Everything Can Be Described in Words: A Simple Unified Multi-Modal Framework with Semantic and Temporal Alignment

Abstract: While multi-modal learning has advanced significantly, current approaches often create inconsistencies in representation and reasoning of different modalities. We propose UMaT, a theoretically-grounded framework that unifies visual and auditory inputs as structured text for LLMs, addressing semantic alignment, temporal synchronization, and efficient sparse information retrieval. It significantly improves state-of-the-art Long Video Question Answering accuracy (up to 13.7%, and 16.9% on long videos) via redundancy minimization and structured textual representation for unified multi-modal reasoning