{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/vl-gpt-a-generative-pre-trained-transformer","title":"VL-GPT: A Generative Pre-trained Transformer for Vision and Language Understanding and Generation","arxiv_id":"2312.09251","date":"2023-12-14","proceeding":null,"authors":["Jinguo Zhu","Xiaohan Ding","Yixiao Ge","Yuying Ge","Sijie Zhao","Hengshuang Zhao","Xiaohua Wang","Ying Shan"],"abstract":"In this work, we introduce Vision-Language Generative Pre-trained Transformer (VL-GPT), a transformer model proficient at concurrently perceiving and generating visual and linguistic data. VL-GPT achieves a unified pre-training approach for both image and text modalities by employing a straightforward auto-regressive objective, thereby enabling the model to process image and text as seamlessly as a language model processes text. To accomplish this, we initially propose a novel image tokenizer-detokenizer framework for visual data, specifically designed to transform raw images into a sequence of continuous embeddings and reconstruct them accordingly. In combination with the existing text tokenizer and detokenizer, this framework allows for the encoding of interleaved image-text data into a multimodal sequence, which can subsequently be fed into the transformer model. Consequently, VL-GPT can perform large-scale pre-training on multimodal corpora utilizing a unified auto-regressive objective (i.e., next-token prediction). Upon completion of pre-training, VL-GPT exhibits remarkable zero-shot and few-shot performance across a diverse range of vision and language understanding and generation tasks, including image captioning, visual question answering, text-to-image generation, and more. Additionally, the pre-trained model retrains in-context learning capabilities when provided with multimodal prompts. We further conduct instruction tuning on our VL-GPT, highlighting its exceptional potential for multimodal assistance. The source code and model weights shall be released.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.09251v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.09251v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"vl-gpt-a-generative-pre-trained-transformer","repo_url":"https://github.com/ailab-cvc/vl-gpt","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"Apache-2.0"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"image-captioning","task_name":"Image Captioning"},{"task_slug":"image-generation","task_name":"Image Generation"},{"task_slug":"in-context-learning","task_name":"In-Context Learning"},{"task_slug":"language-modelling","task_name":"Language Modelling"},{"task_slug":"question-answering","task_name":"Question Answering"},{"task_slug":"text-to-image-generation-1","task_name":"Text to Image Generation"},{"task_slug":"text-to-image-generation","task_name":"Text-to-Image Generation"},{"task_slug":"visual-question-answering-1","task_name":"Visual Question Answering"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"absolute-position-encodings","method_name":"Absolute Position Encodings"},{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"bpe","method_name":"BPE"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"label-smoothing","method_name":"Label Smoothing"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"position-wise-feed-forward-layer","method_name":"Position-Wise Feed-Forward Layer"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"transformer","method_name":"Transformer"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2312.09251","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2312.09251","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}