VILA-U is a Unified foundation model that integrates Video, Image, Language understanding and generation. Traditional visual language models (VLMs) use separate modules for understanding and generating visual content, which can lead to misalignment and increased complexity. In contrast, VILA-U employs a single autoregressive next-token prediction framework for both tasks, eliminating the need for additional components like diffusion models. This approach not only simplifies the model but also achieves near state-of-the-art performance in visual language understanding and generation. The success of VILA-U is attributed to two main factors: the unified vision tower that aligns discrete visual tokens with textual inputs during pretraining, which enhances visual perception, and autoregressive image generation can achieve similar quality as diffusion models with high-quality dataset. This allows VILA-U to perform comparably to more complex models using a fully token-based autoregressive framework.
@article{arxiv.2409.04429,
title = {VILA-U: a Unified Foundation Model Integrating Visual Understanding and Generation},
author = {Yecheng Wu and Zhuoyang Zhang and Junyu Chen and Haotian Tang and Dacheng Li and Yunhao Fang and Ligeng Zhu and Enze Xie and Hongxu Yin and Li Yi and Song Han and Yao Lu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.04429},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
Code: https://github.com/mit-han-lab/vila-u. The first two authors contributed equally to this work