Pith. sign in

REVIEW 14 cited by

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 2307.08041 v2 pith:LBJMNDGG submitted 2023-07-16 cs.CV

Planting a SEED of Vision in Large Language Model

classification cs.CV
keywords imageseedllmsmultimodaltokenstrainingvisualcompared
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
0 comments
read the original abstract

We present SEED, an elaborate image tokenizer that empowers Large Language Models (LLMs) with the emergent ability to SEE and Draw at the same time. Research on image tokenizers has previously reached an impasse, as frameworks employing quantized visual tokens have lost prominence due to subpar performance and convergence in multimodal comprehension (compared to BLIP-2, etc.) or generation (compared to Stable Diffusion, etc.). Despite the limitations, we remain confident in its natural capacity to unify visual and textual representations, facilitating scalable multimodal training with LLM's original recipe. In this study, we identify two crucial principles for the architecture and training of SEED that effectively ease subsequent alignment with LLMs. (1) Image tokens should be independent of 2D physical patch positions and instead be produced with a 1D causal dependency, exhibiting intrinsic interdependence that aligns with the left-to-right autoregressive prediction mechanism in LLMs. (2) Image tokens should capture high-level semantics consistent with the degree of semantic abstraction in words, and be optimized for both discriminativeness and reconstruction during the tokenizer training phase. As a result, the off-the-shelf LLM is able to perform both image-to-text and text-to-image generation by incorporating our SEED through efficient LoRA tuning. Comprehensive multimodal pretraining and instruction tuning, which may yield improved results, are reserved for future investigation. This version of SEED was trained in 5.7 days using only 64 V100 GPUs and 5M publicly available image-text pairs. Our preliminary study emphasizes the great potential of discrete visual tokens in versatile multimodal LLMs and the importance of proper image tokenizers in broader research.

discussion (0)

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

Forward citations

Cited by 14 Pith papers

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

  1. From Standalone LLMs to Integrated Intelligence: A Survey of Compound Al Systems

    cs.MA 2025-06 accept novelty 7.0

    A survey that defines Compound AI Systems, proposes a multi-dimensional taxonomy based on component roles and orchestration strategies, reviews four foundational paradigms, and identifies key challenges for future research.

  2. Transfer between Modalities with MetaQueries

    cs.CV 2025-04 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    MetaQueries act as an efficient bridge allowing multimodal LLMs to augment diffusion-based image generation and editing without complex training or unfreezing the LLM backbone.

  3. Janus: Decoupling Visual Encoding for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation

    cs.CV 2024-10 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Janus decouples visual encoding into task-specific pathways inside a single autoregressive transformer to unify multimodal understanding and generation while outperforming earlier unified models.

  4. Cambrian-1: A Fully Open, Vision-Centric Exploration of Multimodal LLMs

    cs.CV 2024-06 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Cambrian-1 is a vision-centric multimodal LLM family that evaluates over 20 vision encoders, introduces CV-Bench and the Spatial Vision Aggregator, and releases open models, code, and data achieving strong performance...

  5. SEED-Bench: Benchmarking Multimodal LLMs with Generative Comprehension

    cs.CL 2023-07 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    SEED-Bench is a new benchmark of 19K multiple-choice questions for evaluating generative comprehension in multimodal LLMs across 12 image and video dimensions.

  6. When Recovery Matters: The Blind Spot of Surrogate Privacy in MLLM Editing

    cs.CV 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Presents SPPE benchmark and ERMA/C2E-S2SER methods for editability assessment and surrogate-to-source recovery in MLLM privacy protection, reporting metric improvements.

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

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    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.

  8. Mogao: An Omni Foundation Model for Interleaved Multi-Modal Generation

    cs.CV 2025-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Mogao presents a causal unified model with deep fusion, dual encoders, and interleaved position embeddings that achieves strong performance on multi-modal understanding, text-to-image generation, and coherent interlea...

  9. MetaMorph: Multimodal Understanding and Generation via Instruction Tuning

    cs.CV 2024-12 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    VPiT enables pretrained LLMs to perform both visual understanding and generation by predicting discrete text tokens and continuous visual tokens, with understanding data proving more effective than generation-specific data.

  10. VILA-U: a Unified Foundation Model Integrating Visual Understanding and Generation

    cs.CV 2024-09 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    VILA-U unifies visual understanding and generation inside one autoregressive next-token prediction model, removing separate diffusion components while claiming near state-of-the-art results.

  11. SEED-X: Multimodal Models with Unified Multi-granularity Comprehension and Generation

    cs.CV 2024-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    SEED-X is a unified multimodal foundation model that handles multi-granularity visual semantics for both comprehension and generation across arbitrary image sizes and ratios.

  12. DragNUWA: Fine-grained Control in Video Generation by Integrating Text, Image, and Trajectory

    cs.CV 2023-08 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    DragNUWA integrates text, image, and trajectory controls into a diffusion video model using a Trajectory Sampler, Multiscale Fusion, and Adaptive Training to enable fine-grained open-domain video generation.

  13. Mini-Gemini: Mining the Potential of Multi-modality Vision Language Models

    cs.CV 2024-03 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Mini-Gemini enhances VLMs via high-resolution visual refinement, curated reasoning data, and self-guided generation to reach leading zero-shot benchmark results across 2B-34B LLMs.

  14. DeepSight: Long-Horizon World Modeling via Latent States Prediction for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    DeepSight uses parallel latent feature prediction in BEV for long-horizon world modeling and adaptive text reasoning to reach state-of-the-art closed-loop performance on the Bench2drive benchmark.