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Studying Image Tokenizers as Visual Languages in Unified Multimodal Models

A controlled autoregressive testbed shows validation losses must be analyzed per task, and image tokenizer choice affects joint multimodal text modeling.

Researchers built a pure-autoregressive testbed to study image tokenizers as the 'visual language' of unified multimodal models, tracking task-specific validation losses during multimodal continual pretraining across text, image, text-to-image (T2I), and image-to-text (I2T) prediction. They found that losses exhibit distinct scaling behavior per task and rank tokenizers differently, and that I2T loss over a shared text vocabulary gives a more consistent loss–performance signal than T2I loss. Better reconstruction does not necessarily yield lower task-specific losses or stronger downstream performance, and tokenizer choice can affect text modeling under joint optimization. Case studies examine the discriminator, semantic supervision, and vocabulary size design axes.

Hugging Face daily papers · 8d agoAI research1

Studying Image Tokenizers as Visual Languages in Unified Multimodal Models

A controlled pure-autoregressive testbed shows task-specific validation losses rank image tokenizers differently, with I2T loss the most consistent signal.

Researchers built a controlled pure-autoregressive testbed and tracked task-specific validation losses during multimodal continual pretraining across text, image, text-to-image (T2I), and image-to-text (I2T) prediction. They find losses should be analyzed per task because they exhibit distinct scaling behavior and rank tokenizers differently, and that the loss-performance relationship depends on the predicted token space. I2T loss, computed over a shared text vocabulary, correlates consistently with both generation and visual understanding performance after supervised finetuning. Case studies revisit the discriminator, semantic supervision, and vocabulary size as tokenizer design axes.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 7d agoAI research1

We got admin access to Baseten's production GitHub in 25 minutes

Strix autonomous hacking agent extracted a working GitHub token with repo admin rights from Baseten's public Harbor image; Baseten rotated it next day.

Strix, an autonomous hacking agent, scanned *.baseten.co without credentials and found a public Harbor container registry project anonymously exposing the baseten/baseten-app image. A GitHub personal access token for basetenbot, embedded in Docker build history since March 2023, still worked in July 2026 and granted admin/push rights to basetenlabs/baseten, flux-cd, and homebrew-tap plus read/write on private customer repos. Baseten, valued at $13 billion, confirmed the issue as critical and rotated the token within a day.

Reason Through the Latent! Making Latent Visual Reasoning Necessary

Researchers introduce CVRR, forcing multimodal models to rely on recurrent latent computation rather than accessible image tokens, validated via causal interventions and benchmarks.

The paper presents Causal Visual Recurrent Reasoning (CVRR), which makes recurrent hidden-state computation the required image-conditioned path for prediction in vision-language models. Before decoding, visual states and the original multimodal KV cache are removed so only the final recurrent state carries image information to the answer. CVRR retains strong performance on V*, MMVP, BLINK, and MME-RealWorld-Lite while comparable latent reasoners fail under the same constraint. Causal interventions show predictions remain sensitive to recurrent content and that persistent visual evidence causally revises the recurrent trajectory.

Hugging Face daily papers · 10d agoAI research

Agnes-AI/Agnes-3.0-Flash — new model trending #30 on Hugging Face

Agnes AI releases open-weight Agnes-3.0-Flash Preview, a 33B multimodal model with 262k-token context under Apache 2.0.

Agnes AI released Agnes-3.0-Flash Preview, an open-weights multimodal checkpoint with 33B parameters and a 262,144-token context window under Apache 2.0. The model supports text, image, and video understanding, tool calling, and adjustable reasoning effort. The repo clarifies this preview checkpoint is distinct from the production/API Agnes 3.0 Flash model, which uses a different configuration with a 1M-token context window. Reported reference results include IFBench 74.20 and SciCode 38.08 against peers such as Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, Kimi K2.5, and MiniMax M3.

Hugging Face trending models · 4d agoModel release

ChatGPT Images 2.5: Faster, more precise, but not the same for everyone

OpenAI released GPT-Image-2.5 (Flare and Sunburst variants), cutting image generation latency up to 50% and improving multi-round edit consistency.

