Papers › Vary: Scaling up the Vision Vocabulary for Large Vision-Language Models

Vary: Scaling up the Vision Vocabulary for Large Vision-Language Models

11 Dec 2023arXiv:2312.06109archive 2025-07-28

Haoran Wei, Lingyu Kong, Jinyue Chen, Liang Zhao, Zheng Ge, Jinrong Yang, Jianjian Sun, Chunrui Han, Xiangyu Zhang

Modern Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) enjoy the same vision vocabulary -- CLIP, which can cover most common vision tasks. However, for some special vision task that needs dense and fine-grained vision perception, e.g., document-level OCR or chart understanding, especially in non-English scenarios, the CLIP-style vocabulary may encounter low efficiency in tokenizing the vision knowledge and even suffer out-of-vocabulary problem. Accordingly, we propose Vary, an efficient and effective method to scale up the vision vocabulary of LVLMs. The procedures of Vary are naturally divided into two folds: the generation and integration of a new vision vocabulary. In the first phase, we devise a vocabulary network along with a tiny decoder-only transformer to produce the desired vocabulary via autoregression. In the next, we scale up the vanilla vision vocabulary by merging the new one with the original one (CLIP), enabling the LVLMs can quickly garner new features. Compared to the popular BLIP-2, MiniGPT4, and LLaVA, Vary can maintain its vanilla capabilities while enjoying more excellent fine-grained perception and understanding ability. Specifically, Vary is competent in new document parsing features (OCR or markdown conversion) while achieving 78.2% ANLS in DocVQA and 36.2% in MMVet. Our code will be publicly available on the homepage.

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Code

Ucas-HaoranWei/Vary officialmentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Tasks

Chart UnderstandingDecoderOptical Character Recognition (OCR)Visual Question Answering

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Visual Question Answering MM-Vet Vary-base GPT-4 score 36.2 #148 of 231 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

CLIP

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