English

From Modalities to Propositions: A Language-Centric Framework for Multimodal Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence 2026-07-18 v1 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Machine Learning Multimedia

Abstract

We propose a language representation for multimodal data in which any observation, whether image, video, or text, is expressed as a bag of atomic propositions, simple statements about the entities, actions, and relations in a scene. A global semantic codebook unifies these into a shared vocabulary of canonical atomic propositions, placing every modality and observation into one interpretable space that spans fine grained facts to high level concepts and composes into richer ones. This brings interpretability with reasoning, cross-modal understanding and retrieval, and compositionality that enables complex multimodal understanding, rich data curation and complex structured retrieval. We demonstrate the framework on autonomous driving and open-world data.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.16560,
  title  = {From Modalities to Propositions: A Language-Centric Framework for Multimodal Intelligence},
  author = {Nadine Chang and Maying Shen and Shizhe Diao and Jialiang Wang and Jingde Chen and Thomas Breuel and Pavlo Molchanov and Rafid Mahmood and Jose M. Alvarez},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.16560},
  year   = {2026}
}