Soyeon Caren Han, Hyunsuk Chung, Jinwoo Kim +2cs.CL
Large multimodal models follow instructions about what to generate, but not necessarily about what evidence to rely on. Hence, models may continue to depend on shortcut-associated cues even when instructions suggest otherwise. We introduce GUIDE, a framework for controlling internal evidence usage through language instructions. GUIDE combines grouped parameter-efficient adaptation with instruction-conditioned gating to modulate multimodal evidence pathways during reasoning and generation. We further introduce a pathway-level evaluation framework that characterizes instruction-conditioned evidence modulation through reliance sensitivity, controlled perturbation analysis, pathway modulation, and autoregressive decoding dynamics. Across multimodal reasoning, classification, and generation, GUIDE induces structured and instruction-aligned redistribution of evidence reliance while largely preserving task behavior. Experiments on GQA, TextVQA, MM-IMDb, CREMA-D, RAVDESS, and Flickr30K show that GUIDE improves robustness under targeted evidence perturbations and enables controllable modulation across diverse multimodal settings. This suggests that multimodal instruction following can extend beyond output control toward regulating how different evidence sources contribute to model predictions.
Visual instruction tuning is crucial for advancing the vision-language alignment and instruction-following capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs). However, identifying optimal subsets under a fixed ratio constraint from rapidly expanding datasets remains a significant bottleneck. While existing methods largely depend on distribution diversity or heuristic filtering, they often overlook the internal coherence within individual samples. To bridge this gap, we propose Data Intrinsic Consistency (DIC), a self-scoring metric designed to quantify the sample-level inter-component consistency. DIC consists of two modules: Visual Information Consistency (VIC), evaluating the alignment between visual content and instructions, and Response Information Consistency (RIC), assessing response coherence relative to the instruction. Building upon DIC, we introduce Data Intrinsic Consistency Selection (DICS), an adaptive data selection method that optimizes the trade-off between high intra-sample consistency and global distributional diversity under varying data budgets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DICS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across diverse dataset scales and model architectures, surpassing full-dataset fine-tuning while using only 25% of the LLaVA-1.5-665K data. We further curate DICS-6M, a 6M-sample multi-modal instruction corpus that enables the largest-scale visual instruction selection study to date; remarkably, DICS reaches 94.52\% of the official InternVL3-8B-Instruct performance using less than 25\% of its reported training data. Code can be seen at https://github.com/cqu-student/DICS
Current video-to-music (V2M) models lack semantic control and fail to penalize instruction violations, largely due to their reliance on reconstruction objectives and the representational bottleneck of static cross-modal conditioning in Diffusion Autoregressive (DAR) architectures. To resolve this, we introduce VIBE, a novel text-and-video-to-music (T+V2M) generation model that leverages: (1) Conditioning Connection, a depth-wise cross-layer conditioning mechanism that dynamically bridges the planning and diffusion refinement heads and (2) a comprehensive reward modeling taxonomy, optimizing for both hard, verifiable constraints (e.g., tempo, key) and soft, subjective qualities (e.g., musicality, multimodal alignment) with a structured 5-stage training curriculum. Upon evaluation using audio-visual alignment, instruction following, and audio quality metrics, along with a subjective human evaluation study, we observe that VIBE demonstrates enhanced controllability and instruction adherence while performing comparably to most evaluated baselines on generation fidelity and multimodal alignment.
Ibrahim Mohamed Serouis, David Jaramillo Duquecs.AI
Text-to-Image (T2I) models have recently achieved impressive visual fidelity, yet their evaluation remains constrained by benchmarks that are often difficult to interpret and insufficiently diagnostic. Existing skill-based evaluations tend to overlook critical failure modes that strongly impact usability but fall outside standard taxonomies, such as global incoherence arising from missing parts or physically implausible configurations (e.g., floating objects). In addition, prompt difficulty is typically controlled along a single dimension; either prompt length or the number of elements to generate. To address these limitations, we introduce Imag-Eval, a controlled benchmark designed to assess how T2I models ground compositional natural-language instructions into visual outputs. Unlike prior work that conflates surface linguistic complexity with compositional difficulty, Imag-Eval explicitly seeks to disentangles these factors by independently varying both the number of instances and the combination of constraints (rules), while avoiding error propagation. This design enables fine-grained and interpretable analysis of where cross-modal instruction following fails. Our benchmark comprises 1,140 prompts and 8,842 combined rules, and we evaluate it on several state-of-the-art models. Complementing this analysis with an additional study of over 2,000 prompts from a concurrent benchmark, our results suggest that, for structured skills, compositional difficulty is primarily governed by the number of grounded rules and their binding to instances,, rather than by prompt length alone.
