Wake up for Touch! Mask-isolated Tactile Alignment Learning in MLLMs

arXiv:2607.00302v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Touch supplies the physical grounding needed to perceive intrinsic material properties, such as friction and compliance, that vision alone often cannot resolve. Recent efforts for equipping multimodal LLMs with this tactile sense, however, expose a zero-sum trade-off: the limited parameter budget of compact models forces a choice between acquiring the new sensory modality and preserving the established vision-language reasoning. We present Splash, ...