arXiv Computer Vision

Let ViT Speak: Generative Language-Image Pre-training

arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 19

A Language-Informed Loss for Visual Generation

The paper introduces LILIE, a Language‑Informed and Lossless Image Encoder that transforms images via a normalizing flow transformer, enabling a vision‑language model to recover captions from noised features. By training JiT models with a language‑informed loss derived from LILIE, the authors achieve a 14‑point reduction in gFD on the GPIC dataset compared to a pixel‑only baseline. The code, encoders, and generative models are publicly released at https://suchiragarwal.com/lilie.

By Suchir Agarwal, Keshigeyan Chandrasegaran, Ziyu Chen, Kyle Sargent, Juan Carlos Niebles, Li Fei-Fei, Jiajun Wu
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 24

VIVAS: Vitalizing Visual Perception in VLM Pre-training via Vision-language Unified Autoregressive Supervision

VIVAS is a new Vision‑Language Model pre‑training framework that addresses the lack of fine‑grained visual perception in existing VLMs. It introduces a unified token space and a dense‑structural‑semantic vision tokenizer that expands the textual vocabulary with visual tokens, enabling vision‑language unified autoregressive supervision over both visual details and linguistic content. Trained on 12.4 T tokens, VIVAS achieves state‑of‑the‑art results on 7 tasks and 39 multimodal benchmarks.

By Zhehan Kan, Yubo Zhu, Xinghua Jiang, Zhixiang Wei, Shifeng Liu, Wei Tong, Sheng Zhong, Qingmin Liao, Wenming Yang, Xin Li, Yinsong Liu, Deqiang Jiang, Xing Sun
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Visual Information-Guided Parallel Decoding for Diffusion Multimodal Large Language Models

Visual Information-Guided Parallel Decoding for Diffusion Multimodal Large Language Models introduces the VIG‑Sampler, a method that prioritizes tokens for decoding based on their attention to image tokens and penalizes redundancy in image‑attention distributions. The approach aims to improve the quality of multimodal generation by selecting more informative tokens during diffusion decoding. Experiments on seven captioning and VQA benchmarks with three open‑source dMLLMs show that VIG‑Sampler outperforms the Info‑Gain Sampler by an average of 19.3 CIDEr points and achieves better COCO Caption results using only half as many decoding steps.

By Insu Lee, Wooje Park, Wonseok Shin, Jinwoo Son, Byonghyo Shim
arXiv AI
Jul 29

Argus-Unified: Towards A Compact and Economical Unified Model for Image Understanding and Generation

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.

By Weiming Zhuang, Jiabo Huang, Jingtao Li, Zhizhong Li, Chen Chen, Sina Sajadmanesh, Lingjuan Lyu
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 12

TokenSwap: Benchmarking and Reducing the Modality Gap in Multimodal LLMs

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.

By Andong Hua, Colton Bishop, Igor Mordatch, Arian Hosseini, Jindong Gu, Aleksandra Faust, Rebecca Roelofs, Yao Qin
arXiv AI
Jun 16

Token Reduction Should Go Beyond Efficiency in Generative Models -- From Vision, Language to Multimodality

arXiv:2505. 18227v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In Transformer architectures, tokens\textemdash discrete units derived from raw data\textemdash are formed by segmenting inputs into fixed-length chunks.

By Zhenglun Kong, Yize Li, Fanhu Zeng, Lei Xin, Shvat Messica, Xue Lin, Pu Zhao, Manolis Kellis, Hao Tang, Marinka Zitnik
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 8

Studying Image Tokenizers as Visual Languages in Unified Multimodal Models

The paper investigates image tokenizers as the visual language of unified multimodal models by creating a controlled autoregressive testbed that tracks task‑specific validation losses during multimodal continual pretraining across text, image, text‑to‑image, and image‑to‑text predictions. It shows that losses must be analyzed by task, that the loss–performance relationship varies with the token space, and that better reconstruction does not always lead to stronger downstream performance. The study also demonstrates how tokenizer design choices—such as discriminator use, semantic supervision, and vocabulary size—affect joint modeling and downstream results.