Pith. sign in

REVIEW 8 cited by

Language Models are General-Purpose Interfaces

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2206.06336 v1 pith:OTJSW2M5 submitted 2022-06-13 cs.CL

Language Models are General-Purpose Interfaces

classification cs.CL
keywords languagemodelsencoderscapabilitieslearningmodelingacrosscausal
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
0 comments
Share X LinkedIn Reddit HN
read the original abstract

Foundation models have received much attention due to their effectiveness across a broad range of downstream applications. Though there is a big convergence in terms of architecture, most pretrained models are typically still developed for specific tasks or modalities. In this work, we propose to use language models as a general-purpose interface to various foundation models. A collection of pretrained encoders perceive diverse modalities (such as vision, and language), and they dock with a language model that plays the role of a universal task layer. We propose a semi-causal language modeling objective to jointly pretrain the interface and the modular encoders. We subsume the advantages and capabilities from both causal and non-causal modeling, thereby combining the best of two worlds. Specifically, the proposed method not only inherits the capabilities of in-context learning and open-ended generation from causal language modeling, but also is conducive to finetuning because of the bidirectional encoders. More importantly, our approach seamlessly unlocks the combinations of the above capabilities, e.g., enabling in-context learning or instruction following with finetuned encoders. Experimental results across various language-only and vision-language benchmarks show that our model outperforms or is competitive with specialized models on finetuning, zero-shot generalization, and few-shot learning.

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.

Forward citations

Cited by 8 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Language Is Not All You Need: Aligning Perception with Language Models

    cs.CL 2023-02 conditional novelty 7.0

    Kosmos-1 shows strong zero-shot and few-shot results on language tasks, image captioning, visual QA, OCR-free document understanding, and image recognition guided by text instructions.

  2. The Last Visible Pixel: Probing Fine-Scale Perception in Vision-Language Models

    cs.CV 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    FineSightBench reveals VLMs perceive patterns down to 12px but show persistent failures in fine-scale reasoning such as numeracy and sequencing.

  3. RELO: Reinforcement Learning to Localize for Visual Object Tracking

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    RELO replaces handcrafted spatial priors with a reinforcement learning policy for target localization in visual tracking and reports 57.5% AUC on LaSOText without template updates.

  4. RELO: Reinforcement Learning to Localize for Visual Object Tracking

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    RELO formulates visual object tracking localization as a Markov decision process solved by reinforcement learning with combined IoU and AUC rewards, augmented by layer-aligned temporal token propagation, and reports 5...

  5. Retentive Network: A Successor to Transformer for Large Language Models

    cs.CL 2023-07 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    RetNet is a new sequence modeling architecture that delivers parallel training, constant-time inference, and competitive language modeling performance as a potential replacement for Transformers.

  6. Kosmos-2: Grounding Multimodal Large Language Models to the World

    cs.CL 2023-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Kosmos-2 grounds text to image regions by encoding refer expressions as Markdown links to sequences of location tokens and trains on a new GrIT dataset of grounded image-text pairs.

  7. PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model

    cs.LG 2023-03 conditional novelty 6.0

    PaLM-E is a single 562B-parameter multimodal model that performs embodied reasoning tasks like robotic manipulation planning and visual question answering by interleaving vision, state, and text inputs with positive t...

  8. Large Language Models: A Survey

    cs.CL 2024-02 accept novelty 3.0

    The paper surveys key large language models, their training methods, datasets, evaluation benchmarks, and future research directions in the field.