Bo Zhao

Xinlong Wang, Xiaosong Zhang, Zhengxiong Luo et al. · tsinghua

While next-token prediction is considered a promising path towards artificial general intelligence, it has struggled to excel in multimodal tasks, which are still dominated by diffusion models (e.g., Stable Diffusion) and compositional approaches (e.g., CLIP combined with LLMs). In this paper, we introduce Emu3, a new suite of state-of-the-art multimodal models trained solely with next-token prediction. By tokenizing images, text, and videos into a discrete space, we train a single transformer from scratch on a mixture of multimodal sequences. Emu3 outperforms several well-established task-specific models in both generation and perception tasks, surpassing flagship models such as SDXL and LLaVA-1.6, while eliminating the need for diffusion or compositional architectures. Emu3 is also capable of generating high-fidelity video via predicting the next token in a video sequence. We simplify complex multimodal model designs by converging on a singular focus: tokens, unlocking great potential for scaling both during training and inference. Our results demonstrate that next-token prediction is a promising path towards building general multimodal intelligence beyond language. We open-source key techniques and models to support further research in this direction.

Xiao Ma, Guang Zheng, Chi Xu et al.

Characterizing urban environments with broad coverages and high precision is more important than ever for achieving the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as half of the world's populations are living in cities. Urban building height as a fundamental 3D urban structural feature has far-reaching applications. However, so far, producing readily available datasets of recent urban building heights with fine spatial resolutions and global coverages remains a challenging task. Here, we provide an up-to-date global product of urban building heights based on a fine grid size of 150 m around 2020 by combining the spaceborne lidar instrument of GEDI and multi-sourced data including remotely sensed images (i.e., Landsat-8, Sentinel-2, and Sentinel-1) and topographic data. Our results revealed that the estimated method of building height samples based on the GEDI data was effective with 0.78 of Pearson's r and 3.67 m of RMSE in comparison to the reference data. The mapping product also demonstrated good performance as indicated by its strong correlation with the reference data (i.e., Pearson's r = 0.71, RMSE = 4.60 m). Compared with the currently existing products, our global urban building height map holds the ability to provide a higher spatial resolution (i.e., 150 m) with a great level of inherent details about the spatial heterogeneity and flexibility of updating using the GEDI samples as inputs. This work will boost future urban studies across many fields including climate, environmental, ecological, and social sciences.

Junjun Hu, Yanhao Zhu, Bo Zhao et al.

One of the challenges of logo recognition lies in the diversity of forms, such as symbols, texts or a combination of both; further, logos tend to be extremely concise in design while similar in appearance, suggesting the difficulty of learning discriminative representations. To investigate the variety and representation of logo, we introduced Makeup216, the largest and most complex logo dataset in the field of makeup, captured from the real world. It comprises of 216 logos and 157 brands, including 10,019 images and 37,018 annotated logo objects. In addition, we found that the marginal background around the pure logo can provide a important context information and proposed an adversarial attention representation framework (AAR) to attend on the logo subject and auxiliary marginal background separately, which can be combined for better representation. Our proposed framework achieved competitive results on Makeup216 and another large-scale open logo dataset, which could provide fresh thinking for logo recognition. The dataset of Makeup216 and the code of the proposed framework will be released soon.