-verified samples across 266 cultures and 10 historical regions, designed to assess AI in tasks like classification and interpretation of manuscripts, artworks, inscriptions, and archaeological discoveries. The goal is to establish AI as a reliable partner in preserving cultural heritage and assisting researchers.
MBZUAI alumnus Hanan Gani, a 2024 master's graduate in machine learning, is now a research associate at MBZUAI working on a meteorological project with the UAE government. He also focuses on multimodal and embodied intelligence research, mentors AI students, and has published nine papers during his time at MBZUAI. His research includes work on vision transformers, text-to-image generation, and large multimodal models. Why it matters: Showcases MBZUAI's role in attracting and developing AI talent within the UAE, contributing to the nation's AI research capabilities.