arXiv Computer Vision

Can Discrete Tokens Serve as Semantically Lossless Representations of Visual Signals?

The paper investigates whether discrete visual tokens can preserve semantic information as effectively as continuous representations. Contrary to the common belief that quantization error inevitably causes semantic loss, the authors show that larger quantization errors can still yield better multimodal understanding, and that the effective bit budget of discrete indices is the critical factor. They propose Factorized Vector Quantization, which uses parallel codebooks to encode complementary views of visual features, achieving performance that matches continuous representations and surpasses prior discrete models on a broad set of metrics.

arXiv AI
Oct 7

VisionWeave: Weaving Elastic Visual Representations as a Native Capability of MLLMs

VisionWeave introduces elastic visual representation weaving, a native capability for multimodal large language models that learns where and at what granularity to encode visual information. The method combines a gated spatial pooler for coarse representations with a granularity router that allocates content‑adaptive token usage, trained end‑to‑end on large‑scale data. Experiments on Qwen3.5‑4B and Qwen3.8‑27B show that VisionWeave can save 43.0% of tokens while preserving 98.9% of performance across eight benchmarks, and delivers significant throughput gains and latency reductions when deployed on the SGLang serving engine.

By Yuan Feng, Qize Yang, Ruizhe Chen, Sibo Song, Haolin He, Muzhi Zhu, Zihan Liu, Yunfei Chu, Xize Cheng, Yuxuan Wang, Jin Xu, Xike Xie
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 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 31

PACE: Pareto-Adaptive Compression for Efficient Native MLLMs

The paper introduces PACE, a Pareto‑adaptive compression framework designed for native multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that directly tokenize pixel patches without external vision encoders. By analyzing token discriminability and heterogeneous redundancy across spatial dimensions, PACE decomposes attention into height‑ and width‑specific saliency maps and applies a Pareto‑optimization strategy to allocate token budgets, achieving near‑lossless performance with only 25‑50% of visual tokens and more than 2× FLOP savings. Experiments demonstrate that PACE not only preserves but sometimes improves benchmark results compared to existing ViT‑based compression methods.

By Lei Tian, Chunzheng Zhu, Kai Wu, Yifan Zhang, Haihua Yang
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 16

Intern Lumina U2: A Multi-Codebook Diffusion Large Language Model for Omni-Visual Understanding and Image Generation

Intern Lumina U2 is a diffusion large language model that uses multi-codebook visual tokens in a fully discrete space, allowing each visual position to be represented by a group of complementary codes. The model concatenates embeddings at each position and employs a lightweight autoregressive head to predict codes sequentially while the diffusion backbone processes all positions in parallel. Built on the unified 4D representation of AToken, it supports image, video, and 3D inputs, achieves leading performance in visual understanding, image generation, and editing, and includes a cross‑platform training, inference, and evaluation system with a stability‑aware sampling strategy that speeds up image generation by 4.45×.

By Qian Yu, Zongyang Qiu, Juncheng Yan, Hongliang Li, Qi Qin, Keqi Wang, Siqi Luo, Junkui Ju, Yapeng Mi, Tiantian Lu, Tian Liu, Pengyu Xie, Chenhao Ji, Minghui Zhang, Yiang Zhao, Siyu Yan, Haiying Xu, Yanbo Wang, Jianghan Shen, Yuandong Pu, Jiayi Lei, Borui Zhang, Jinxin Shi, Bo Zhang, Yuhang Zang, Shenglong Ye, Lixin Gu, Hongjie Zhang, Linghan Liu, Xinyuan Chen, Yuewen Cao, Lihe Zhang, Xiaohong Liu, Junjun He, Qiangwei Liu, Qi Zhang, Yu Cheng, Tianfan Xue, Hui Xiong, Chang Xu, Yu Qiao, Yihao Liu, Bin Fu
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 9

Scaling Native Multimodal Pre-Training From Scratch

The paper investigates how to scale a Transformer-based vision‑language model trained from scratch on multimodal inputs under a fixed compute budget. It finds that minimal loss follows a predictable compute law while optimal model size and token count obey power‑law scaling, with language and multimodal objectives showing distinct allocation trends. The study also proposes a budget‑compensation rule that allows additional multimodal tokens to offset text‑efficiency penalties, and demonstrates that native multimodal pre‑training improves spatial reasoning and few‑shot learning.

By Haoyuan Wu, Aoqi Wu, Hai Wang, Jiajia Wu, Jinxiang Ou, Bei Yu