Advances in Multimodal AI: Challenges and Opportunities

A special issue of Electronics (ISSN 2079-9292). This special issue belongs to the section "Artificial Intelligence".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 15 July 2026 | Viewed by 257

Special Issue Editors


E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
School of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, China
Interests: graph neural networks; multimodal AI; salient object detection; semantic segmentation; deep learning; computer vision

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
School of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, China
Interests: multimodal learning; computer vision; edge intelligence; distributed AI

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

We invite researchers, practitioners, and industry experts to submit their original research and innovative solutions to this Special Issue, titled “Advances in Multimodal AI: Challenges and Opportunities”. This issue aims to showcase cutting-edge developments in the rapidly evolving field of multimodal artificial intelligence, with a focus on novel theories, models, algorithms, systems, and applications that integrate multiple data modalities.

As multimodal AI continues to gain prominence across natural language processing, computer vision, audio understanding, robotics, and embodied intelligence, new opportunities and challenges have emerged. These include designing unified model architectures, improving cross-modal alignment, enhancing model interpretability, ensuring robustness in real-world deployment, and establishing comprehensive evaluation benchmarks. This Special Issue seeks to explore the latest advancements, fundamental challenges, and future research directions in multimodal learning and multimodal large models.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to, the following areas:

  • Multimodal representation learning and fusion;
  • Cross-modal alignment, grounding, and semantic consistency;
  • Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and foundation models;
  • Vision–language understanding and generation;
  • Audio–visual learning, speech–vision integration, and cross-modal retrieval;
  • Multimodal reasoning, instruction following, and agent-based interactions;
  • Efficient training, optimization, and deployment of multimodal systems;
  • Safety, robustness, and bias mitigation in multimodal AI;
  • Evaluation metrics, benchmarks, and emergent capabilities;
  • Human–AI collaboration, interactive multimodal interfaces, and XR applications;
  • Applications of multimodal AI in healthcare, autonomous systems, industrial inspection, education, and other domains.

This Special Issue welcomes theoretical contributions, methodological innovations, system-level implementations, and real-world case studies that push the boundaries of multimodal AI. We look forward to hearing from you.

Dr. Gaowei Zhang
Dr. Wei Wang
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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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. Electronics 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

  • cross-modal representation learning
  • cross-modal alignment
  • real-world multimodal applications
  • multimodal reasoning
  • multimodal generation

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

19 pages, 2166 KB  
Article
DRAM: Dynamic Range Modulation for Multimodal Attribute Value Extraction on E-Commerce Product Data
by Mengyin Liu and Chao Zhu
Electronics 2026, 15(5), 969; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics15050969 - 26 Feb 2026
Viewed by 80
Abstract
With the prosperity of e-commerce applications, the web data of products are presented by multiple modalities, e.g., vision and language. For mining the product characteristics, multimodal attribute values are crucial, which are extracted from textual descriptions, assisted by helpful image regions. However, most [...] Read more.
With the prosperity of e-commerce applications, the web data of products are presented by multiple modalities, e.g., vision and language. For mining the product characteristics, multimodal attribute values are crucial, which are extracted from textual descriptions, assisted by helpful image regions. However, most previous works (1) fuse the multimodal information within a newly learned range based on co-occurrence rather than language meanings and (2) predict the outputs within a range of all attributes rather than the product-related ones. These issues yield unsatisfactory results; thus, we propose a novel approach via Dynamic Range Modulation (DRAM): (1) First, we propose an Information Range Calibration (IRC) method to dynamically fuse multimodal features of related meanings as Text-Related Embeddings (TEM) within a language range, which is calibrated from the range to fuse language features by a powerful attention mechanism of a pretrained language model. (2) Moreover, an Attribute Range Minimization (ARM) method is proposed to minimize the output attribute range based on the adaptive selection of product-related attribute prototypes. Experiments on the popular multimodal e-commerce benchmarks show that our DRAM performs well compared with previous methods. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Multimodal AI: Challenges and Opportunities)
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