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In this episode, we’re joined by Munawar Hayat, researcher at Qualcomm AI Research, to discuss a series of papers presented at NeurIPS 2025 focusing on multimodal and generative AI. We dive into the persistent challenge of object hallucination in Vision-Language Models (VLMs), why models often discard visual information in favor of pre-trained language priors, and how his team used attention-guided alignment to enforce better visual grounding. We also explore a novel approach to generalized contrastive learning designed to solve complex, composed retrieval tasks—such as searching via combined text and image queries—without increasing inference costs. Finally, we cover the difficulties generative models face when rendering multiple human subjects, and the new "MultiHuman Testbench" his team created to measure and mitigate issues like identity leakage and attribute blending. Throughout the discussion, we examine how these innovations align with the need for efficient, on-device AI deployment.
Qualcomm AI Research is dedicated to advancing AI to make its core capabilities — perception, reasoning, and action — ubiquitous across devices. Their work makes it possible for billions of users around the world to have AI-enhanced experiences on devices powered by Qualcomm Technologies. To learn more about what Qualcomm Technologies is up to on the research front, visit twimlai.com/qualcomm.
