OmniCaptioner: One Captioner to Rule Them All

We propose OmniCaptioner, a versatile visual captioning framework for generating fine-grained textual descriptions across a wide variety of visual domains. Unlike prior methods limited to specific image types (e.g., natural images or geometric visuals), our framework provides a unified solution for captioning natural images, visual text (e.g., posters, UIs, textbooks), and structured visuals (e.g., documents, tables, charts). By converting low-level pixel information into semantically rich textual representations, our framework bridges the gap between visual and textual modalities. Our results highlight three key advantages: (i) Enhanced Visual Reasoning with LLMs, where long-context captions of visual modalities empower LLMs, particularly the DeepSeek-R1 series, to reason effectively in multimodal scenarios; (ii) Improved Image Generation, where detailed captions improve tasks like text-to-image generation and image transformation; and (iii) Efficient Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), which enables faster convergence with less data. We believe the versatility and adaptability of OmniCaptioner can offer a new perspective for bridging the gap between language and visual modalities.

Q-Adapt: Adapting LMM for Visual Quality Assessment with Progressive Instruction Tuning

The rapid advancement of Large Multi-modal Foundation Models (LMM) has paved the way for the possible Explainable Image Quality Assessment (EIQA) with instruction tuning from two perspectives: overall quality explanation, and attribute-wise perception answering. However, existing works usually overlooked the conflicts between these two types of perception explanations during joint instruction tuning, leading to insufficient perception understanding. To mitigate this, we propose a new paradigm for perception-oriented instruction tuning, i.e., Q-Adapt, which aims to eliminate the conflicts and achieve the synergy between these two EIQA tasks when adapting LMM, resulting in enhanced multi-faceted explanations of IQA. Particularly, we propose a progressive instruction tuning strategy by dividing the adaption process of LMM for EIQA into two stages, where the first stage empowers the LMM with universal perception knowledge tailored for two tasks using an efficient transfer learning strategy, i.e., LoRA, and the second stage introduces the instruction-adaptive visual prompt tuning to dynamically adapt visual features for the different instructions from two tasks. In this way, our proposed Q-Adapt can achieve a lightweight visual quality evaluator, demonstrating comparable performance and, in some instances, superior results across perceptual-related benchmarks and commonly-used IQA databases. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/yeppp27/Q-Adapt.

Lumina-Image 2.0: A Unified and Efficient Image Generative Framework

We introduce Lumina-Image 2.0, an advanced text-to-image generation framework that achieves significant progress compared to previous work, Lumina-Next. Lumina-Image 2.0 is built upon two key principles: (1) Unification - it adopts a unified architecture (Unified Next-DiT) that treats text and image tokens as a joint sequence, enabling natural cross-modal interactions and allowing seamless task expansion. Besides, since high-quality captioners can provide semantically well-aligned text-image training pairs, we introduce a unified captioning system, Unified Captioner (UniCap), specifically designed for T2I generation tasks. UniCap excels at generating comprehensive and accurate captions, accelerating convergence and enhancing prompt adherence. (2) Efficiency - to improve the efficiency of our proposed model, we develop multi-stage progressive training strategies and introduce inference acceleration techniques without compromising image quality. Extensive evaluations on academic benchmarks and public text-to-image arenas show that Lumina-Image 2.0 delivers strong performances even with only 2.6B parameters, highlighting its scalability and design efficiency. We have released our training details, code, and models at https://github.com/Alpha-VLLM/Lumina-Image-2.0.

Hybrid Agents for Image Restoration

Existing Image Restoration (IR) studies typically focus on task-specific or universal modes individually, relying on the mode selection of users and lacking the cooperation between multiple task-specific/universal restoration modes. This leads to insufficient interaction for unprofessional users and limits their restoration capability for complicated real-world applications. In this work, we present HybridAgent, intending to incorporate multiple restoration modes into a unified image restoration model and achieve intelligent and efficient user interaction through our proposed hybrid agents. Concretely, we propose the hybrid rule of fast, slow, and feedback restoration agents. Here, the slow restoration agent optimizes the powerful multimodal large language model (MLLM) with our proposed instruction-tuning dataset to identify degradations within images with ambiguous user prompts and invokes proper restoration tools accordingly. The fast restoration agent is designed based on a lightweight large language model (LLM) via in-context learning to understand the user prompts with simple and clear requirements, which can obviate the unnecessary time/resource costs of MLLM. Moreover, we introduce the mixed distortion removal mode for our HybridAgents, which is crucial but not concerned in previous agent-based works. It can effectively prevent the error propagation of step-by-step image restoration and largely improve the efficiency of the agent system. We validate the effectiveness of HybridAgent with both synthetic and real-world IR tasks.

InternVQA: Advancing Compressed Video Quality Assessment with Distilling Large Foundation Model

Video quality assessment tasks rely heavily on the rich features required for video understanding, such as semantic information, texture, and temporal motion. The existing video foundational model, InternVideo2, has demonstrated strong potential in video understanding tasks due to its large parameter size and large-scale multimodal data pertaining. Building on this, we explored the transferability of InternVideo2 to video quality assessment under compression scenarios. To design a lightweight model suitable for this task, we proposed a distillation method to equip the smaller model with rich compression quality priors. Additionally, we examined the performance of different backbones during the distillation process. The results showed that, compared to other methods, our lightweight model distilled from InternVideo2 achieved excellent performance in compression video quality assessment.

