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The Scalability of Simplicity: Empirical Analysis of Vision-Language Learning with a Single Transformer

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arxiv 2504.10462 v1 pith:O5U6WR22 submitted 2025-04-14 cs.CV

classification cs.CV
keywords sailmllmsmodularscalabilitytransformervisionvisualarchitecture
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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This paper introduces SAIL, a single transformer unified multimodal large language model (MLLM) that integrates raw pixel encoding and language decoding within a singular architecture. Unlike existing modular MLLMs, which rely on a pre-trained vision transformer (ViT), SAIL eliminates the need for a separate vision encoder, presenting a more minimalist architecture design. Instead of introducing novel architectural components, SAIL adapts mix-attention mechanisms and multimodal positional encodings to better align with the distinct characteristics of visual and textual modalities. We systematically compare SAIL's properties-including scalability, cross-modal information flow patterns, and visual representation capabilities-with those of modular MLLMs. By scaling both training data and model size, SAIL achieves performance comparable to modular MLLMs. Notably, the removal of pretrained ViT components enhances SAIL's scalability and results in significantly different cross-modal information flow patterns. Moreover, SAIL demonstrates strong visual representation capabilities, achieving results on par with ViT-22B in vision tasks such as semantic segmentation. Code and models are available at https://github.com/bytedance/SAIL.

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Cited by 7 Pith papers

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

  1. Are Tools Always Beneficial? Learning to Invoke Tools Adaptively for Dual-Mode Multimodal LLM Reasoning

    cs.CL 2026-05 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    AutoTool uses reinforcement learning with dual-mode rewards to train multimodal LLMs to adaptively choose between tool-assisted and text-centric reasoning, yielding accuracy and efficiency gains on V* and POPE benchmarks.

  2. VGR: Visual Grounded Reasoning

    cs.CV 2025-06 unverdicted novelty 7.0 of 10

    VGR introduces a visual-grounded reasoning MLLM that detects and replays image regions during inference, achieving gains on visual benchmarks with 30% fewer image tokens than the LLaVA-NeXT-7B baseline.

  3. MuRA: Multi-Rank Adaptation for Efficient and Effective Test-Time Vision-Language Generalization

    cs.CV 2026-08 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    MuRA improves label-free test-time adaptation of CLIP by routing each image's tokens to a weighted mix of rank-2 through rank-32 LoRA experts at the deepest visual layer.

  4. From Pixels to Words -- Towards Native One-Vision Models at Scale

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    NEO-ov is a native one-vision model that learns cross-frame and pixel-word correspondence end-to-end and narrows the gap to modular VLMs on multi-image, video, and spatial tasks.

  5. Are Tools Always Beneficial? Learning to Invoke Tools Adaptively for Dual-Mode Multimodal LLM Reasoning

    cs.CL 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    AutoTool uses dual-mode RL to let MLLMs adaptively choose tool use or text-only reasoning, reporting 21.8% accuracy gain on V* and 44.9% efficiency gain on POPE versus baselines.

  6. Learning to See What You Need: Gaze Attention for Multimodal Large Language Models

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    Gaze Attention groups visual embeddings into selectable regions and dynamically restricts attention to task-relevant ones, matching dense baselines with up to 90% fewer visual KV entries via added context tokens.

  7. Circle-RoPE: Cone-like Decoupled Rotary Positional Embedding for Large Vision-Language Models

    cs.CV 2025-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    Circle-RoPE achieves cross-modal positional disentanglement in VLMs by mapping 2D image tokens to a cone-like annulus orthogonal to the text axis, with PTD=0 eliminating RoPE geometric bias while preserving intra-imag...

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