探索视觉与语言融合的预训练机制,发现视觉更需数据支持。
Beyond Language Modeling: An Exploration of Multimodal Pretraining
- 用统一框架分离训练视觉与语言,验证多模态协同机制。
- 视觉数据需求远超语言,且统一训练可自然生成世界建模能力。
- 专家混合架构(MoE)平衡模态差异,适合大规模多模态模型设计。
视觉世界为突破语言模型局限提供了关键路径。尽管该方向备受关注,但原生多模态模型的设计空间仍不清晰。本文通过从零开始的受控预训练实验,剥离语言预训练干扰,揭示影响多模态预训练的核心因素。采用Transfusion框架,以词元预测处理语言,以扩散模型处理视觉,训练包含文本、视频、图文对及动作条件视频的多样化数据。实验得出四大发现:(i) 表示自编码器(RAE)在视觉理解与生成上表现最优,提供理想的统一视觉表征;(ii) 视觉与语言数据具有互补性,协同提升下游任务性能;(iii) 统一多模态预训练自然催生世界建模能力,无需额外设计;(iv) 混合专家(MoE)架构实现高效多模态扩展,并天然促进模态专业化。通过IsoFLOP分析,我们计算出两模态的缩放规律,发现视觉比语言显著更依赖数据。MoE架构通过为语言提供高容量同时适应视觉的数据密集性,有效调和这一缩放不对称性,推动真正统一的多模态模型发展。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
The visual world offers a critical axis for advancing foundation models beyond language. Despite growing interest in this direction, the design space for native multimodal models remains opaque. We provide empirical clarity through controlled, from-scratch pretraining experiments, isolating the factors that govern multimodal pretraining without interference from language pretraining. We adopt the Transfusion framework, using next-token prediction for language and diffusion for vision, to train on diverse data including text, video, image-text pairs, and even action-conditioned video. Our experiments yield four key insights: (i) Representation Autoencoder (RAE) provides an optimal unified visual representation by excelling at both visual understanding and generation; (ii) visual and language data are complementary and yield synergy for downstream capabilities; (iii) unified multimodal pretraining leads naturally to world modeling, with capabilities emerging from general training; and (iv) Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) enables efficient and effective multimodal scaling while naturally inducing modality specialization. Through IsoFLOP analysis, we compute scaling laws for both modalities and uncover a scaling asymmetry: vision is significantly more data-hungry than language. We demonstrate that the MoE architecture harmonizes this scaling asymmetry by providing the high model capacity required by language while accommodating the data-intensive nature of vision, paving the way for truly unified multimodal models.
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