Youtu-VL: Unleashing Visual Potential via Unified Vision-Language Supervision

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Authors: Zhixiang Wei, Yi Li, Zhehan Kan, Xinghua Jiang, Zuwei Long, Shifeng Liu, Hongze Shen, Wei Liu, Xiaoyu Tan, Haojia Lin, Yubo Zhu, Qianyu Li
+29 more Di Yin, Haoyu Cao, Weibo Gu, Li, Xin, Yinsong Liu, Deqiang Jiang, Xing Sun, Yunsheng Wu, Mingkong Tang, Shuangyin Liu, Lexiang Tang, Haodong Lin, Junru Lu, Jiarui Qin, Lingfeng Qiao, Ruizhi Qiao, Bo Ke, Jianfeng He, Li, Ke, Yangning Li, Yunhang Shen, Mengdan Zhang, Peixian Chen, Yin, Kun, Liu, Bing, Yunfei Wu, Huang Chen, Zhongpeng Cai, Xiaotian Li
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Abstract

Despite the significant advancements represented by Vision-Language Models (VLMs), current architectures often exhibit limitations in retaining fine-grained visual information, leading to coarse-grained multimodal comprehension. We attribute this deficiency to a suboptimal training paradigm inherent in prevailing VLMs, which exhibits a text-dominant optimization bias by conceptualizing visual signals merely as passive conditional inputs rather than supervisory targets. To mitigate this, we introduce Youtu-VL, a framework leveraging the Vision-Language Unified Autoregressive Supervision (VLUAS) paradigm, which fundamentally shifts the optimization objective from ``vision-as-input'' to ``vision-as-target.'' By integrating visual tokens directly into the prediction stream, Youtu-VL applies unified autoregressive supervision to both visual details and linguistic content. Furthermore, we extend this paradigm to encompass vision-centric tasks, enabling a standard VLM to perform vision-centric tasks without task-specific additions. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate that Youtu-VL achieves competitive performance on both general multimodal tasks and vision-centric tasks, establishing a robust foundation for the development of comprehensive generalist visual agents.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Multimodal Machine Learning Applications Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning

Publication details

Journal / source
arXiv (Cornell University)
Publication date
27 January 2026
Document type
Preprint