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VARGPT: Unified Understanding and Generation in a Visual Autoregressive Multimodal Large Language Model

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arxiv 2501.12327 v1 pith:P5UCNRH4 submitted 2025-01-21 cs.CV

VARGPT: Unified Understanding and Generation in a Visual Autoregressive Multimodal Large Language Model

classification cs.CV
keywords visualgenerationvargptunderstandingautoregressivemodelunifiedarchitecture
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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We present VARGPT, a novel multimodal large language model (MLLM) that unifies visual understanding and generation within a single autoregressive framework. VARGPT employs a next-token prediction paradigm for visual understanding and a next-scale prediction paradigm for visual autoregressive generation. VARGPT innovatively extends the LLaVA architecture, achieving efficient scale-wise autoregressive visual generation within MLLMs while seamlessly accommodating mixed-modal input and output within a single model framework. Our VARGPT undergoes a three-stage unified training process on specially curated datasets, comprising a pre-training phase and two mixed visual instruction-tuning phases. The unified training strategy are designed to achieve alignment between visual and textual features, enhance instruction following for both understanding and generation, and improve visual generation quality, respectively. Despite its LLAVA-based architecture for multimodel understanding, VARGPT significantly outperforms LLaVA-1.5 across various vision-centric benchmarks, such as visual question-answering and reasoning tasks. Notably, VARGPT naturally supports capabilities in autoregressive visual generation and instruction-to-image synthesis, showcasing its versatility in both visual understanding and generation tasks. Project page is at: \url{https://vargpt-1.github.io/}

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Cited by 14 Pith papers

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