Echocardiography analysis demands a dual capability: rigorous quantitative keyframe localization for evidence verification and comprehensive qualitative synthesis for diagnostic reporting. However, current Multi-Modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) struggle to meet these clinical requirements due to a misalignment with diagnostic workflows, a scarcity of video instruction data, and the critical challenge of cyclic temporal ambiguity—where the repetitive nature of cardiac cycles renders standard single-frame supervision ill-posed. To bridge this gap, we introduce EchoMLLM, a unified framework designed for real-world echocardiography video understanding. First, we align model capabilities with clinical needs by defining two fine-grained tasks: cycle- and pathology-conditioned keyframe grounding and video report generation. To facilitate this, we curate EchoMM-120k, a large-scale instruction dataset specifically constructed to support temporal localization and professional reporting. Furthermore, to resolve the cyclic ambiguity, we propose a multi-stage training paradigm incorporating a novel cycle-aware Reinforcement Learning (RL) strategy. By prioritizing logical consistency over rigid index matching, our approach moves beyond rote memorization to elicit invariant reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EchoMLLM reduces temporal grounding errors by up to 76% and improves report generation quality by 65% over its backbone, achieving state-of-the-art performance against both generalist and medical baselines.

Open-source LLMs provide a flexible alternative to closed-source models for Text-to-SQL but still struggle with complex queries. Finetuning with chain-of-thought (CoT) data improves reasoning, yet standard datasets lack CoT annotations, requiring synthetic generation. Existing synthesis methods only verify the final answer, allowing flawed reasoning steps to corrupt the training data. We propose VCoT-SQL, a framework that improves Text-to-SQL generation through intermediate-step-validated CoT supervision and a dedicated SQL validator, which enables small open-source models to outperform frontier closed-source models. VCoT-SQL trains two complementary models on curated reasoning traces: an SQL generator using clause-level CoT templates where reasoning steps are verified via execution and schema alignment checks, and an SQL validator using diagnostic CoT templates to detect syntactic, semantic, and type-level errors. We further design a hierarchical schema filtering pipeline that integrates and refines complementary retrieval strategies to distill relevant database elements. VCoT-SQL achieves 66.82% execution accuracy on challenging dataset BIRD dev and 86.8% on Spider test, improving the base 7B model by 7% on BIRD. Notably, our CoT synthesis relies on 7B models yet outperforms methods that use 72B-scale or even proprietary closed-source teachers for data generation, demonstrating that rigorous step-level validation can be more effective than scaling up teacher model size. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/INTREBID/VCoT-SQL.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) incur high computational costs from redundant visual tokens. Although training-free attention-based multi-layer pruning in the vision encoder has been explored as an effective strategy, we find that pruning in shallow layers consistently degrades performance. We aim to understand this problem and seek a solution. By analyzing attention patterns across network depth, we find that shallow layers primarily function as edge detectors with chaotic attention maps, while deeper layers transition through local subject recognition and unstable semantic aggregation. To address misalignment between pruning strategies and network stages, we propose STD, a hierarchical token pruning framework that adapts token selection mechanisms to the functional role of each stage. STD employs High-Frequency Spectral Analysis in shallow layers to deterministically preserve structural edges, uses Gaussian-Smoothed Attention in intermediate layers to maintain spatial coherence, and introduces a Stability-Adaptive Trigger in deep layers to execute pruning only during semantically stable phases. Extensive experiments show that STD outperforms state-of-the-art pruning methods by 1.1% on LLaVA-1.5-7B with 88.9% token reduction, while being plug-and-play and highly effective when combined with other methods, and by 2.1% on LLaVA-NeXT-7B with 94.4% reduction, delivering a 3.9× speed-up in the prefilling stage. Our code will be released at https://github.com/Twilight03/STD.

The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) has saturated social media platforms with hyper-realistic posts, rendering traditional detection methods that rely on low-level artifacts or unimodal statistics increasingly ineffective. In this work, we identify a fundamental semantic distinction: humans tend to complement visual content with additional context, while LLMs predominantly describe the visual information. To capture this, UMPIRE employs an orthogonal semantic decomposition mechanism that disentangles textual embeddings into redundant and complementary components. An adaptive gating module dynamically weighs these components to reflect diverse communicative styles. To enforce the desired geometric structure, we introduce a latent contrastive redundancy regularization loss that encourages LLM-generated content to exhibit high semantic redundancy, while human-written content emphasizes complementarity. Experimental results demonstrate that UMPIRE significantly outperforms state-of-the-art detection methods across multiple datasets, achieving up to a 5.38% improvement in accuracy.

The recent advancement of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has significantly improved their fine-grained perception of single images and general comprehension across multiple images. However, existing MLLMs still face challenges in achieving precise grounding in complex multi-image scenarios. To address this, we first explore a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) framework that integrates single-image grounding with multi-image comprehension. While partially effective, it remains unstable and struggles to capture abstract visual information due to its non-end-to-end nature. Therefore, we introduce Migician, the first multi-image grounding model capable of performing free-form and accurate grounding across multiple images. To support this, we present the MGrounding-630k dataset, which comprises data for several multi-image grounding tasks derived from existing datasets, along with newly generated free-form grounding instruction-following data. Furthermore, we propose MIG-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed for evaluating multi-image grounding capabilities. Experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves significantly superior multi-image grounding capabilities, outperforming the best existing MLLMs by 24.94% and even surpassing much larger 70B models. Our code, model, dataset, and benchmark are fully open-sourced at https://migician-vg.github.io/.