OpenAI launched GPT-Image-2.5 in two API variants: Flare, the faster default with higher quality than GPT-Image-2 at up to 50% lower latency, and Sunburst, built for precise multi-round edits. Both cost $8 per million input and $30 per million output tokens, with new xhigh and max quality tiers; a max-tier 1024x1024 image runs roughly $0.21. Testing found edit consistency strong in ChatGPT Work but inconsistent in Chat, and OpenAI has not documented how ChatGPT routes users between the models.

The Decoder · 7d agoModel release

[AINews] 10% worse, 100x cheaper, 10000x faster: Why Simulation is taking over

Latent Space argues AI training pipeline stages—rewards, data, teachers, curricula, environments—are flipping from human-made to model-made simulation.

Latent Space's AINews essay traces how each component of AI training has turned synthetic since 2022: reward models (InstructGPT, RLAIF), synthetic pretraining data (Microsoft Phi, NVIDIA Nemotron-4 340B), model teachers (Alpaca, DeepSeek-R1 distillation), and self-generated curricula (Self-Rewarding Language Models, SPIN). In 2026 it highlights Karpathy's autoresearch loop—700 experiments yielding 20 kept improvements, cutting GPT-2 training time from 2.02 to 1.80 hours—and Z.ai's GLM-5.3 fully synthetic RL environment, judging, and verification stack. It frames these shifts as 'simulation': 10% worse but 100x cheaper and 10,000x faster than human equivalents.

Latent Space · 25d agoAI industry

[AINews] Claude Fable/Mythos 5.1: new SOTA model, 75% cache price cut but 70% more output tokens

Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1, claiming new SOTA benchmarks, with 75% cache-read price cut and 1M-token context.

Anthropic released Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 as flagship models for coding and knowledge work, with a 1M-token context window and pricing of $10/$50 per million input/output tokens and cache reads cut 75% to $0.25. Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index scored Fable 5.1 at 66 versus 63 for Claude Opus 5, with HLE at 59.1% and Terminal-Bench v2.1 at 91.4%, though per-task cost rose ~20% due to 1.7x output token usage. Community analysis suggested Fable and Mythos may share underlying weights with different safety/routing behavior, and release notes highlighted Enterprise Frontier Safeguards and zero-data-retention support.

Latent Space · 14d agoModel release2

H Company Releases NeoMME: A Family of 260M and 800M Single-Tower Multimodal Encoders That Drop the Vision Tower and Causal Decoder

H Company released NeoMME, 260M/800M single-tower multimodal encoders matching 3.75B ColQwen2.5 on ViDoRe v3 while being 14.4x smaller, under Apache 2.0.

H Company released NeoMME, a family of 262,937,906- and 793,715,032-parameter bidirectional encoders that process text and raw 32x32 image patches in a single tower, pretrained via masked diffusion and released under Apache 2.0 with day-zero Hugging Face Transformers support. NeoMME-Retriever-260M reaches 0.523 nDCG@10 on ViDoRe v3, matching 3.75B-parameter ColQwen2.5 while being 14.4x smaller; the 800M model scores 0.556. Hierarchical token pooling with int8 and binary quantization shrinks late-interaction indexes from roughly 1.5 MB to 6 kB per page while retaining 95.19% of nDCG@10; text-only BEIR retrieval remains a weak spot.

MarkTechPost · 9d agoAI research

Augustinian BabyLM: What Ostensive Definition Can and Cannot Teach a Small Language Model

Study shows visually grounded token embeddings in a small masked LM persist through training and improve object-property knowledge, but escape standard BabyLM benchmarks.

The paper implements ostensive definition for a small DeBERTa masked language model trained on 10M words, seeding visually grounded tokens with embeddings derived from labeled image regions before training. Visual initialization leaves a persistent, seed-replicated advantage on object-property knowledge (COMPS) and a corpus-tailored Visual-Property Swap benchmark covering color, material, size, and shape, but has no effect on most BabyLM grammar benchmarks. Synthetic grounding of previously unseeded words causally transfers the advantage to exactly those words.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 5d agoAI research

[AINews] DeepSeek v4.1-Flash: 763B-P8B-D16B novel causal Encoder–Decoder architecture with vision marks the Return of the Whale

DeepSeek released V4.1-Flash, an open-weight 763B-parameter model with a novel causal encoder-decoder architecture, 1M context, vision input, and MIT license.

