# Multi-modal Auto-regressive Modeling via Visual Words

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.07720 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07720/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 20 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Mar 2024.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Multimodal reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/multimodal-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06281/) (2023)
- [Learn to Explain: Multimodal Reasoning via Thought Chains for Science Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09513/) (2022)
- [Evaluating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10355/) (2023)
- [Towards VQA Models That Can Read](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08920/) (2019)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [MM-Vet: Evaluating Large Multimodal Models for Integrated Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02490/) (2023)
- [mPLUG-Owl: Modularization Empowers Large Language Models with Multimodality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14178/) (2023)
- [Unified-IO 2: Scaling Autoregressive Multimodal Models with Vision, Language, Audio, and Action](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17172/) (2023)
- [MoE-LLaVA: Mixture of Experts for Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15947/) (2024)
- [DreamLLM: Synergistic Multimodal Comprehension and Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11499/) (2023)
- [MultiModal-GPT: A Vision and Language Model for Dialogue with Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04790/) (2023)
- [Sequential Modeling Enables Scalable Learning for Large Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00785/) (2023)
- [Emu: Generative Pretraining in Multimodality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05222/) (2023)
- [Unified Language-Vision Pretraining in LLM with Dynamic Discrete Visual Tokenization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04669/) (2023)
- [MM-Interleaved: Interleaved Image-Text Generative Modeling via Multi-modal Feature Synchronizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10208/) (2024)
- [VL-GPT: A Generative Pre-trained Transformer for Vision and Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09251/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Towards Unifying Understanding and Generation in the Era of Vision Foundation Models: A Survey from the Autoregression Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22217/) (2024)
- [EvoComp: Learning Visual Token Compression for Multimodal Large Language Models via Semantic-Guided Evolutionary Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17087/) (2026)
- [VHASR: A Multimodal Speech Recognition System With Vision Hotwords](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00822/) (2024)
- [DenseMLLM: Standard Multimodal LLMs for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14134/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs), benefiting from the auto-regressive modelling approach performed on massive unannotated texts corpora, demonstrates powerful perceptual and reasoning capabilities. However, as for extending auto-regressive modelling to multi-modal scenarios to build Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs), there lies a great difficulty that the image information is processed in the LMM as continuous visual embeddings, which cannot obtain discrete supervised labels for classification.In this paper, we successfully perform multi-modal auto-regressive modeling with a unified objective for the first time.Specifically, we propose the concept of visual tokens, which maps the visual features to probability distributions over LLM's vocabulary, providing supervision information for visual modelling.We further explore the distribution of visual features in the semantic space within LMM and the possibility of using text embeddings to represent visual information.Experimental results and ablation studies on 5 VQA tasks and 4 benchmark toolkits validate the powerful performance of our proposed approach.