Patch-as-Decodable-Token: Towards Unified Multi-Modal Vision Tasks in
  MLLMs
Authors: name: Yongyi Su; name: Haojie Zhang; name: Shijie Li; name: Nanqing Liu; name: Jingyi Liao; name: Junyi Pan; name: Yuan Liu; name: Xiaofen Xing; name: Chong Sun; name: Chen Li; name: Nancy F. Chen; name: Shuicheng Yan; name: Xulei Yang; name: Xun Xu
Published: 2025-10-02 12:23:57

Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have advanced rapidly in recent
years. However, existing approaches for vision tasks often rely on indirect
representations, such as generating coordinates as text for detection, which
limits performance and prevents dense prediction tasks like segmentation. To
overcome these challenges, we introduce Patch-as-Decodable Token (PaDT), a
unified paradigm that enables MLLMs to directly generate both textual and
diverse visual outputs. Central to PaDT are Visual Reference Tokens (VRTs),
derived from visual patch embeddings of query images and interleaved seamlessly
with LLM's output textual tokens. A lightweight decoder then transforms LLM's
outputs into detection, segmentation, and grounding predictions. Unlike prior
methods, PaDT processes VRTs independently at each forward pass and dynamically
expands the embedding table, thus improving localization and differentiation
among similar objects. We further tailor a training strategy for PaDT by
randomly selecting VRTs for supervised fine-tuning and introducing a robust
per-token cross-entropy loss. Our empirical studies across four visual
perception and understanding tasks suggest PaDT consistently achieving
state-of-the-art performance, even compared with significantly larger MLLM
models. The code is available at https://github.com/Gorilla-Lab-SCUT/PaDT.