In this work, we introduce Vision-Language Generative Pre-trained Transformer (VL-GPT), a transformer model proficient at concurrently perceiving and generating visual and linguistic data. VL-GPT achieves a unified pre-training approach for both image and text modalities by employing a straightforward auto-regressive objective, thereby enabling the model to process image and text as seamlessly as a language model processes text. To accomplish this, we initially propose a novel image tokenizer-detokenizer framework for visual data, specifically designed to transform raw images into a sequence of continuous embeddings and reconstruct them accordingly. In combination with the existing text tokenizer and detokenizer, this framework allows for the encoding of interleaved image-text data into a multimodal sequence, which can subsequently be fed into the transformer model. Consequently, VL-GPT can perform large-scale pre-training on multimodal corpora utilizing a unified auto-regressive objective (i.e., next-token prediction). Upon completion of pre-training, VL-GPT exhibits remarkable zero-shot and few-shot performance across a diverse range of vision and language understanding and generation tasks, including image captioning, visual question answering, text-to-image generation, and more. Additionally, the pre-trained model retrains in-context learning capabilities when provided with multimodal prompts. We further conduct instruction tuning on our VL-GPT, highlighting its exceptional potential for multimodal assistance. The source code and model weights shall be released.

VL-GPT是一种同时感知和生成视觉和语言数据的变压器模型，通过采用直观的自回归目标，实现了图像和文本两种模态的统一预训练方法，从而使模型可以像处理文本一样无缝地处理图像和文本。预训练完成后，VL-GPT在包括图像字幕生成、视觉问答、文本到图像生成等多样的视觉和语言理解以及生成任务中表现出了令人瞩目的零样本和少样本性能。

VL-GPT：用于视觉与语言理解与生成的生成式预训练Transformer模型