# Leveraging Visual Tokens for Extended Text Contexts in Multi-Modal Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.02547 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02547/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 53 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [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)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [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)
- [FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14135/) (2022)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [Mistral 7B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06825/) (2023)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12966/) (2023)
- [PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03378/) (2023)
- [Mixtral of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04088/) (2024)
- [Towards VQA Models That Can Read](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08920/) (2019)
- [LAION-400M: Open Dataset of CLIP-Filtered 400 Million Image-Text Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02114/) (2021)
- [Generating Long Sequences with Sparse Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10509/) (2019)
- [ChartQA: A Benchmark for Question Answering about Charts with Visual and Logical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10244/) (2022)
- [Flickr30k Entities: Collecting Region-to-Phrase Correspondences for Richer Image-to-Sentence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04870/) (2015)
- [DocVQA: A Dataset for VQA on Document Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00398/) (2020)
- [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)
- [OK-VQA: A Visual Question Answering Benchmark Requiring External Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00067/) (2019)
- [VizWiz Grand Challenge: Answering Visual Questions from Blind People](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08218/) (2018)
- [Extending Context Window of Large Language Models via Positional Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15595/) (2023)
- [DeepSeek-VL: Towards Real-World Vision-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05525/) (2024)

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

- [VisualCloze: A Universal Image Generation Framework via Visual In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07960/) (2025)
- [Vision-centric Token Compression in Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.00791/) (2025)
- [Zoom-Refine: Boosting High-Resolution Multimodal Understanding via Localized Zoom and Self-Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01663/) (2025)
- [NeSyGeo: A Neuro-Symbolic Framework for Multimodal Geometric Reasoning Data Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17121/) (2025)
- [ReGuLaR: Variational Latent Reasoning Guided by Rendered Chain-of-Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.23184/) (2026)
- [See the Text: From Tokenization to Visual Reading](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18840/) (2025)
- [Beyond Words: Advancing Long-Text Image Generation via Multimodal Autoregressive Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20198/) (2025)
- [Can Vision-Language Models Handle Long-Context Code? An Empirical Study on Visual Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00746/) (2026)
- [UniModel: A Visual-Only Framework for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16917/) (2025)
- [Decoupling semantics from vision: A framework for faithful visual-text compression evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01848/) (2026)
- [Exploring a Unified Vision-Centric Contrastive Alternatives on Multi-Modal Web Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18703/) (2025)
- [Optical Context Compression Is Just (Bad) Autoencoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03643/) (2025)
- [Reading is not Reasoning: Bridging the Agentic Policy Gap in Vision-Text Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.08960/) (2026)
- [Improving MLLM Training Efficiency via Stage-Aware Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18150/) (2025)
- [LoMo: Local Modality Substitution for Deeper Vision-Language Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30265/) (2026)
- [A Table Is Worth 64 Tokens: Pixel-level Compression for Multi-Table Document Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.26949/) (2026)
- [FocusVTC: Efficient and High-Performance Visual Text Compression with Adaptive Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36651/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Training models with longer in-context lengths is a significant challenge for multimodal model due to substantial GPU memory and computational costs. This exploratory study does not present state-of-the-art models; rather, it introduces an innovative method designed to increase in-context text length in multi-modality large language models (MLLMs) efficiently. We present Visualized In-Context Text Processing (VisInContext), which processes long in-context text using visual tokens. This technique significantly reduces GPU memory usage and floating point operations (FLOPs) for both training and inferenceing stage. For instance, our method expands the pre-training in-context text length from 256 to 2048 tokens with nearly same FLOPs for a 56 billion parameter MOE model. Experimental results demonstrate that model trained with VisInContext delivers superior performance on common downstream benchmarks for in-context few-shot evaluation. Additionally, VisInContext is complementary to existing methods for increasing in-context text length and enhances document understanding capabilities, showing great potential in document QA tasks and sequential document retrieval.