# MAGVLT: Masked Generative Vision-and-Language Transformer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12208 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12208/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 62 of its 74 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 62)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07909/) (2015)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [Structured Denoising Diffusion Models in Discrete State-Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03006/) (2021)
- [LAION-400M: Open Dataset of CLIP-Filtered 400 Million Image-Text Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02114/) (2021)
- [LXMERT: Learning Cross-Modality Encoder Representations from Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07490/) (2019)
- [Flickr30k Entities: Collecting Region-to-Phrase Correspondences for Richer Image-to-Sentence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04870/) (2015)
- [Scaling Autoregressive Models for Content-Rich Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10789/) (2022)
- [CoCa: Contrastive Captioners are Image-Text Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01917/) (2022)
- [ViLT: Vision-and-Language Transformer Without Convolution or Region Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03334/) (2021)
- [Conceptual 12M: Pushing Web-Scale Image-Text Pre-Training To Recognize Long-Tail Visual Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08981/) (2021)
- [MaskGIT: Masked Generative Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04200/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Finite Scalar Quantization: VQ-VAE Made Simple](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15505/) (2023)
- [GIVT: Generative Infinite-Vocabulary Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02116/) (2023)
- [InterMask: 3D Human Interaction Generation via Collaborative Masked Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10010/) (2024)
- [JetFormer: An Autoregressive Generative Model of Raw Images and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19722/) (2024)
- [Masked Image Modeling: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06687/) (2024)
- [OneRef: Unified One-tower Expression Grounding and Segmentation with Mask Referring Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08021/) (2024)
- [Enhancing EEG-to-Text Decoding through Transferable Representations from Pre-trained Contrastive EEG-Text Masked Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17433/) (2024)
- [EditMGT: Unleashing Potentials of Masked Generative Transformers in Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11715/) (2025)
- [Video Is Worth a Thousand Images: Exploring the Latest Trends in Long Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18688/) (2024)
- [Visual Echoes: A Simple Unified Transformer for Audio-Visual Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14598/) (2024)
- [What Drives Compositional Generalization in Visual Generative Models? The Importance of Continuous Training Objectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03075/) (2025)
- [Mobile-O: Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation on Mobile Device](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20161/) (2026)
- [Recent Advances of Local Mechanisms in Computer Vision: A Survey and Outlook of Recent Work](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01929/) (2023)
- [Optimized Information Flow for Transformer Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08195/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While generative modeling on multimodal image-text data has been actively developed with large-scale paired datasets, there have been limited attempts to generate both image and text data by a single model rather than a generation of one fixed modality conditioned on the other modality. In this paper, we explore a unified generative vision-and-language (VL) model that can produce both images and text sequences. Especially, we propose a generative VL transformer based on the non-autoregressive mask prediction, named MAGVLT, and compare it with an autoregressive generative VL transformer (ARGVLT). In comparison to ARGVLT, the proposed MAGVLT enables bidirectional context encoding, fast decoding by parallel token predictions in an iterative refinement, and extended editing capabilities such as image and text infilling. For rigorous training of our MAGVLT with image-text pairs from scratch, we combine the image-to-text, text-to-image, and joint image-and-text mask prediction tasks. Moreover, we devise two additional tasks based on the step-unrolled mask prediction and the selective prediction on the mixture of two image-text pairs. Experimental results on various downstream generation tasks of VL benchmarks show that our MAGVLT outperforms ARGVLT by a large margin even with significant inference speedup. Particularly, MAGVLT achieves competitive results on both zero-shot image-to-text and text-to-image generation tasks from MS-COCO by one moderate-sized model (fewer than 500M parameters) even without the use of monomodal data and networks.