English

Chameleon: Mixed-Modal Early-Fusion Foundation Models

Computation and Language 2025-03-24 v2

Abstract

We present Chameleon, a family of early-fusion token-based mixed-modal models capable of understanding and generating images and text in any arbitrary sequence. We outline a stable training approach from inception, an alignment recipe, and an architectural parameterization tailored for the early-fusion, token-based, mixed-modal setting. The models are evaluated on a comprehensive range of tasks, including visual question answering, image captioning, text generation, image generation, and long-form mixed modal generation. Chameleon demonstrates broad and general capabilities, including state-of-the-art performance in image captioning tasks, outperforms Llama-2 in text-only tasks while being competitive with models such as Mixtral 8x7B and Gemini-Pro, and performs non-trivial image generation, all in a single model. It also matches or exceeds the performance of much larger models, including Gemini Pro and GPT-4V, according to human judgments on a new long-form mixed-modal generation evaluation, where either the prompt or outputs contain mixed sequences of both images and text. Chameleon marks a significant step forward in a unified modeling of full multimodal documents.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2405.09818,
  title  = {Chameleon: Mixed-Modal Early-Fusion Foundation Models},
  author = {Chameleon Team},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.09818},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T16:29:02.777Z