Papers › Generative Multimodal Models are In-Context Learners

Generative Multimodal Models are In-Context Learners

20 Dec 2023CVPR 2024 1arXiv:2312.13286archive 2025-07-28

Quan Sun, Yufeng Cui, Xiaosong Zhang, Fan Zhang, Qiying Yu, Zhengxiong Luo, Yueze Wang, Yongming Rao, Jingjing Liu, Tiejun Huang, Xinlong Wang

The human ability to easily solve multimodal tasks in context (i.e., with only a few demonstrations or simple instructions), is what current multimodal systems have largely struggled to imitate. In this work, we demonstrate that the task-agnostic in-context learning capabilities of large multimodal models can be significantly enhanced by effective scaling-up. We introduce Emu2, a generative multimodal model with 37 billion parameters, trained on large-scale multimodal sequences with a unified autoregressive objective. Emu2 exhibits strong multimodal in-context learning abilities, even emerging to solve tasks that require on-the-fly reasoning, such as visual prompting and object-grounded generation. The model sets a new record on multiple multimodal understanding tasks in few-shot settings. When instruction-tuned to follow specific instructions, Emu2 further achieves new state-of-the-art on challenging tasks such as question answering benchmarks for large multimodal models and open-ended subject-driven generation. These achievements demonstrate that Emu2 can serve as a base model and general-purpose interface for a wide range of multimodal tasks. Code and models are publicly available to facilitate future research.

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Tasks

In-Context LearningPersonalized Image GenerationQuestion AnsweringVisual PromptingVisual Question Answering

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Personalized Image Generation DreamBooth Emu2 SDXL v1.0 Concept Preservation (CP) 0.528 #3 of 7 Archive leaderboard report
Personalized Image Generation DreamBooth Emu2 SDXL v1.0 Overall (CP * PF) 0.364 #3 of 7 Archive leaderboard report
Personalized Image Generation DreamBooth Emu2 SDXL v1.0 Prompt Following (PF) 0.690 #3 of 7 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Question Answering MM-Vet Emu2-Chat GPT-4 score 48.5 #75 of 231 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Question Answering MM-Vet Emu2-Chat Params 37B #75 of 231 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Question Answering MM-Vet v2 Emu2-Chat GPT-4 score 38.0±0.1 #19 of 24 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

BASE

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