FLAT (Flexible‑Length Aligned Transmodal representations) is a joint multimodal pre‑training framework that learns a shared encoder for images and text, producing 1‑D continuous embeddings that can be directly used by downstream generative decoders. By combining contrastive alignment with bidirectional cross‑modal generative objectives, FLAT yields representations that are both discriminative and generative, enabling cross‑modal retrieval and generation with a single pre‑training stage. The model achieves strong performance on T2I generation (GenEval 71.1), image captioning (BLEU‑4 40.5, CIDEr 138.6), and retrieval tasks (Recall@5 86.8/75.8 on MS‑COCO, 98.3/93.6 on Flickr30K), and supports linear interpolation, latent space arithmetic, and zero‑shot composed retrieval.
Traditional multimodal representation learning and generation are two stages: a contrastive or self-supervised visual encoder is trained first, followed by a separate downstream generative model. This...
arXiv:2608. 12987v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative information retrieval (GIR) has emerged as a compelling alternative to the conventional index-retrieve-then-rank retrieval pipeline by training a generator to produce the identifiers of relevant items directly.
arXiv:2603. 22282v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present UniMotion, to our knowledge the first unified framework for simultaneous understanding and generation of human motion, natural language, and RGB images within a single architecture.
TokenSwap introduces a method to benchmark and reduce the modality gap in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) by interleaving semantically aligned images with text tokens. By transforming text-only benchmarks like MMLU into image‑interleaved versions (TokenSwap‑Bench), the authors reveal a pervasive performance drop—averaging 19.6%—across 42 MLLMs, with reasoning models showing smaller gaps. Training with TokenSwap mitigates this gap while maintaining strong text‑only and vision‑language performance.
arXiv:2508. 12466v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Traditional multimodal learning approaches rely on alignment pre-training to bridge vision and language modalities, typically by projecting visual features into discrete text token spaces using large-scale image--text data.
UniFGVC introduces a training‑free framework for few‑shot fine‑grained visual classification that reframes the task as a multimodal retrieval problem. It uses a Category‑Discriminative Visual Captioner to generate attribute‑aware textual descriptions, then matches image‑description pairs with category templates via pre‑trained encoders. Experiments on 12 datasets show that UniFGVC consistently outperforms existing CLIP‑based and fully‑supervised MLLM methods, demonstrating the effectiveness of the retrieval paradigm.
arXiv:2609.37225v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong potential for universal multimodal representation learning. However, existing methods eith...
arXiv:2605. 18714v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unified multimodal models (UMMs) strive to consolidate visual understanding and visual generation within a single architecture.
JUICE (Joint Unified multimodal modeling In Continuous Encoder spaces) is a single flow‑matching Transformer that jointly models images and text in pretrained continuous encoder spaces, allowing each modality to be generated by the same process with its own noise level. The model can perform tasks such as image generation, captioning, visual question answering, and joint generation by deciding which modalities are clean and which are generated. Experiments show that joint and conditional denoising together outperform either alone, and that JUICE achieves strong performance on GenEval, VQAv2, and visual spatial planning tasks, even enabling coupled sampling where both modalities are generated simultaneously.
arXiv:2506. 08774v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Different machine learning models can represent the same underlying concept in different ways.
Multimodal models often build on architectures designed for generative vision-language modeling, typically combining separately pretrained vision encoders with causal language models. Visual document...
The paper introduces Lens, a training‑free framework that aligns multimodal representations with the semantic perspective required by downstream tasks. Lens uses a task‑specific readout phrase to anchor the perspective and then aggregates token states after the full input, ensuring the extracted representation reflects task‑conditioned evidence integration rather than generic salient content. The method achieves a Precision@1 of 63.9 across 36 MMEB datasets, outperforming the nearest training‑free baseline by 10.2 points.