This is the most important research in months: weโre now very close to having a single architecture to handle all modalities. The folks at Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI) just released Emu3, a single model that handles text, images, and videos all at once.
๐ช๐ต๐ฎ๐'๐ ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐ฏ๐ถ๐ด ๐ฑ๐ฒ๐ฎ๐น? ๐ Emu3 is the first model to truly unify all these different types of data (text, images, video) using just one simple trick: predicting the next token. And itโs only 8B, but really strong: ๐ผ๏ธ For image generation, it's matching the best specialized models out there, like SDXL. ๐๏ธ In vision tasks, it's outperforming top models like LLaVA-1.6-7B, which is a big deal for a model that wasn't specifically designed for this. ๐ฌ It's the first to nail video generation without using complicated diffusion techniques.
๐๐ผ๐ ๐ฑ๐ผ๐ฒ๐ ๐ถ๐ ๐๐ผ๐ฟ๐ธ? ๐งฉ Emu3 uses a special tokenizer (SBER-MoVQGAN) to turn images and video clips into sequences of 4,096 tokens. ๐ Then, it treats everything - text, images, and videos - as one long series of tokens to predict. ๐ฎ During training, it just tries to guess the next token, whether that's a word, part of an image, or a video frame.
๐๐ฎ๐๐ฒ๐ฎ๐๐ ๐ผ๐ป ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐๐๐น๐๐: ๐ In image generation, Emu3 beats SDXL, but itโs also much bigger (8B vs 3.5B). It would be more difficult to beat the real diffusion GOAT FLUX-dev. ๐ In vision, authors also donโt show a comparison against all the current SOTA models like Qwen-VL or Pixtral.
This approach is exciting because it's simple (next token prediction) and scalable(handles all sorts of data)!
2. Phi 3 Mini Vision 128k: A 4.5 billion-parameter, instruction-tuned vision model that has outperformed models such as Llava3 and Claude 3, and is providing stiff competition to Gemini 1Pro Vision. microsoft/Phi-3-vision-128k-instruct