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:2604. 00086v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The field of computer vision has experienced significant advancements through scalable vision encoders and multimodal pre-training frameworks.
By Eugene Lee, Ting-Yu Chang, Jui-Huang Tsai, Jiajie Diao, Chen-Yi Lee
arXiv:2605.12491v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Vision Transformers (ViTs) learn rich visual-semantic representations through all-to-all self-attention among patch tokens. However, this design im...
By Alan Z. Song, Yinjie Chen, Mu Nan, Deva Ramanan, Michael J. Tarr, Andrew F. Luo
arXiv:2601. 03100v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) typically rely on a single late-layer feature from a frozen vision encoder, leaving the encoder's rich hierarchy of visual cues under-utilized.
By Chenchen Lin, Sanbao Su, Rachel Luo, Yuxiao Chen, Yan Wang, Marco Pavone, Fei Miao
The paper introduces V‑GIFT, a lightweight method that enhances visual instruction tuning for multimodal large language models by incorporating a small set of visually grounded self‑supervised tasks expressed as natural language instructions. These tasks—such as rotation prediction, color matching, and cross‑view correspondence—are reformulated into image‑instruction‑response triplets, providing supervision that cannot be solved without visual evidence. The approach requires no human annotations, architectural changes, or extra training stages, and consistently improves vision‑centric performance across various models, regimes, and benchmarks when only 3‑10% of the training data is augmented with these instructions.
By Sophia Sirko-Galouchenko, Monika Wysoczanska, Andrei Bursuc, Nicolas Thome, Spyros Gidaris
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
The paper introduces a method to retrofit depth recurrence into pretrained vision‑language models, reducing the language backbone’s parameter count by pruning layers and looping over the remaining ones with linear adapters. A three‑stage recovery training—language‑only pretraining, vision‑language projector alignment, and full fine‑tuning—helps recover performance, with distillation from the non‑recurrent model further improving results. Experiments on TinyLLaVA‑1.4B show the retrofitted recurrent model outperforms the unpruned baseline while saving 23.3% of language parameters and performs better on reasoning‑oriented benchmarks.
By Madhav Iyengar, Andreas Geiger, Hilde K\"uhne
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
The study investigates how unified vision‑language models (VLMs) can simultaneously support visual understanding and generation. Using controlled benchmarks (SmartWatch and modified CelebA) that pair VQA, captioning, and text‑to‑image tasks, the authors evaluate several LLM‑based architectures built on SigLIP and VQ‑VAE visual spaces. Results show that mixed training can improve both understanding and generation, but the gains depend on how well the visual input and output spaces are aligned; misaligned or distorted visual spaces can weaken or reverse these benefits. The paper also demonstrates that balancing data across tasks and controlling attribute frequencies can help recover underrepresented visual concepts, and that the transfer is driven more by the base language model’s learned relationships than by visual adapters.
By Jihai Zhang, Tianle Li, Linjie Li, Zhengyuan Yang, Yu Cheng
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
LearnPruner rethinks token pruning in vision‑language models by addressing shortcomings of attention mechanisms in vision encoders and large language models. The method uses a two‑stage approach: first a learnable pruning module removes redundant vision tokens after the vision encoder, then only task‑relevant tokens are kept in the LLM’s middle layer. Experiments show that LearnPruner retains about 95% of performance while using only 5.5% of vision tokens, achieving a 3.2× speed‑up.
By Rinyoichi Takezoe, Yaqian Li, Zihao Bo, Anzhou Hou, Mo Guang, Kaiwen Long
arXiv:2511. 11421v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) aims to continually learn new categories without forgetting previously acquired knowledge.
By Lan Li, Tao Hu, Da-Wei Zhou, Jia-Qi Yang, Han-Jia Ye, De-Chuan Zhan