Papers › JetFormer: An Autoregressive Generative Model of Raw Images and Text

JetFormer: An Autoregressive Generative Model of Raw Images and Text

29 Nov 2024arXiv:2411.19722archive 2025-07-28

Michael Tschannen, André Susano Pinto, Alexander Kolesnikov

Removing modeling constraints and unifying architectures across domains has been a key driver of the recent progress in training large multimodal models. However, most of these models still rely on many separately trained components such as modality-specific encoders and decoders. In this work, we further streamline joint generative modeling of images and text. We propose an autoregressive decoder-only transformer - JetFormer - which is trained to directly maximize the likelihood of raw data, without relying on any separately pretrained components, and can understand and generate both text and images. Specifically, we leverage a normalizing flow model to obtain a soft-token image representation that is jointly trained with an autoregressive multimodal transformer. The normalizing flow model serves as both an image encoder for perception tasks and an image decoder for image generation tasks during inference. JetFormer achieves text-to-image generation quality competitive with recent VQ-VAE- and VAE-based baselines. These baselines rely on pretrained image autoencoders, which are trained with a complex mixture of losses, including perceptual ones. At the same time, JetFormer demonstrates robust image understanding capabilities. To the best of our knowledge, JetFormer is the first model that is capable of generating high-fidelity images and producing strong log-likelihood bounds.

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text_to_image_retrieval_eval google-research/big_vision/big_vision/evaluators/proj/image_text/image_text_retrieval.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong fingerprinted Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 71393273a1210e33 · report
right_align google-research/big_vision/big_vision/models/proj/jetformer/jetformer.py official repository ran · fixture could not drive it fingerprinted Apache-2.0 (permissive) · ecdd49907e267cdc · report
image_to_text_retrieval_eval google-research/big_vision/big_vision/evaluators/proj/image_text/image_text_retrieval.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · fa422d5f3b0b46d9 · report

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DecoderImage GenerationText to Image GenerationText-to-Image Generation

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