Multimodal instruction-following models require training data that is accurate, diverse, verifiable, and challenging. Existing synthesis pipelines typically follow a one-pass generate-and-filter paradigm, discarding feedback from failed samples, verifier outcomes, and target-model errors. We present VISA (Visual Instruction Synthesis Agent), an agentic framework that reformulates multimodal instruction synthesis as a self-evolving loop. At each round, VISA analyzes an image to filter incompatible constraints and discover new verifiable ones, samples diversity- and difficulty-aware constraint sets from persistent memory, generates candidate instructions, and verifies the resulting samples with executable tools and structured large language model judges. Failed samples trigger diagnostic-guided recovery, while accepted samples are probed against the target model to estimate difficulty. The resulting verifier signals and target-model failure profiles are written back to memory, allowing subsequent rounds to adaptively expand the constraint space, reduce template repetition, and focus on unresolved model weaknesses. The same verifier contracts further provide reward signals for reinforcement learning without a separately trained reward model. Experiments on MM-IFEval show that VISA consistently improves multimodal instruction following over strong baselines, while preserving general multimodal capability across seven public benchmarks.
Understanding instruction-following capabilities in scientific domains is essential for effectively leveraging Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to advance the development of scientific fields. In this work, we introduce SciMIF, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate the capability of MLLMs in following complex scientific instructions. Specifically, based on an extensive analysis of 22 distinct tasks across 5 representative scientific disciplines, we propose a comprehensive taxonomy comprising 10 constraint groups that captures both general functional requirements and discipline-specific characteristics. Guided by this taxonomy, we develop a high-fidelity instruction injection pipeline to systematically augment existing scientific datasets. We conduct comprehensive experiments on multiple state-of-the-art closed-source and open-source MLLMs. Our findings reveal significant performance disparities across different scientific disciplines, with chemistry posing greater challenges for current MLLMs. Furthermore, we observe that increasing the model scale does not yield corresponding improvements in constraint adherence, and current models still struggle severely with fine-grained constraints and instructions requiring the deep application of disciplinary knowledge. SciMIF fills the current void in evaluating multimodal instruction adherence within scientific domains, laying a crucial foundation for future enhancements of MLLMs in rigorous scientific applications. Data and code will be released at https://github.com/shenye7436/SciMIF .
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown strong performance in video understanding. However, their ability to follow instructions in this domain remains under-explored. Real-world video understanding requires models not only to interpret video content correctly, but also to satisfy diverse user-specified constraints. Existing benchmarks focus primarily on task accuracy rather than instruction adherence, leaving this capability insufficiently evaluated. To address this gap, we introduce Video-IFBench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating instruction following in video understanding, where models must satisfy diverse user-specified constraints, including those grounded in visual and audio content. We develop an instruction taxonomy with four templates, including single-task, multi-task, selection, and nested instructions, covering 32 task types and 39 manually designed constraint categories spanning both semantic and format requirements. To reduce annotation cost, we build a semi-automatic data construction pipeline that combines MLLMs, programmatic processing, and human verification, resulting in 1.5K samples. We conduct a large-scale evaluation of more than 20 recent MLLMs and show that video instruction following remains challenging for current models, especially for instructions with many constraints, semantic constraints, or complex conditional structures that require selecting the correct branch or path based on video content. We hope our work will facilitate future research on instruction following in video understanding scenarios.
Real-world multimodal instructions often bundle multiple requirements with unequal importance, yet most multimodal training data still reduce instruction following to answering one self-contained question. We study this gap through rubric comprehension, which casts the model not as a generator measured against rubrics but as an executor that follows them: given an image and a typed, prioritized rubric, the model must verify each rule before producing an overall judgment. To support this setting, we propose PRISM, a four-stage data synthesis framework that produces persona--task pairs, prefix-guided rule sets, quality-filtered rubrics, and structured verification traces. We further introduce PRISM-Eval, whose Loose and Strict metrics use deterministic matching against fixed labels and therefore require no inference-time judge model. With only 10K synthesized samples, PRISM lifts Qwen3-VL-4B from 9.5% to 30.1% Strict accuracy on PRISM-Eval while preserving average performance on general benchmarks, and the gains transfer to four additional open-source MLLMs across dense and MoE architectures, suggesting that structured rubric supervision is a scalable path toward multi-rule, priority-aware multimodal instruction following.
