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.
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.
arXiv:2605. 18714v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unified multimodal models (UMMs) strive to consolidate visual understanding and visual generation within a single architecture.
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.
arXiv:2509. 07295v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unified multimodal models (UMMs) unify visual understanding and generation within a single architecture.
arXiv:2511. 01390v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fine-grained cross-modal alignment aims to establish precise local correspondences between vision and language, forming a cornerstone for visual question answering and related multimodal applications.
arXiv:2607. 25527v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Unifying visual understanding and generation in one model holds immense promise, but remains challenging and expensive due to heavy compute and data demands and conflicts between the visual features needed for these two capabilities.
The paper introduces Redemption Score (RS), a multi‑modal evaluation framework for image captioning that combines three complementary signals: Mutual Information Divergence for global image‑text alignment, DINO‑based perceptual similarity of cycle‑generated images for visual grounding, and LLM text embeddings for contextual similarity to human references. RS fuses these signals to provide a more holistic assessment, achieving a Kendall‑τ of 58.42 on Flickr8k and outperforming most prior methods. The framework demonstrates consistent performance across Conceptual Captions and MS COCO, offering a robust evaluation that captures both visual accuracy and text quality.