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Multimodality and World Models: Methods and Applications

A special issue of Applied Sciences (ISSN 2076-3417). This special issue belongs to the section "Computing and Artificial Intelligence".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 20 November 2026 | Viewed by 6

Special Issue Editors


E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
The Institute of Trustworthy Embodied Artificial Intelligence (TEAI), Fudan University, No. 220 Handan Road, Shanghai 200433, China
Interests: computer vision; autonomous driving; embodied AI; multimodal image analysis; generative models; world models; trustworthy
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Research Center, The University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-8656, Japan
Interests: AI Computational imaging; optical imaging; computer vision; intelligent image processing; hyperspectral imaging; photometric vision; 3D reconstruction; image restoration
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
School of Electronic Engineering, Xidian University, 2nd Taibai South Road, Xi’an 710071, China
Interests: multimodal understanding; continual learning; lightweight models

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Intelligence in the real world is never built from a single signal. A robot observes motion and force; an autonomous vehicle combines cameras, LiDAR, maps, trajectories, and traffic rules; a clinical system must relate images, measurements, records, and temporal changes; a scientific model often needs to connect observations, simulations, and prior knowledge. The central challenge is therefore no longer only how to recognize patterns in one modality, but how to construct coherent, evolving, and actionable representations from many forms of data.

Multimodality and world models offer a promising route toward this goal. By learning across visual, linguistic, temporal, physical, and sensor-based information, these models may support perception, memory, prediction, generation, planning, and decision-making within a unified framework. They are especially relevant to open and dynamic scenarios where data arrive continuously, environments change over time, and reliable actions require both current understanding and future anticipation.

This Special Issue seeks papers that investigate this emerging direction from diverse perspectives. Contributions may address new architectures, learning objectives, datasets, benchmarks, evaluation protocols, simulation environments, deployment systems, or application studies. We encourage submissions on multimodal foundation models, world models, video understanding, time-series modeling, spatiotemporal reasoning, generative prediction, embodied intelligence, robotics, autonomous driving, digital twins, medical and industrial intelligence, remote sensing, scientific AI, human–AI interaction, uncertainty modeling, interpretability, safety, and trustworthy AI. Broad surveys, technical advances, and application-driven studies are all welcome, provided that they help clarify how AI systems can better learn from multiple sources of information and reason about complex real-world processes.

Dr. Xiaosong Jia
Prof. Dr. Yinqiang Zheng
Dr. Xu Yang
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Applied Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • multimodal learning
  • world models
  • foundation models
  • vision-language models
  • video analysis
  • time-series modeling
  • spatiotemporal intelligence
  • generative AI
  • embodied AI
  • trustworthy AI

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Published Papers

This special issue is now open for submission.
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