arXiv:2609.01147v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Text-rich visual inputs require models that can read, retrieve, and compress language directly in pixel space, yet existing pixel-text encoders strug...
By Chaohao Yuan, Ruifeng Yuan, Zhuoxu Huang, Yu Rong, Hong Cheng, Hou Pong Chan, Chenghao Xiao
MIXAR is the first generative multilingual pixel‑based language model, pretrained on eight high‑resource languages across Latin and CJK scripts with up to 0.5 B parameters. It replaces unstable adversarial training with a GRPO‑based reinforcement‑learning stage, improving free‑generation accuracy by up to 2.3× on multilingual benchmarks. MIXAR generalizes better to unseen low‑resource languages than a tokenizer‑based model trained on the same corpus, matches tokenizer models on discriminative tasks, and resists orthographic attacks more gracefully.
By Chen Hu, Yintao Tai, Antonio Vergari, Frank Keller, Alessandro Suglia
The paper examines OCR adaptation for low‑resource languages, noting that fine‑tuning often hits a performance ceiling in data‑scarce settings. It identifies that lower layers of language‑specific models learn redundant features while higher layers capture script nuances, leading to a structural inefficiency. To address this, the authors propose PSMC, a framework that pre‑trains a base model, specializes it per language, merges the experts via task arithmetic, and co‑trains a unified multilingual backbone, achieving about a 2% improvement in Word Recognition Rate across 10 Indian scripts without adding parameters.
By Achyuth P, Kahaan Shah, Chetan Arora
arXiv:2608. 11002v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Text-to-image (T2I) generation has achieved remarkable progress in recent years.
By Sicheng Zhang, Zhonghao Yan, Binzhu Xie, Shi Qiu, Muzammal Naseer, Naveed Akhtar, Mubarak Shah
The paper introduces PuMVR, a benchmark of 1,000 Punjabi image‑text pairs spanning three scripts—Gurmukhi, Shahmukhi, and Roman—to evaluate Vision‑Language Models (VLMs). Testing ten state‑of‑the‑art VLMs reveals a significant Script Gap: models perform well in one script but poorly in another, with accuracy differences up to 16%. The authors propose the Script Consistency Rate (SCR) as a new metric, noting it can be as low as 24.8% on their benchmark, and argue that current multilingual VLMs are not truly multi‑script.
By Prabhjot Singh, Bhushan Pawar, Madhu Reddiboina, Rajvee Sheth
arXiv:2610.19443v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Native multimodal pre-training trains a single model from scratch on text and multimodal data, enabling it to understand both language and visual input...
By Haoyuan Wu, Aoqi Wu, Jiani Hu, Bei Yu
arXiv:2601. 09566v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this work, we study whether rendering Chinese characters as visual glyph images, rather than discrete token IDs as mainstream LLMs do, providing an inductive bias for character-level language modeling.
By Shuyang Xiang, Hao Guan
ASCIIBench is a new benchmark that evaluates large language models on generating and classifying ASCII-text images, using a dataset of 5,315 labeled ASCII images. The authors also release a fine‑tuned CLIP model adapted to capture ASCII structure for evaluation. Their analysis shows that cosine similarity on CLIP embeddings fails to separate most categories, indicating a representation bottleneck rather than generational variance.
By Kerry Luo, Michael Fu, Joshua Peguero, Husnain Malik, Anvay Patil, Joyce Lin, Megan Van Overborg, Ryan Sarmiento, Kevin Zhu
arXiv:2607. 03994v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern language models generally represent text as sequences of discrete token embeddings, an assumption deeply rooted in current practice but rarely questioned.
By Shuyang Xiang, Hao Guan
The paper introduces Vision-Free Adaptation (VFA), a method that separates multilingual language enhancement from visual alignment in multimodal large language models. VFA fine‑tunes a base LLM on multilingual text to create a multilingual task vector, which is then merged with the vision‑aligned task vector of an existing MLLM. Experiments on five MLLMs and six multilingual benchmarks show consistent gains while preserving multimodal and text‑only performance, and using less than 2% of text data narrows the performance gap to fully multimodal‑trained models.
By Yixia Li, Yaqing Shi, Zhiwen Ruan, Dongdong Zhang, Lingjie Jiang, Shaohan Huang, Yun Chen, Guanhua Chen, Furu Wei
arXiv:2607. 26596v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities by integrating visual and textual understanding within a unified transformer architecture.
By Mingkuan Feng, Zhengqi Wen, Jianhua Tao
LensVLM is an inference framework and post‑training recipe that lets Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) process compressed images of text by selectively expanding only the relevant parts back to full resolution. Using Qwen3.5‑9B‑Base, LensVLM achieves accuracy comparable to full‑text models at 4.3× compression and outperforms other compression baselines up to 10.1× across seven text QA benchmarks, while also improving performance on multimodal document and code tasks as compression increases.
By Roy Xie, Dan Friedman, Donghan Yu, Bowen Pan, Christopher Fifty, Jang-Hyun Kim, Xianzhi Du, Zhe Gan, Vivek Rathod, Bhuwan Dhingra