Le Thien Phuc Nguyen

Le Thien Phuc Nguyen, Zhuoran Yu, Samuel Low Yu Hang et al.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are expected to jointly interpret vision, audio, and language, yet existing video benchmarks rarely assess fine-grained reasoning about human speech. Many tasks remain visually solvable or only coarsely evaluate speech, offering limited insight into whether models can align who speaks, what is said, and when it occurs. We introduce AV-SpeakerBench, a curated benchmark of 3,212 multiple-choice questions focused on speaker-centric audiovisual reasoning in real-world videos. It features: (1) a speaker-centered formulation that treats speakers-not scenes-as the core reasoning unit; (2) fusion-grounded question design embedding audiovisual dependencies into question semantics; and (3) expert-curated annotations ensuring temporal precision and cross-modal validity. Comprehensive evaluations show that the Gemini family consistently outperforms open-source systems, with Gemini 2.5 Pro achieving the best results. Among open models, Qwen3-Omni-30B approaches Gemini 2.0 Flash but remains far behind Gemini 2.5 Pro, primarily due to weaker audiovisual fusion rather than visual perception. We believe AV-SpeakerBench establishes a rigorous foundation for advancing fine-grained audiovisual reasoning in future multimodal systems.

Yen-Linh Vu, Dinh-Thang Duong, Truong-Binh Duong et al.

Recent progress has been made in region-aware vision-language modeling, particularly with the emergence of the Describe Anything Model (DAM). DAM is capable of generating detailed descriptions of any specific image areas or objects without the need for additional localized image-text alignment supervision. We hypothesize that such region-level descriptive capability is beneficial for the task of Visual Question Answering (VQA), especially in challenging scenarios involving images with dense text. In such settings, the fine-grained extraction of textual information is crucial to producing correct answers. Motivated by this, we introduce DAM-QA, a framework with a tailored evaluation protocol, developed to investigate and harness the region-aware capabilities from DAM for the text-rich VQA problem that requires reasoning over text-based information within images. DAM-QA incorporates a mechanism that aggregates answers from multiple regional views of image content, enabling more effective identification of evidence that may be tied to text-related elements. Experiments on six VQA benchmarks show that our approach consistently outperforms the baseline DAM, with a notable 7+ point gain on DocVQA. DAM-QA also achieves the best overall performance among region-aware models with fewer parameters, significantly narrowing the gap with strong generalist VLMs. These results highlight the potential of DAM-like models for text-rich and broader VQA tasks when paired with efficient usage and integration strategies. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Linvyl/DAM-QA.git.

Le Thien Phuc Nguyen, Zhuoran Yu, Yong Jae Lee

Active Speaker Detection (ASD) aims to identify speaking individuals in complex visual scenes. While humans can easily detect speech by matching lip movements to audio, current ASD models struggle to establish this correspondence, often misclassifying non-speaking instances when audio and lip movements are unsynchronized. To address this limitation, we propose Lip landmark Assisted Speaker dEtection for Robustness (LASER). Unlike models that rely solely on facial frames, LASER explicitly focuses on lip movements by integrating lip landmarks in training. Specifically, given a face track, LASER extracts frame-level visual features and the 2D coordinates of lip landmarks using a lightweight detector. These coordinates are encoded into dense feature maps, providing spatial and structural information on lip positions. Recognizing that landmark detectors may sometimes fail under challenging conditions (e.g., low resolution, occlusions, extreme angles), we incorporate an auxiliary consistency loss to align predictions from both lip-aware and face-only features, ensuring reliable performance even when lip data is absent. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets show that LASER outperforms state-of-the-art models, especially in scenarios with desynchronized audio and visuals, demonstrating robust performance in real-world video contexts. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/plnguyen2908/LASER_ASD}.

Le Thien Phuc Nguyen, Zhuoran Yu, Khoa Quang Nhat Cao et al.

We present UniTalk, a novel dataset specifically designed for the task of active speaker detection, emphasizing challenging scenarios to enhance model generalization. Unlike previously established benchmarks such as AVA, which predominantly features old movies and thus exhibits significant domain gaps, UniTalk focuses explicitly on diverse and difficult real-world conditions. These include underrepresented languages, noisy backgrounds, and crowded scenes - such as multiple visible speakers speaking concurrently or in overlapping turns. It contains over 44.5 hours of video with frame-level active speaker annotations across 48,693 speaking identities, and spans a broad range of video types that reflect real-world conditions. Through rigorous evaluation, we show that state-of-the-art models, while achieving nearly perfect scores on AVA, fail to reach saturation on UniTalk, suggesting that the ASD task remains far from solved under realistic conditions. Nevertheless, models trained on UniTalk demonstrate stronger generalization to modern "in-the-wild" datasets like Talkies and ASW, as well as to AVA. UniTalk thus establishes a new benchmark for active speaker detection, providing researchers with a valuable resource for developing and evaluating versatile and resilient models. Dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/plnguyen2908/UniTalk-ASD Code: https://github.com/plnguyen2908/UniTalk-ASD-code

Ngoc Bui Lam Quang, Nam Le Nguyen Binh, Thanh-Huy Nguyen et al.

Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) is the leading approach for whole slide image (WSI) classification, enabling efficient analysis of gigapixel pathology slides. Recent work has introduced vision-language models (VLMs) into MIL pipelines to incorporate medical knowledge through text-based class descriptions rather than simple class names. However, when these methods rely on large language models (LLMs) to generate clinical descriptions or use fixed-length prompts to represent complex pathology concepts, the limited token capacity of VLMs often constrains the expressiveness and richness of the encoded class information. Additionally, descriptions generated solely by LLMs may lack domain grounding and fine-grained medical specificity, leading to suboptimal alignment with visual features. To address these challenges, we propose a vision-language MIL framework with two key contributions: (1) A grounded multi-agent description generation system that leverages curated pathology textbooks and agent specialization (e.g., morphology, spatial context) to produce accurate and diverse clinical descriptions; (2) A text encoding strategy using a list of descriptions rather than a single prompt, capturing fine-grained and complementary clinical signals for better alignment with visual features. Integrated into a VLM-MIL pipeline, our approach shows improved performance over single-prompt class baselines and achieves results comparable to state-of-the-art models, as demonstrated on renal and lung cancer datasets.