Visual Bridge: Universal Visual Perception Representations Generating

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Authors: Association for Artificial Intelligence 2026, Shiqing Dou, Yilin Gao, Dongsheng Jiang, Junzhou Li, Yin Li, Shugong Xu, Zhiheng Yu
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Abstract

Recent advances in diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in isolated computer vision tasks such as text-to-image generation, depth estimation, and optical flow. However, these models are often restricted by a ``single-task-single-model'' paradigm, severely limiting their generalizability and scalability in multi-task scenarios. Motivated by the cross-domain generalization ability of large language models, we propose a universal visual perception framework based on \emph{flow matching} that can generate diverse visual representations across multiple tasks. Our approach formulates the process as a universal flow-matching problem from image patch tokens to task-specific representations rather than an independent generation or regression problem. By leveraging a strong self-supervised foundation model as the anchor and introducing a multi-scale, circular task embedding mechanism, our method learns a universal velocity field to bridge the gap between heterogeneous tasks, supporting efficient and flexible representation transfer. Extensive experiments on classification, detection, segmentation, depth estimation, and image-text retrieval demonstrate that our model achieves competitive performance in both zero-shot and fine-tuned settings, outperforming prior generalist and several specialist models. Ablation studies further validate the robustness, scalability, and generalization of our framework. Our work marks a significant step towards general-purpose visual perception, providing a solid foundation for future research in universal vision modeling.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning Advanced Neural Network Applications Multimodal Machine Learning Applications

Publication details

Journal / source
Underline Science Inc.
Publication date
7 January 2026
Language
EN