arXiv Computation and Language

PixelBench: Can LLMs Understand and Generate Images Pixel by Pixel?

PixelBench is a benchmark that evaluates large language models on their ability to generate and understand images pixel by pixel, without relying on learned image tokenizers or decoders. The benchmark includes text-to-pixel (T2P) and image-to-pixel (I2P) generation tasks across multiple resolutions, as well as a pixel-understanding evaluation. Models produce an RGB palette followed by a grid of indices that map each pixel to a palette color, and the study shows that strong models can generate recognizable images from text and outperform specialized pixelization algorithms at low resolutions, with performance correlating with pixel-understanding ability and improving up to a point before declining at high resolutions. Additionally, Pixel Reconstruction Tuning (PRT) augments visual instruction tuning with caption‑palette‑grid trajectories, and post‑training Molmo2‑4B with PRT data improves performance on 16 visual‑centric benchmarks, demonstrating the utility of explicit pixel reconstruction as auxiliary supervision.

arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 28

Know, then Draw: A New Learning Paradigm for Visual Generation

The paper introduces a new learning paradigm for visual generation that separates knowledge acquisition and high-fidelity rendering. Autoregressive pretraining is used to acquire semantic knowledge, while diffusion models are employed afterward for detailed image synthesis. The authors demonstrate that this approach improves learning efficiency and final generation quality, and they provide compute‑optimal scaling laws that enable training a 3B‑parameter text‑to‑image model with only 6,600 H100 GPU‑hours, achieving state‑of‑the‑art scores on GenEval and DPG‑Bench.

By Yucheng Mao, Chongjian Ge, Zhuowen Tu, Hao Tan, Hanwen Jiang
arXiv AI
Jun 6

Image Generators are Generalist Vision Learners

arXiv:2604. 20329v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent works show that image and video generators exhibit zero-shot visual understanding behaviors, in a way reminiscent of how LLMs develop emergent capabilities of language understanding and reasoning from generative pretraining.

By Valentin Gabeur, Shangbang Long, Songyou Peng, Paul Voigtlaender, Shuyang Sun, Yanan Bao, Karen Truong, Zhicheng Wang, Wenlei Zhou, Jonathan T. Barron, Kyle Genova, Nithish Kannen, Sherry Ben, Yandong Li, Mandy Guo, Suhas Yogin, Yiming Gu, Huizhong Chen, Oliver Wang, Saining Xie, Howard Zhou, Kaiming He, Thomas Funkhouser, Jean-Baptiste Alayrac, Radu Soricut
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 7

From RGB Generation to Dense Field Readout: Pixel-Space Dense Prediction with Text-to-Image Models

Large-scale text-to-image models are attractive backbones for dense prediction because RGB generation pretraining learns rich semantic, structural, and geometric priors. Existing generative and editing approaches reuse these priors by casting dense prediction as target generation: annotations such as depth, normals, alpha mattes, masks, and heatmaps are encoded into an RGB-trained VAE latent space and decoded back as image-like targets.

arXiv AI
Aug 28

PACE: A Unified Condense-and-Extract Paradigm for Fast VLM Inference

PACE introduces a training‑free Condense‑and‑Extract framework that speeds up Vision‑Language Model inference by first adaptively downsampling visual inputs before encoding and then selectively retaining essential tokens during decoding. The Adaptive Pixel Compressor (APC) reduces encoder workload while preserving global context, and the Dynamic Dual‑Attention Extractor (DDAE) keeps task‑critical details by fusing visual and language signals. Applied to Qwen2.5‑VL‑7B, PACE maintains 93.8% of performance using only 10% of visual tokens, achieving a 3.1× speedup in time to first token.

By Junjie Liu, Shengyuan Ye, Xu Chen
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 9

LUMI: Tokenizer-Agnostic LLM-Based Lossless Image Compression

Large language model (LLM)-based lossless image compression methods typically represent pixel data through the native text interface of a pretrained model, converting pixel values into token sequences that the LLM processes through its vocabulary head. This design shows that pretrained language models can provide probability estimates for image coding, but it also couples compression to tokenizer behavior, vocabulary-specific numeric tokens, and model-family-specific adaptation.

arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 24

Exploring the Performance Frontier of Compact Unified Image Generation Models

Swift-Image is a compact unified model that performs text-to-image generation, single-image editing, and multi-image editing using a 6B parameter DiT architecture. It employs a progressive training pipeline, parallel expert reinforcement learning, and multi-teacher distillation to balance diverse objectives, while a Prompt Enhancer decouples high-level reasoning from pixel-level rendering. After training, structural pruning and few-step distillation produce efficient 3B and accelerated variants that maintain near‑lossless performance and improve editing efficiency.

By Taihang Hu, Zhao Wang, Zuan Gao, Tao Liu, Hao Yan, Zhengze Xu, Yuhang Yu, Yongchao Du, Xingjian Wang, Jun Zheng, Qinye Zhou, Yaqi Cai, Zhengrui Chen, Chao Lin, Yefeng Shen, Yuan Wang, Zhengtao Wu, Ge Wu, Xiaoli Xu, Denghui Yang, Huayu Zhang, Mingzhou Zhang, Mengting Chen
arXiv AI
Jul 16

Boogu-Image-0.1: Boosting Open-Source Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation

arXiv:2607. 13125v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce Boogu-Image-0.

By Guoxuan Chen, Chufeng Xiao, Haoran Yang, Siyue Xie, Binxiao Huang, Ming Zhang, Cheuk Him Chau, Xinyu Fu, Yingzhao Lian, Tom S. Y. Li, Jintao Lin, Bowen Dong, Zian Qian, Yuhao Liu, Yuxuan Hu, Weikang Shi, Bin Zou, Bowen Zheng, Haoxuan Che, Chang Chen, Yuyang He, Heyang Sun, Tianyu Huang, Chong Hou Choi, Cheng Gong, Han Shi, Haoli Bai, Xihui Liu, Hongsheng Li, Qifeng Chen, Chao Huang, Rui Liu, Chenyang Lei
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 24

UVU: Improving Multimodal Understanding via Vision-Language Unified Autoregressive Paradigm

UVU is a vision-language unified autoregressive framework that integrates visual supervision directly into the pre-training stage of multimodal large language models. By using continuous visual encoding and a large-scale iterative hierarchical clustering algorithm to build a pixel-level visual codebook, UVU enables lossless representation of visual inputs and autoregressive generation of pixel-level image tokens alongside textual tokens. This approach synergizes pixel-level visual perception with semantic-level visual understanding, allowing models to internalize visual reconstruction capabilities and improve multimodal understanding performance.

By Zhehan Kan, Xinghua Jiang, Yubo Zhu, Yanlin Liu, Xiaochen Yang, Zhixiang Wei, Shifeng Liu, Qingmin Liao, Wenming Yang, Xin Li, Yinsong Liu, Deqiang Jiang, Xing Sun
arXiv AI
Oct 2

LensVLM: Selective Context Expansion for Compressed Visual Representation of Text

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