Weilong Chai

CV
h-index3
6papers
11citations
Novelty67%
AI Score55

6 Papers

33.6AIJun 11, 2025Code
Ming-Omni: A Unified Multimodal Model for Perception and Generation

Inclusion AI, Biao Gong, Cheng Zou et al.

We propose Ming-Omni, a unified multimodal model capable of processing images, text, audio, and video, while demonstrating strong proficiency in both speech and image generation. Ming-Omni employs dedicated encoders to extract tokens from different modalities, which are then processed by Ling, an MoE architecture equipped with newly proposed modality-specific routers. This design enables a single model to efficiently process and fuse multimodal inputs within a unified framework, thereby facilitating diverse tasks without requiring separate models, task-specific fine-tuning, or structural redesign. Importantly, Ming-Omni extends beyond conventional multimodal models by supporting audio and image generation. This is achieved through the integration of an advanced audio decoder for natural-sounding speech and Ming-Lite-Uni for high-quality image generation, which also allow the model to engage in context-aware chatting, perform text-to-speech conversion, and conduct versatile image editing. Our experimental results showcase Ming-Omni offers a powerful solution for unified perception and generation across all modalities. Notably, our proposed Ming-Omni is the first open-source model we are aware of to match GPT-4o in modality support, and we release all code and model weights to encourage further research and development in the community.

22.3CVMay 5, 2025Code
Ming-Lite-Uni: Advancements in Unified Architecture for Natural Multimodal Interaction

Inclusion AI, Biao Gong, Cheng Zou et al.

We introduce Ming-Lite-Uni, an open-source multimodal framework featuring a newly designed unified visual generator and a native multimodal autoregressive model tailored for unifying vision and language. Specifically, this project provides an open-source implementation of the integrated MetaQueries and M2-omni framework, while introducing the novel multi-scale learnable tokens and multi-scale representation alignment strategy. By leveraging a fixed MLLM and a learnable diffusion model, Ming-Lite-Uni enables native multimodal AR models to perform both text-to-image generation and instruction based image editing tasks, expanding their capabilities beyond pure visual understanding. Our experimental results demonstrate the strong performance of Ming-Lite-Uni and illustrate the impressive fluid nature of its interactive process. All code and model weights are open-sourced to foster further exploration within the community. Notably, this work aligns with concurrent multimodal AI milestones - such as ChatGPT-4o with native image generation updated in March 25, 2025 - underscoring the broader significance of unified models like Ming-Lite-Uni on the path toward AGI. Ming-Lite-Uni is in alpha stage and will soon be further refined.

2.8CVDec 13, 2023Code
SpeedUpNet: A Plug-and-Play Adapter Network for Accelerating Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Weilong Chai, DanDan Zheng, Jiajiong Cao et al.

Text-to-image diffusion models (SD) exhibit significant advancements while requiring extensive computational resources. Existing acceleration methods usually require extensive training and are not universally applicable. LCM-LoRA, trainable once for diverse models, offers universality but rarely considers ensuring the consistency of generated content before and after acceleration. This paper proposes SpeedUpNet (SUN), an innovative acceleration module, to address the challenges of universality and consistency. Exploiting the role of cross-attention layers in U-Net for SD models, we introduce an adapter specifically designed for these layers, quantifying the offset in image generation caused by negative prompts relative to positive prompts. This learned offset demonstrates stability across a range of models, enhancing SUN's universality. To improve output consistency, we propose a Multi-Step Consistency (MSC) loss, which stabilizes the offset and ensures fidelity in accelerated content. Experiments on SD v1.5 show that SUN leads to an overall speedup of more than 10 times compared to the baseline 25-step DPM-solver++, and offers two extra advantages: (1) training-free integration into various fine-tuned Stable-Diffusion models and (2) state-of-the-art FIDs of the generated data set before and after acceleration guided by random combinations of positive and negative prompts. Code is available: https://williechai.github.io/speedup-plugin-for-stable-diffusions.github.io.

26.1CLJun 17
GraphPO: Graph-based Policy Optimization for Reasoning Models

Yuliang Zhan, Xinyu Tang, Jian Li et al.

