# CoBIT: A Contrastive Bi-directional Image-Text Generation Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.13455 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13455/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 62 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Mar 2023.

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

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [Generating Long Sequences with Sparse Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10509/) (2019)
- [Flickr30k Entities: Collecting Region-to-Phrase Correspondences for Richer Image-to-Sentence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04870/) (2015)
- [VisualBERT: A Simple and Performant Baseline for Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03557/) (2019)
- [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)
- [MaskGIT: Masked Generative Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04200/) (2022)
- [Scaling Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04560/) (2021)
- [Adafactor: Adaptive Learning Rates with Sublinear Memory Cost](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04235/) (2018)
- [Florence: A New Foundation Model for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11432/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Generating Images with Multimodal Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17216/) (2023)
- [UniControl: A Unified Diffusion Model for Controllable Visual Generation In the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11147/) (2023)
- [CROMA: Remote Sensing Representations with Contrastive Radar-Optical Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00566/) (2023)
- [IdealGPT: Iteratively Decomposing Vision and Language Reasoning via Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14985/) (2023)
- [JetFormer: An Autoregressive Generative Model of Raw Images and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19722/) (2024)
- [Generative Semantic Communication: Diffusion Models Beyond Bit Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04321/) (2023)
- [Negative Pre-aware for Noisy Cross-modal Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05777/) (2023)
- [Leveraging Unpaired Data for Vision-Language Generative Models via Cycle Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03734/) (2023)
- [DoraCycle: Domain-Oriented Adaptation of Unified Generative Model in Multimodal Cycles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03651/) (2025)
- [Multi-modal Generation via Cross-Modal In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18304/) (2024)
- [Underlying Semantic Diffusion for Effective and Efficient In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04050/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The field of vision and language has witnessed a proliferation of pre-trained foundation models. Most existing methods are independently pre-trained with contrastive objective like CLIP, image-to-text generative objective like PaLI, or text-to-image generative objective like Parti. However, the three objectives can be pre-trained on the same data, image-text pairs, and intuitively they complement each other as contrasting provides global alignment capacity and generation grants fine-grained understanding. In this work, we present a Contrastive Bi-directional Image-Text generation model (CoBIT), which attempts to unify the three pre-training objectives in one framework. Specifically, CoBIT employs a novel unicoder-decoder structure, consisting of an image unicoder, a text unicoder and a cross-modal decoder. The image/text unicoders can switch between encoding and decoding in different tasks, enabling flexibility and shared knowledge that benefits both image-to-text and text-to-image generations. CoBIT achieves superior performance in image understanding, image-text understanding (Retrieval, Captioning, VQA, SNLI-VE) and text-based content creation, particularly in zero-shot scenarios. For instance, 82.7% in zero-shot ImageNet classification, 9.37 FID score in zero-shot text-to-image generation and 44.8 CIDEr in zero-shot captioning.