Erkut Erdem

Mustafa Dogan, Ilker Kesen, Iacer Calixto et al.

As multimodal large language models (MLLMs) advance in handling interleaved image-text data, assessing their few-shot learning capabilities remains an open challenge. In this paper, we introduce FewMMBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate MLLMs under few-shot conditions, with a focus on In-Context Learning (ICL) and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting. Covering a diverse suite of multimodal understanding tasks, from attribute recognition to temporal reasoning, FewMMBench enables systematic analysis across task types, model families, and prompting strategies. We evaluate 26 open-weight MLLMs from six model families across zero-shot, few-shot, and CoT-augmented few-shot settings. Our findings reveal that instruction-tuned models exhibit strong zero-shot performance but benefit minimally, or even regress, with additional demonstrations or CoT reasoning. Retrieval-based demonstrations and increased context size also yield limited gains. These results highlight FewMMBench as a rigorous testbed for diagnosing and advancing few-shot capabilities in multimodal LLMs. The data is available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/mustafaa/FewMMBench

Mustafa Dogan, Ilker Kesen, Iacer Calixto et al.

The linguistic capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are critical for their effective application across diverse tasks. This study aims to evaluate the performance of MLLMs on the VALSE benchmark, focusing on the efficacy of few-shot In-Context Learning (ICL), and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting. We conducted a comprehensive assessment of state-of-the-art MLLMs, varying in model size and pretraining datasets. The experimental results reveal that ICL and CoT prompting significantly boost model performance, particularly in tasks requiring complex reasoning and contextual understanding. Models pretrained on captioning datasets show superior zero-shot performance, while those trained on interleaved image-text data benefit from few-shot learning. Our findings provide valuable insights into optimizing MLLMs for better grounding of language in visual contexts, highlighting the importance of the composition of pretraining data and the potential of few-shot learning strategies to improve the reasoning abilities of MLLMs.

Abdul Basit Anees, Ahmet Canberk Baykal, Muhammed Burak Kizil et al.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), particularly StyleGAN and its variants, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in generating highly realistic images. Despite their success, adapting these models to diverse tasks such as domain adaptation, reference-guided synthesis, and text-guided manipulation with limited training data remains challenging. Towards this end, in this study, we present a novel framework that significantly extends the capabilities of a pre-trained StyleGAN by integrating CLIP space via hypernetworks. This integration allows dynamic adaptation of StyleGAN to new domains defined by reference images or textual descriptions. Additionally, we introduce a CLIP-guided discriminator that enhances the alignment between generated images and target domains, ensuring superior image quality. Our approach demonstrates unprecedented flexibility, enabling text-guided image manipulation without the need for text-specific training data and facilitating seamless style transfer. Comprehensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations confirm the robustness and superior performance of our framework compared to existing methods.

Enes Sanli, Baris Sarper Tezcan, Aykut Erdem et al.

Recent progress in text-to-video (T2V) generation has enabled the synthesis of visually compelling and temporally coherent videos from natural language. However, these models often fall short in basic physical commonsense, producing outputs that violate intuitive expectations around causality, object behavior, and tool use. Addressing this gap, we present PhysVidBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate the physical reasoning capabilities of T2V systems. The benchmark includes 383 carefully curated prompts, emphasizing tool use, material properties, and procedural interactions, and domains where physical plausibility is crucial. For each prompt, we generate videos using diverse state-of-the-art models and adopt a three-stage evaluation pipeline: (1) formulate grounded physics questions from the prompt, (2) caption the generated video with a vision-language model, and (3) task a language model to answer several physics-involved questions using only the caption. This indirect strategy circumvents common hallucination issues in direct video-based evaluation. By highlighting affordances and tool-mediated actions, areas overlooked in current T2V evaluations, PhysVidBench provides a structured, interpretable framework for assessing physical commonsense in generative video models.

Enes Karanfil, Nevrez Imamoglu, Erkut Erdem et al.

Scene understanding in remote sensing often faces challenges in generating accurate representations for complex environments such as various land use areas or coastal regions, which may also include snow, clouds, or haze. To address this, we present a vision-language framework named Spectral LLaVA, which integrates multispectral data with vision-language alignment techniques to enhance scene representation and description. Using the BigEarthNet v2 dataset from Sentinel-2, we establish a baseline with RGB-based scene descriptions and further demonstrate substantial improvements through the incorporation of multispectral information. Our framework optimizes a lightweight linear projection layer for alignment while keeping the vision backbone of SpectralGPT frozen. Our experiments encompass scene classification using linear probing and language modeling for jointly performing scene classification and description generation. Our results highlight Spectral LLaVA's ability to produce detailed and accurate descriptions, particularly for scenarios where RGB data alone proves inadequate, while also enhancing classification performance by refining SpectralGPT features into semantically meaningful representations.

Yigit Ekin, Ahmet Burak Yildirim, Erdem Eren Caglar et al.

Advanced image editing techniques, particularly inpainting, are essential for seamlessly removing unwanted elements while preserving visual integrity. Traditional GAN-based methods have achieved notable success, but recent advancements in diffusion models have produced superior results due to their training on large-scale datasets, enabling the generation of remarkably realistic inpainted images. Despite their strengths, diffusion models often struggle with object removal tasks without explicit guidance, leading to unintended hallucinations of the removed object. To address this issue, we introduce CLIPAway, a novel approach leveraging CLIP embeddings to focus on background regions while excluding foreground elements. CLIPAway enhances inpainting accuracy and quality by identifying embeddings that prioritize the background, thus achieving seamless object removal. Unlike other methods that rely on specialized training datasets or costly manual annotations, CLIPAway provides a flexible, plug-and-play solution compatible with various diffusion-based inpainting techniques.

Ahmet E. Tekden, Aykut Erdem, Erkut Erdem et al.

Pushing is an essential non-prehensile manipulation skill used for tasks ranging from pre-grasp manipulation to scene rearrangement, reasoning about object relations in the scene, and thus pushing actions have been widely studied in robotics. The effective use of pushing actions often requires an understanding of the dynamics of the manipulated objects and adaptation to the discrepancies between prediction and reality. For this reason, effect prediction and parameter estimation with pushing actions have been heavily investigated in the literature. However, current approaches are limited because they either model systems with a fixed number of objects or use image-based representations whose outputs are not very interpretable and quickly accumulate errors. In this paper, we propose a graph neural network based framework for effect prediction and parameter estimation of pushing actions by modeling object relations based on contacts or articulations. Our framework is validated both in real and simulated environments containing different shaped multi-part objects connected via different types of joints and objects with different masses, and it outperforms image-based representations on physics prediction. Our approach enables the robot to predict and adapt the effect of a pushing action as it observes the scene. It can also be used for tool manipulation with never-seen tools. Further, we demonstrate 6D effect prediction in the lever-up action in the context of robot-based hard-disk disassembly.