Recently, the remarkable advance of the Large Language Model (LLM) has inspired researchers to transfer its extraordinary reasoning capability to data across several modalities. The prevailing approaches primarily regard visual input as the prompt and focus exclusively on optimizing the text generation process conditioned upon vision content by a frozen LLM. Such an inequitable treatment of vision and language heavily constrains the model's potential. In this paper, we break through this limitation by representing both vision and language in a unified representation. To this end, we craft a visual tokenizer that translates the non-linguistic image into a sequence of discrete tokens like a foreign language that LLM can read. The resulting visual tokens encompass high-level semantics worthy of a word and also support dynamic sequence length varying from the image content. Coped with this visual tokenizer, the presented foundation model called LaVIT (Language-VIsion Transformer) can handle both image and text indiscriminately under a unified generative learning paradigm. Pre-trained on the web-scale image-text corpus, LaVIT is empowered with impressive multi-modal comprehension capability. The extensive experiments showcase that it outperforms existing models by a large margin on downstream tasks. Our code and models will be available at https://github.com/jy0205/LaVIT.

最近，大型语言模型的显著进展激发了研究人员将其非凡的推理能力转移到多个模态的数据上。本文通过在统一的表示中同时表达视觉和语言，突破了仅以视觉内容作为提示并专注于优化文本生成过程的限制。通过一个将非语言图像转换为LLM可以阅读的一系列离散标记的视觉分词器，LaVIT (Language-VIsion Transformer) 可以在统一的生成学习范式下无差别地处理图像和文本。在网上规模图像-文本语料库上预训练的LaVIT具有令人印象深刻的多模态理解能力。广泛的实验表明，它在下游任务上的性能超过现有模型很多。我们的代码和模型将在此https URL上提供。

动态离散视觉标记的统一语言-视觉预训练