While instruction-based video editing has advanced rapidly, real-world videos contain tightly coupled audio and visual signals, and editing one modality often requires coordinated changes in the other. Existing benchmarks primarily evaluate visual transformations on silent clips or isolated audio editing, leaving complex audio-visual editing and cross-modal consistency underexplored. We introduce AVE-Compass, a comprehensive benchmark with 145 curated source videos, 196 audio-visually coupled editing instructions, and 2,688 fine-grained checklist items. It evaluates Instruction Following, Fidelity Preserving, Realism, and Editing Intent through checklist-based MLLM judging and a dedicated realism rubric, complemented by automated cross-modal, video, and audio metrics. Extensive evaluation shows that state-of-the-art models still struggle to execute cross-modal instructions while preserving non-target content. We further propose AVE-Agent, a modular agent framework that decomposes complex instructions into dependent subtasks and iteratively improves editing results through self-reflection and evaluator feedback. AVE-Agent improves instruction execution, Fidelity Preserving, and audio-visual alignment in joint editing while maintaining competitive perceptual quality.
Editing the figures in a research paper is a routine and time-consuming part of everyday research practice: authors relabel components, rearrange panels, and restyle visuals as they revise their manuscripts. Automating this editing workflow under a natural-language instruction, however, is challenging, because a scientific figure is a dense infographic in which heterogeneous visual elements such as schematics, plots, photos, captions, and arrows are composed under a tight visual grammar to advance a specific argument. To address this, we present SciDiagramEdit, a benchmark and skill-evolution framework that learns from natural paper revisions and operates on the figure's editable vector source, where users can inspect and co-edit individual primitives alongside the agent. Our benchmark mines before/after figure pairs from arXiv version histories, each grounded in the authors' own revision intent. To accommodate the diversity of editing instructions, we adopt agentic learning via skill evolution: an agentic proposer continually refines the agent's skill specification from execution traces over multiple epochs. The resulting skill progressively lifts edit accuracy on a held-out validation set, providing evidence that natural paper revisions are an effective training signal for instruction-driven figure editing.
We re-implement the NAVER LABS IWSLT 2025 instruction-following pipeline for the IWSLT 2026 Shared Task (constrained condition, short audio track), adapting it to the mandated components: SeamlessM4T-v2-large as the speech encoder and Qwen3-4B-Instruct as the LLM backbone. The three-stage approach projector alignment, text-only LoRA pre-training, and multimodal merging is preserved from the original design. We additionally construct 100k synthetic instruction-following examples across ten speech-centric task types (10k per task) from the provided corpora, suitable for further Stage 3 fine-tuning. Our primary model achieves COMET 0.781 on EN-ZH speech translation and BERTScore-F1 0.346 on English SQA on the MCIF benchmark.
Text-rich image models can now design poster-scale layouts, but we lack ways to measure whether they honor scientific communication contracts: legible labels, prescribed aspect ratios, and -- above all -- abstaining from fabricated scientific figures. We present POSTERHARNESS, an auditable harness reframing poster generation as measurable instruction-following tasks, with a pilot benchmark and failure taxonomy. POSTERHARNESS uses a placeholder-first contract to separate two jobs models otherwise conflate. The model performs visual-summary design: typography, reading path, color, and background -- but never draws data-bearing figures. Every figure region must be an empty labeled placeholder; a deterministic compositor inserts real source-paper figures at detected coordinates. This makes properties measurable: placeholder count and ID accuracy, blankness, aspect-ratio compliance, abstention from synthesized graphics, public-text hygiene, and source-figure provenance -- with failures logged as explicit rejections, not hidden in plausible-looking output. We instantiate the harness on 12 papers (6 HEP, 6 AI/ML-adjacent) and report three findings. (i) A counterfactual probe shows the placeholder contract drives VLM-counted synthesized figures from 34 to 0 across three papers. (ii) A failure taxonomy identifies blocking contracts: placeholder geometry, placeholder QA, template critic, and public text. (iii) Comparison with Paper2Poster shows a trade-off: PosterHarness yields higher-resolution artifacts, lower white-canvas fraction, and stronger VLM visual preference; the deterministic baseline retains slightly more PosterQuiz-style information and runs faster. We report this as regime characterization, not a superiority claim. All artifacts, prompts, manifests, and audit scripts are released as a reusable evaluation component.