DeepSeek launched V4.1-Flash, an open-weight MIT-licensed model using a novel causal encoder-decoder architecture with 763B total parameters and asymmetric active parameters: 8B for prefill and 16B for decode. It supports 1M-token context and text+image input, priced at $0.30 per 1M input and $1.20 per 1M output tokens with a 50% off-peak discount. Artificial Analysis scored it 40 on its Intelligence Index, above DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813, and Vals ranked it the #1 open-weight model ahead of Kimi K3. Baseten shipped day-0 support and Ollama began rolling it out to paid subscribers.

Latent Space · 4d agoModel release 7 sources1

AI spend per employee slumped at top firms in August — summer doldrums or a warning sign?

Ramp data across 70,000 companies shows August AI adoption grew just 0.4% while per-employee spend at top-spending firms fell nearly 10% to $7,205 amid declining token prices.

Ramp's spending data shows 56% of its customers paid for AI products in August, up only 0.4% month-over-month, with spend per employee in the top 1% of firms down almost 10% to $7,205. Average token costs have dropped to $0.68 per million tokens from a 2026 peak of $1.15 in March after price cuts by OpenAI and Anthropic, and the labs have not yet offset the cuts with volume, with customers shifting to cheaper models like ChatGPT 5.6-Terra and Claude Sonnet. The US Census Bureau's broader survey shows only 22% of businesses report using AI, suggesting Ramp's tech-heavy client base overstates adoption, while only 6.4% of AI-spending businesses used model-serving or inference platforms in August.

TechCrunch · AI · 7d agoAI industry

Google's new AI model predicts the future from sales data, weather, and discount schedules

Google Research released TimesFM-3, a 330M-parameter multivariate time series forecasting model that tops Gift-Eval, FEV-Bench, and Time benchmarks and is on Hugging Face.

Google Research released TimesFM-3, a 330-million-parameter Transformer-based time series forecasting model trained on more than one trillion real and synthetic data points. It works zero-shot and adds multivariate support, ingesting related series, historical-only covariates, and known future events such as discount schedules and weather forecasts, while filling all future time steps in a single one-shot pass. Google reports first place among pretrained forecasting models on Gift-Eval, FEV-Bench, and Time, ahead of Amazon's Chronos-2, the Toto-2.0 family, and its own TimesFM-2.5. Weights are available on GitHub and Hugging Face, with BigQuery integration planned in the coming weeks.

The Decoder · 4d agoModel release2

VoT: Vision-of-Thought for Unified Multimodal Representation Alignment

Researchers propose Vision-of-Thought (VoT), a discrete visual-planning token layer between VLMs and diffusion transformers improving text-to-image semantic alignment.

VoT introduces a discrete visual-thinking layer between vision-language models and diffusion transformers, letting the VLM act as a multimodal planner that emits tokens describing objects and layouts before pixel generation. A specialized VoT tokenizer is trained with VLM alignment, feature reconstruction, and vector-quantization losses. Experiments show improved semantic alignment and a structured, interpretable interface for controllable generation.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 8d agoAI research

CoVeR: Coverage-Based Token Pruning for Multi-View 3D Reasoning in VLMs

CoVeR, a training-free coverage-based token pruner, preserves 93.5% of VLM 3D-reasoning performance using only about 8% of visual tokens.

Researchers introduce CoVeR, a deterministic, training-free selector that chooses visual tokens to cover every region of a multi-view 3D scene using only token coordinates. Unlike learned-importance and voxelization pruners, it enforces an exact per-scene token budget, avoids saturation plateaus, and prevents near-duplicate selections. Experiments across four vision-language models show it surpasses prior state of the art by 3.9 percentage points on average across three 3D reasoning benchmarks.

Hugging Face daily papers · 8d agoAI research