IMAGINE-E: Image Generation Intelligence Evaluation of State-of-the-art Text-to-Image Models

With the rapid development of diffusion models, text-to-image(T2I) models have made significant progress, showcasing impressive abilities in prompt following and image generation. Recently launched models such as FLUX.1 and Ideogram2.0, along with others like Dall-E3 and Stable Diffusion 3, have demonstrated exceptional performance across various complex tasks, raising questions about whether T2I models are moving towards general-purpose applicability. Beyond traditional image generation, these models exhibit capabilities across a range of fields, including controllable generation, image editing, video, audio, 3D, and motion generation, as well as computer vision tasks like semantic segmentation and depth estimation. However, current evaluation frameworks are insufficient to comprehensively assess these models' performance across expanding domains. To thoroughly evaluate these models, we developed the IMAGINE-E and tested six prominent models: FLUX.1, Ideogram2.0, Midjourney, Dall-E3, Stable Diffusion 3, and Jimeng. Our evaluation is divided into five key domains: structured output generation, realism, and physical consistency, specific domain generation, challenging scenario generation, and multi-style creation tasks. This comprehensive assessment highlights each model's strengths and limitations, particularly the outstanding performance of FLUX.1 and Ideogram2.0 in structured and specific domain tasks, underscoring the expanding applications and potential of T2I models as foundational AI tools. This study provides valuable insights into the current state and future trajectory of T2I models as they evolve towards general-purpose usability. Evaluation scripts will be released at https://github.com/jylei16/Imagine-e.

UniMIC: Towards Universal Multi-modality Perceptual Image Compression

We present UniMIC, a universal multi-modality image compression framework, intending to unify the rate-distortion-perception (RDP) optimization for multiple image codecs simultaneously through excavating cross-modality generative priors. Unlike most existing works that need to design and optimize image codecs from scratch, our UniMIC introduces the visual codec repository, which incorporates amounts of representative image codecs and directly uses them as the basic codecs for various practical applications. Moreover, we propose multi-grained textual coding, where variable-length content prompt and compression prompt are designed and encoded to assist the perceptual reconstruction through the multi-modality conditional generation. In particular, a universal perception compensator is proposed to improve the perception quality of decoded images from all basic codecs at the decoder side by reusing text-assisted diffusion priors from stable diffusion. With the cooperation of the above three strategies, our UniMIC achieves a significant improvement of RDP optimization for different compression codecs, e.g., traditional and learnable codecs, and different compression costs, e.g., ultra-low bitrates. The code will be available in https://github.com/Amygyx/UniMIC .

LossAgent: Towards Any Optimization Objectives for Image Processing with LLM Agents

We present the first loss agent, dubbed LossAgent, for low-level image processing tasks, e.g., image super-resolution and restoration, intending to achieve any customized optimization objectives of low-level image processing in different practical applications. Notably, not all optimization objectives, such as complex hand-crafted perceptual metrics, text description, and intricate human feedback, can be instantiated with existing low-level losses, e.g., MSE loss. which presents a crucial challenge in optimizing image processing networks in an end-to-end manner. To eliminate this, our LossAgent introduces the powerful large language model (LLM) as the loss agent, where the rich textual understanding of prior knowledge empowers the loss agent with the potential to understand complex optimization objectives, trajectory, and state feedback from external environments in the optimization process of the low-level image processing networks. In particular, we establish the loss repository by incorporating existing loss functions that support the end-to-end optimization for low-level image processing. Then, we design the optimization-oriented prompt engineering for the loss agent to actively and intelligently decide the compositional weights for each loss in the repository at each optimization interaction, thereby achieving the required optimization trajectory for any customized optimization objectives. Extensive experiments on three typical low-level image processing tasks and multiple optimization objectives have shown the effectiveness and applicability of our proposed LossAgent. Code and pre-trained models will be available at https://github.com/lbc12345/LossAgent.

Get Large Language Models Ready to Speak: A Late-fusion Approach for Speech Generation

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing (NLP) with impressive performance across various text-based tasks. However, the extension of text-dominant LLMs to with speech generation tasks remains under-explored. In this work, we introduce a text-to-speech (TTS) system powered by a fine-tuned Llama model, named TTS-Llama, that achieves state-of-the-art speech synthesis performance. Building on TTS-Llama, we further propose MoLE-Llama, a text-and-speech multimodal LLM developed through purely late-fusion parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) and a mixture-of-expert architecture. Extensive empirical results demonstrate MoLE-Llama's competitive performance on both text-only question-answering (QA) and TTS tasks, mitigating catastrophic forgetting issue in either modality. Finally, we further explore MoLE-Llama in text-in-speech-out QA tasks, demonstrating its great potential as a multimodal dialog system capable of speech generation.

Enabling Beam Search for Language Model-Based Text-to-Speech Synthesis

Tokenising continuous speech into sequences of discrete tokens and modelling them with language models (LMs) has led to significant success in text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. Although these models can generate speech with high quality and naturalness, their synthesised samples can still suffer from artefacts, mispronunciation, word repeating, etc. In this paper, we argue these undesirable properties could partly be caused by the randomness of sampling-based strategies during the autoregressive decoding of LMs. Therefore, we look at maximisation-based decoding approaches and propose Temporal Repetition Aware Diverse Beam Search (TRAD-BS) to find the most probable sequences of the generated speech tokens. Experiments with two state-of-the-art LM-based TTS models demonstrate that our proposed maximisation-based decoding strategy generates speech with fewer mispronunciations and improved speaker consistency.