Congrui Du, Yang Zhang, Kaizhi Qian +1cs.CL eess.AS
Instruction tuning for speech language models (SLMs) is substantially more challenging than for text-based large language models (LLMs), as it requires learning a new modality and a wide range of speech-specific instructions in addition to those supported by text LLMs. Existing SLM training approaches largely replicate the text LLM training paradigm by synthesizing large-scale speech pre-training and instruction-tuning datasets. However, this strategy is difficult to scale, since speech sequences are significantly longer than text sequences. In this paper, we propose SpeechCombine, an instruction-following speech language model trained without any instruction tuning, using only a single round of speech pre-training on 30k hours of data. Starting from a text LLM base model, we perform continuous pre-training on speech utterances to obtain a speech-adapted model, and then directly combine its weights with the weight difference between the instruction-tuned and base versions of the text LLM. Our results show that this simple combination strategy not only preserves the knowledge and capabilities of the original text LLM, but also effectively transfers them to the speech domain. These findings suggest a new direction for SLM training that avoids reliance on massive speech data.
In this paper, we describe NAVER LABS Europe's submission to the instruction-following speech processing short track at IWSLT 2026. We participate again in the constrained setting, developing systems capable of jointly performing ASR, ST, and SQA from English speech into Chinese, Italian, and German. Building on our previous submission, ranked first in last year's short track, we update our multi-stage training pipeline by replacing the speech projector with SpeechMapper, a method for learning a speech-to-LLM embedding projector using only ASR data. In addition, we introduce a synthetic SQA dataset, fakACL, composed of artificially generated scientific presentations. This dataset is built by prompting the LLM backbone, segmenting the generated talks, and synthesizing speech with SeamlessM4T-large-v2. The combination of an improved speech projection mechanism and domain-specific synthetic data allows our model to outperform last year's best short-track system, while being considerably more compact and relying on a weaker LLM backbone. This year's results place our system tied for first place in the overall short track ranking.
Real-world e-commerce image editing often requires multiple, localized, and auditable operations rather than global restyling. This compositional nature poses a dual challenge: models must precisely apply all requested edits to the correct regions while preserving unmodified content, even under ambiguous instructions. Existing one-shot editors conflate intent resolution, spatial grounding, and synthesis into a single step, frequently resulting in partial execution failures, which is unacceptable for commercial scenarios. To address this, we introduce GMO-E$^2$DIT, an agentic editing framework that couples a Vision-Language Model (VLM) with a mask-conditioned image editor to tackle structured multi-turn task completion. Given an underspecified instruction, the VLM agent constructs a region-grounded edit agenda, effectively decoupling cognitive reasoning from generative rendering. The framework then executes sub-programs via operation-aware masks and references, utilizing a reflection-driven loop to inspect intermediate results and determine the subsequent state. This iterative mechanism reliably preserves safe partial progress, retries unfinished operations, and recovers from errors. Furthermore, we develop a unified data pipeline providing aligned supervision for planning, execution, and reflection, alongside EComEditBench, a comprehensive benchmark for instruction-driven evaluation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GMO-E$^2$DIT achieves competitive performance compared to strong closed-source models, yielding superior instruction accuracy and edit fidelity over existing baselines.
We present Seed2.0, a model series that takes a meaningful step toward solving complex, real-world tasks. Our approach begins with identifying users' genuine needs and constructing a reliable, forward-looking evaluation system by selecting and abstracting benchmarks grounded in these needs and in realistic, complex scenarios. Guided by this evaluation system, Seed2.0 targets two persistent challenges, long-tail knowledge and complex instruction following, substantially improving the model's reliability on intricate, long-horizon tasks. Beyond these, Seed2.0 delivers world-leading reasoning intelligence, visual understanding, and search capabilities that address the most common needs of a broad user base. Through extensive real-world use cases documented in this model card, we demonstrate that Seed2.0 begins to exhibit the ability to handle initial complex real-world tasks, delivering greater value to hundreds of millions of users.
