Jason Armitage, Ioannis Tsochantaridis, Linda Mazzone +3cs.AI
We introduce MAP, the first benchmark to evaluate multimodal AI systems as assistants for users with accessibility requirements when planning visits to places in the real world. In our evaluation, systems are presented with requests to verify or recommend a point of interest meeting an accessibility requirement. MAP contains two novel assessments: Claim verification for accessibility planning assesses if information on places and stated accessibility features is supported and identifies places that satisfy requested accessibility features. Visual evidence retrieval for accessibility planning checks if a multimodal AI system can select visual evidence for the requested place and accessibility feature. Our methodology supports comparison of AI systems in a setting where place information and accessibility information can change over time by evaluating systems and refreshing ground truth data at scheduled times. The benchmark is based on automatic rating and human rating for a proportion of responses.
Multimodal speculative decoding accelerates vision-language models by allowing a lightweight draft model to propose candidate tokens for parallel verification by a larger target model. Existing methods typically condition the drafter on a fixed visual interface, such as a predefined visual-token budget or a static compressed representation. However, our controlled visual-budget analysis shows that visual demand varies substantially across tasks and decoding stages, which means more visual input is not always beneficial. Actually, insufficient evidence may weaken visual grounding, while excessive context adds overhead and may disrupt drafting. We propose FOVEA (Focused On-demand Visual Evidence Adaptation), a cache-friendly approach that builds a reusable visual memory and dynamically retrieves a bounded subset for a draft state. A cumulative-mass rule determines both how many and which entries are selected. The selected entries are aggregated into a visual readout and fused with the current draft hidden state through a lightweight gated residual correction. Rather than inserting visual tokens into the autoregressive context, the correction modifies only the representation passed to the language-model head. Experiments across multiple vision-language backbones and multimodal benchmarks show that FOVEA improves draft acceptance and end-to-end decoding speed, achieving up to $2.13\times$ speedup over autoregressive decoding. These results demonstrate that state-conditioned evidence retrieval is an effective alternative to reusing a fixed visual representation throughout multimodal generation.
Long-term memory is essential for LVLM agents to maintain consistency and integrate information across extended multimodal interactions. Existing agent memory systems, however, often reduce visual experiences into textual summaries or rely on static retrieve-then-reason pipelines, which are inefficient at query time and brittle when questions require image-text binding, temporal updates, or visual details. We propose Prospective Multimodal Memory Compilation, a framework that shifts part of the memory reasoning process from query time to memory consolidation time. Given accumulated multimodal interactions, a Questioner predicts future question candidates, a Planner compiles question-conditioned multimodal memory programs, and a Doubter verifies whether the planned evidence path can support the predicted answer. The verified question-program pairs form a structured question bank for efficient query-time routing and evidence retrieval. Experiments on multimodal long-term memory benchmarks show that our method improves answer quality and visual evidence recall while reducing query-time token and latency costs. Extensive ablations analyze the effects of self-feedback, dynamic planning, raw-image access, and question bank coverage.