In plain words: One transformer learns text and images together: it predicts the next word for text and cleans up noisy pixels step by step for pictures. It scaled better than chopping images into word-like tokens, and at 7 billion parameters matched dedicated text and image generators.
Abstract · Transfusion: Predict the Next Token and Diffuse Images with One Multi-Modal Model
We introduce Transfusion, a recipe for training a multi-modal model over discrete and continuous data. Transfusion combines the language modeling loss function (next token prediction) with diffusion to train a single transformer over mixed-modality sequences. We pretrain multiple Transfusion models up to 7B parameters from scratch on a mixture of text and image data, establishing scaling laws with respect to a variety of uni- and cross-modal benchmarks. Our experiments show that Transfusion scales significantly better than quantizing images and training a language model over discrete image tokens. By introducing modality-specific encoding and decoding layers, we can further improve the performance of Transfusion models, and even compress each image to just 16 patches. We further demonstrate that scaling our Transfusion recipe to 7B parameters and 2T multi-modal tokens produces a model that can generate images and text on a par with similar scale diffusion models and language models, reaping the benefits of both worlds.
Chunting Zhou, Lili Yu, Arun Babu, Kushal Tirumala, Michihiro Yasunaga, Leonid Shamis, Jacob Kahn, Xuezhe Ma, Luke Zettlemoyer, Omer Levy
arXiv:2408.11039 · cs.AI, cs.CV · submitted Aug 20, 2024
abstract · pdf · html · 23 pages
When I ask a diffusion model to generate a chessboard, I’d expect the pieces to be placed randomly. We are getting closer to image generators that not only know what chess pieces look like but also where to place them.