Learning to See through Illumination Extremes with Event Streaming in Multimodal Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Baoheng, Liu, Jiahui, Zhao, Gui, Zhang, Weizhou, Ma, Yixuan, Jiang, Jun, Chen, Yingxian, Fok, Wilton W. T., Qi, Xiaojuan, So, Hayden Kwok-Hay
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Zhang, Baoheng
Liu, Jiahui
Zhao, Gui
Zhang, Weizhou
Ma, Yixuan
Jiang, Jun
Chen, Yingxian
Fok, Wilton W. T.
Qi, Xiaojuan
So, Hayden Kwok-Hay
author_facet Zhang, Baoheng
Liu, Jiahui
Zhao, Gui
Zhang, Weizhou
Ma, Yixuan
Jiang, Jun
Chen, Yingxian
Fok, Wilton W. T.
Qi, Xiaojuan
So, Hayden Kwok-Hay
contents Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) perform strong vision-language reasoning under standard conditions but fail in extreme illumination, where RGB inputs lose irrevocable structure and semantics. We propose Event-MLLM, an event-enhanced model that performs all-light visual reasoning by dynamically fusing event streams with RGB frames. Two key components drive our approach: an Illumination Indicator - a learnable signal derived from a DINOv2 branch that represents exposure degradation and adaptively modulates event-RGB fusion - and an Illumination Correction Loss that aligns fused features with non-degraded (normal-light) semantics in the latent space, compensating for information lost in extreme lighting. We curate the first multi-illumination event-instruction corpus for MLLMs, with 2,241 event-RGB samples (around 6 QA pairs each) across diverse scenes and 17 brightness rates (0.05x - 20x), plus an instruct-following benchmark for reasoning, counting, and fine-grained recognition under extreme lighting. Experiments show that Event-MLLM markedly outperforms general-purpose, illumination-adaptive, and event-only baselines, setting a new state of the art in robust multimodal perception and reasoning under challenging illumination.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_27558
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning to See through Illumination Extremes with Event Streaming in Multimodal Large Language Models
Zhang, Baoheng
Liu, Jiahui
Zhao, Gui
Zhang, Weizhou
Ma, Yixuan
Jiang, Jun
Chen, Yingxian
Fok, Wilton W. T.
Qi, Xiaojuan
So, Hayden Kwok-Hay
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) perform strong vision-language reasoning under standard conditions but fail in extreme illumination, where RGB inputs lose irrevocable structure and semantics. We propose Event-MLLM, an event-enhanced model that performs all-light visual reasoning by dynamically fusing event streams with RGB frames. Two key components drive our approach: an Illumination Indicator - a learnable signal derived from a DINOv2 branch that represents exposure degradation and adaptively modulates event-RGB fusion - and an Illumination Correction Loss that aligns fused features with non-degraded (normal-light) semantics in the latent space, compensating for information lost in extreme lighting. We curate the first multi-illumination event-instruction corpus for MLLMs, with 2,241 event-RGB samples (around 6 QA pairs each) across diverse scenes and 17 brightness rates (0.05x - 20x), plus an instruct-following benchmark for reasoning, counting, and fine-grained recognition under extreme lighting. Experiments show that Event-MLLM markedly outperforms general-purpose, illumination-adaptive, and event-only baselines, setting a new state of the art in robust multimodal perception and reasoning under challenging illumination.
title Learning to See through Illumination Extremes with Event Streaming in Multimodal Large Language Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.27558