FLAT: Resampling Image and Text into 1D Flexible-Length Aligned Transmodal Tokens for Retrieval and Generation
FLAT jointly trains a multimodal encoder with text-to-image and image-to-text decoders, producing flexible-length tokens that hit 83.1 GenEval on T2I after fine-tuning.
FLAT (Flexible-Length Aligned Transmodal representations) is a pre-training framework that jointly optimizes a shared multimodal encoder with T2I and I2T decoders, combining contrastive alignment with bidirectional cross-modal generative objectives. It maps visual and textual inputs into a unified continuous 1D sequence space and uses nested dropout over prefix-K tokens for dynamic output lengths. A single pre-training stage supports cross-modal retrieval and generation (71.1 GenEval), with task-specific fine-tuning reaching 83.1 GenEval on T2I, 40.5 BLEU-4 and 138.6 CIDEr on MS-COCO captioning, and strong Recall@5 on MS-COCO and Flickr30K.