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become a standard paradigm for enhancing the capability of large reasoning models. RLVR typically samples responses independently and optimizes the policy using from final answers. This paradigm has two limitations. First, independently responses often contain similar intermediate reasoning steps, causing redundant exploration and wasted computation. Second, sparse final-answer rewards make it hard to identify useful steps. Tree-based methods partly address this problem by sharing prefixes and comparing branches from the same prefix to provide fine-grained signals. However, tree branches are still expanded independently. When different branches reach similar reasoning states, they cannot share information and repeat similar exploration. Moreover, tree-based methods ignore such dispersion and only perform local comparisons within separate branches, which can lead to higher variance in advantage estimation. To address this challenge, we propose GraphPO (Graph-based Policy Optimization), a novel RL framework that represents rollouts as a directed acyclic graph, with reasoning steps as edges and semantic states summarized from the reasoning paths as nodes. GraphPO merges semantically equivalent reasoning paths into equivalence classes, allowing them to share suffixes and reallocating budget away from redundant expansions to diverse exploration. Furthermore, we assign efficiency advantages to incoming edges and correctness advantages to outgoing edges, thereby improving inference efficiency while deriving process supervision from outcome. Theory shows that GraphPO reduces advantage-estimation variance and enhances reasoning efficiency. Experiments on three LLMs across reasoning and agentic search benchmarks show that GraphPO consistently outperforms chain- and tree-based baselines with the same token budgets or response budgets.

26.8CVOct 8, 2025
Ming-UniVision: Joint Image Understanding and Generation with a Unified Continuous Tokenizer

Ziyuan Huang, DanDan Zheng, Cheng Zou et al.

Visual tokenization remains a core challenge in unifying visual understanding and generation within the autoregressive paradigm. Existing methods typically employ tokenizers in discrete latent spaces to align with the tokens from large language models, where the quantization errors can limit semantic expressiveness and degrade the capability of vision-language understanding. To address this, we introduce MingTok, a new family of visual tokenizers with a continuous latent space, for unified autoregressive generation and understanding. While understanding tasks favor discriminative high-dimensional features, generation tasks prefer compact low-level codes. Thus, to reconcile these competing demands, MingTok adopts a three-stage sequential architecture involving low-level encoding, semantic expansion, and visual reconstruction. Built on top of it, Ming-UniVision eliminates the need for task-specific visual representations, and unifies diverse vision-language tasks under a single autoregrsssive prediction paradigm. By formulating both understanding and generation as next-token prediction in a shared continuous space, it seamlessly supports multi-round, in-context tasks such as iterative understanding, generation and editing. Empirically, we find that using a unified continuous visual representation reconciles the competing requirements on the tokenizers by the understanding and generation tasks, thereby leading to state-of-the-art level performance across both domains. We hope our findings will facilitate unified visual tokenization in the continuous domain. Inference code and model weights are released to benefit community.

19.7CVJun 17, 2025
VideoMAR: Autoregressive Video Generatio with Continuous Tokens

Hu Yu, Biao Gong, Hangjie Yuan et al.

Masked-based autoregressive models have demonstrated promising image generation capability in continuous space. However, their potential for video generation remains under-explored. In this paper, we propose \textbf{VideoMAR}, a concise and efficient decoder-only autoregressive image-to-video model with continuous tokens, composing temporal frame-by-frame and spatial masked generation. We first identify temporal causality and spatial bi-directionality as the first principle of video AR models, and propose the next-frame diffusion loss for the integration of mask and video generation. Besides, the huge cost and difficulty of long sequence autoregressive modeling is a basic but crucial issue. To this end, we propose the temporal short-to-long curriculum learning and spatial progressive resolution training, and employ progressive temperature strategy at inference time to mitigate the accumulation error. Furthermore, VideoMAR replicates several unique capacities of language models to video generation. It inherently bears high efficiency due to simultaneous temporal-wise KV cache and spatial-wise parallel generation, and presents the capacity of spatial and temporal extrapolation via 3D rotary embeddings. On the VBench-I2V benchmark, VideoMAR surpasses the previous state-of-the-art (Cosmos I2V) while requiring significantly fewer parameters ($9.3\%$), training data ($0.5\%$), and GPU resources ($0.2\%$).