The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has accelerated the emergence of in-context learning (ICL) as a cutting-edge approach in the natural language processing domain. Recently, ICL has been employed in visual understanding tasks, such as semantic segmentation and image captioning, yielding promising results. However, existing visual ICL framework can not enable producing content across multiple modalities, which limits their potential usage scenarios. To address this issue, we present a new ICL framework for visual understanding with multi-modal output enabled. First, we quantize and embed both text and visual prompt into a unified representational space, structured as interleaved in-context sequences. Then a decoder-only sparse transformer architecture is employed to perform generative modeling on them, facilitating in-context learning. Thanks to this design, the model is capable of handling in-context vision understanding tasks with multimodal output in a unified pipeline. Experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves competitive performance compared with specialized models and previous ICL baselines. Overall, our research takes a further step toward unified multimodal in-context learning.

我们提出了一种新的具有多模态输出功能的视觉理解的上下文学习框架，通过将文本和视觉提示量化和嵌入到统一的表示空间中，并采用仅具有解码器的稀疏Transformer架构在其上执行生成建模。实验结果表明，我们的模型在统一的多模态管线中实现了与专门模型和先前上下文学习基准模型相竞争的性能。总体而言，我们的研究在统一多模态上下文学习方面迈出了进一步的一步。

走向更统一的上下文视觉理解