Composition is a high-level visual intent that governs where subjects are placed and how a scene is organized, yet current unified multimodal models remain unreliable at fine-grained composition recognition and struggle to turn such intent into controllable generation. We present COMPASS, the first unified multimodal framework that grounds composition-intent control in a single system spanning both composition perception and composition-guided generation, with a shared expert token $τ_c$ as the central intent anchor. On the perception side, COMPASS injects composition expertise into an MoE backbone in a minimally invasive manner and distills the inferred intent into $τ_c$. On the generation side, COMPASS reuses $τ_c$ as a global conditioning signal that steers the denoising trajectory, effectively converting passive composition analysis into explicit layout control. To support systematic instruction-following composition learning and evaluation at scale, we construct Comp-11, a large-scale dataset with an 11-class taxonomy and reasoning-augmented annotations. Extensive experiments show that COMPASS substantially improves category-level composition understanding and delivers more composition-consistent, prompt-faithful generation than strong baselines.
Vision foundation models are typically trained as static feature extractors, placing the burden of task adaptation onto large downstream models. We propose an alternative paradigm: instead of solely feeding visual features into language models, we use language itself to dynamically guide the vision encoder. Our method, Language-Instructed Vision Embeddings (LIVE), leverages language as high-level guidance to produce task-centric embeddings at inference time, removing the need for task-specific retraining. This enables the encoder to focus on contextually relevant aspects of the input, yielding more controllable and generalizable representations. Empirically, LIVE reduces visual hallucinations (+34 points on MMVP), surpasses vision-language models with orders of magnitude more parameters on visual question answering, and generalizes to unseen instructions and tasks -- offering a direct path toward adaptive, instruction-driven visual intelligence.
Production deployments of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) increasingly rely on system messages to govern model behavior. Yet existing benchmarks either evaluate constraints in text only or embed them into the user turn, leaving system-message adherence in multimodal contexts largely unmeasured; they also leave open whether compliance comes at the cost of foundational vision-language capabilities. We introduce VSysBench, a benchmark built on MMVet-v2 that organizes constraints into 5 main categories and 22 sub-categories, ranging from textual directives in visual contexts to fully vision-grounded ones, each paired with a misaligned counterpart that stress-tests the instructional hierarchy. VSysBench scores each response jointly along two axes, constraint compliance and answer correctness, via the Joint Satisfaction Rate (JSR) and Cross-Constraint Sensitivity (CCS). Across 16 MLLMs, we find that imposing system messages substantially erodes base task accuracy, that compliance collapses under user conflict for open-weight models while remaining stable for top proprietary ones, and that vision-grounded constraints are the hardest category for every model.
While Omni-modal Large Language Models (OLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in jointly processing audio and visual streams, their ability to strictly adhere to complex, multi-faceted user instructions remains largely unexplored. Existing benchmarks primarily focus on holistic video understanding or text-only instruction following, failing to capture the intricate interplay between modalities and user constraints. To bridge this gap, we introduce OmniCap-IF, the first comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to evaluate instruction-following capabilities in omni-modal captioning. OmniCap-IF incorporates a systematic framework that assesses captions on two dimensions: format correctness and content correctness. Our benchmark encompasses 50 distinct constraint types across pure visual, pure audio, and audio-visual modalities, while integrating Temporal Grounding to assess spatio-temporal precision. Extensive evaluations of prominent models on 1,920 high-quality samples reveal significant performance disparities. Furthermore, our analysis uncovers a critical "format-content tradeoff", demonstrating that increasing formatting complexity directly degrades models' omni-modal reasoning abilities. Finally, to advance the field, we curate a 54K instruction-tuning dataset, OmniCap-IF-54K and present OmniCaptioner-IF, which achieves notable improvements in both complex instruction adherence and general omni-modal captioning performance.
Multimodal large language models have made rapid progress in video understanding, yet existing benchmarks largely rely on simple prompts and provide limited evidence about whether models can satisfy explicit output constraints. We introduce VCIFBench, a benchmark for evaluating complex instruction following in video understanding. VCIFBench constructs constraint-rich instructions from both benchmark-adapted and directly video-grounded prompts, covering content, format, style, and structure requirements, and evaluates model outputs with a hybrid verification pipeline. The benchmark contains 306 satisfiable test instructions, a 540-pair DPO preference dataset, and a 30-item conflict diagnostic subset. Experiments on 10 MLLMs show that joint constraint satisfaction remains challenging. We further show that DPO training on VCIFBench data can improve instruction-following performance.