# Grounding Language Models to Images for Multimodal Inputs and Outputs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.13823 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13823/

## Key facts

- Cited by 131 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 69 of its 98 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Jan 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 69)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15556/) (2022)
- [Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07909/) (2015)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07682/) (2022)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [Transformer-XL: Attentive Language Models Beyond a Fixed-Length Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02860/) (2019)
- [LAION-400M: Open Dataset of CLIP-Filtered 400 Million Image-Text Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02114/) (2021)
- [Scaling Autoregressive Models for Content-Rich Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10789/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 131)

- [LISA: Reasoning Segmentation via Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00692/) (2023)
- [BigCodeBench: Benchmarking Code Generation with Diverse Function Calls and Complex Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15877/) (2024)
- [VLM-R1: A Stable and Generalizable R1-style Large Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07615/) (2025)
- [The Platonic Representation Hypothesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07987/) (2024)
- [What matters when building vision-language models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02246/) (2024)
- [Unified-IO 2: Scaling Autoregressive Multimodal Models with Vision, Language, Audio, and Action](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17172/) (2023)
- [InternLM-XComposer: A Vision-Language Large Model for Advanced Text-image Comprehension and Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15112/) (2023)
- [Generating Images with Multimodal Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17216/) (2023)
- [Building and better understanding vision-language models: insights and future directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12637/) (2024)
- [Emu: Generative Pretraining in Multimodality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05222/) (2023)
- [On the Adversarial Robustness of Multi-Modal Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10741/) (2023)
- [VisionLLM v2: An End-to-End Generalist Multimodal Large Language Model for Hundreds of Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08394/) (2024)
- [Exploring the Reasoning Abilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs): A Comprehensive Survey on Emerging Trends in Multimodal Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06805/) (2024)
- [Robust CLIP: Unsupervised Adversarial Fine-Tuning of Vision Embeddings for Robust Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12336/) (2024)
- [M3Exam: A Multilingual, Multimodal, Multilevel Benchmark for Examining Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05179/) (2023)
- [Foundational Models Defining a New Era in Vision: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13721/) (2023)
- [ZoomEye: Enhancing Multimodal LLMs with Human-Like Zooming Capabilities through Tree-Based Image Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16044/) (2024)
- [From CLIP to DINO: Visual Encoders Shout in Multi-modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08825/) (2023)
- [Ferret-v2: An Improved Baseline for Referring and Grounding with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07973/) (2024)
- [CapsFusion: Rethinking Image-Text Data at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20550/) (2023)
- [X-InstructBLIP: A Framework for aligning X-Modal instruction-aware representations to LLMs and Emergent Cross-modal Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18799/) (2023)
- [Wiki-LLaVA: Hierarchical Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15406/) (2024)
- [LISA++: An Improved Baseline for Reasoning Segmentation with Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17240/) (2023)
- [The Semantic Hub Hypothesis: Language Models Share Semantic Representations Across Languages and Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04986/) (2024)
- [VidHalluc: Evaluating Temporal Hallucinations in Multimodal Large Language Models for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03735/) (2024)
- [VL-JEPA: Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture for Vision-language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10942/) (2025)
- [Exploring Diverse In-Context Configurations for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14800/) (2023)
- [SpeechVerse: A Large-scale Generalizable Audio Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08295/) (2024)
- [Self-Supervised Multimodal Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01008/) (2023)
- [LLM-CXR: Instruction-Finetuned LLM for CXR Image Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11490/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose an efficient method to ground pretrained text-only language models to the visual domain, enabling them to process arbitrarily interleaved image-and-text data, and generate text interleaved with retrieved images. Our method leverages the abilities of language models learnt from large scale text-only pretraining, such as in-context learning and free-form text generation. We keep the language model frozen, and finetune input and output linear layers to enable cross-modality interactions. This allows our model to process arbitrarily interleaved image-and-text inputs, and generate free-form text interleaved with retrieved images. We achieve strong zero-shot performance on grounded tasks such as contextual image retrieval and multimodal dialogue, and showcase compelling interactive abilities. Our approach works with any off-the-shelf language model and paves the way towards an effective, general solution for leveraging pretrained language models in visually grounded settings.