A More Word-like Image Tokenization for MLLMs

ArXi:2605.17954v1 Announce Type: cross Modern multimodal large language models (MLLMs) typically keep the language model fixed and train a visual projector that maps the pixels into a sequence of tokens in its embedding space, so that images can be presented in essentially the same form as text. However, the language model has been optimized to operate on discrete, semantically meaningful tokens, while prevailing visual projectors transform an image into a long stream of continuous and highly correlated embeddings.