# Pixel Aligned Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.09237 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09237/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 52 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Dec 2023.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/vlm-benchmarks-and-visual-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [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)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [Microsoft COCO Captions: Data Collection and Evaluation Server](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00325/) (2015)
- [Flickr30k Entities: Collecting Region-to-Phrase Correspondences for Richer Image-to-Sentence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04870/) (2015)
- [Objects as Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07850/) (2019)
- [Grounded Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03857/) (2021)
- [Kosmos-2: Grounding Multimodal Large Language Models to the World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14824/) (2023)
- [Modeling Context in Referring Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00272/) (2016)
- [Shikra: Unleashing Multimodal LLM's Referential Dialogue Magic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15195/) (2023)
- [Generation and Comprehension of Unambiguous Object Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02283/) (2015)
- [MDETR -- Modulated Detection for End-to-End Multi-Modal Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12763/) (2021)
- [LLaMA-Adapter: Efficient Fine-tuning of Language Models with Zero-init Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16199/) (2023)
- [LISA: Reasoning Segmentation via Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00692/) (2023)
- [PaLI: A Jointly-Scaled Multilingual Language-Image Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06794/) (2022)
- [OFA: Unifying Architectures, Tasks, and Modalities Through a Simple Sequence-to-Sequence Learning Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03052/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [PIVOT: Iterative Visual Prompting Elicits Actionable Knowledge for VLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07872/) (2024)
- [The Revolution of Multimodal Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12451/) (2024)
- [VisionLLM v2: An End-to-End Generalist Multimodal Large Language Model for Hundreds of Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08394/) (2024)
- [IBD: Alleviating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models via Image-Biased Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18476/) (2024)
- [BRAVE: Broadening the visual encoding of vision-language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07204/) (2024)
- [Lexicon3D: Probing Visual Foundation Models for Complex 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.03757/) (2024)
- [SSR: Enhancing Depth Perception in Vision-Language Models via Rationale-Guided Spatial Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12448/) (2025)
- [3D-GRAND: A Million-Scale Dataset for 3D-LLMs with Better Grounding and Less Hallucination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05132/) (2024)
- [LocCa: Visual Pretraining with Location-aware Captioners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19596/) (2024)
- [ControlMLLM: Training-Free Visual Prompt Learning for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21534/) (2024)
- [F-HOI: Toward Fine-grained Semantic-Aligned 3D Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12435/) (2024)
- [How Well Can Vision Language Models See Image Details?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03940/) (2024)
- [Emergent Visual Grounding in Large Multimodal Models Without Grounding Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08209/) (2024)
- [SRL-CLIP: Efficient CLIP Video Adaptation via Structured Semantic Role Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07669/) (2024)
- [TraDiffusion: Trajectory-Based Training-Free Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09739/) (2024)
- [TraceVision: Trajectory-Aware Vision-Language Model for Human-Like Spatial Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19768/) (2026)
- [QUILL: An Algorithm-Architecture Co-Design for Cache-Local Deformable Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13679/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models have achieved great success in recent years, so as their variants in vision. Existing vision-language models can describe images in natural languages, answer visual-related questions, or perform complex reasoning about the image. However, it is yet unclear how localization tasks, such as word grounding or referring localization, can be performed using large language models. In this work, we aim to develop a vision-language model that can take locations, for example, a set of points or boxes, as either inputs or outputs. When taking locations as inputs, the model performs location-conditioned captioning, which generates captions for the indicated object or region. When generating locations as outputs, our model regresses pixel coordinates for each output word generated by the language model, and thus performs dense word grounding. Our model is pre-trained on the Localized Narrative dataset, which contains pixel-word-aligned captioning from human attention. We show our model can be applied to various location-aware vision-language tasks, including referring localization, location-conditioned captioning, and dense object captioning, archiving state-of-the-art performance on RefCOCO and Visual Genome. Project page: https://jerryxu.net/PixelLLM .