4M-21: An Any-to-Any Vision Model for Tens of Tasks and Modalities

*Equal Contributors

Current multimodal and multitask foundation models like 4M or UnifiedIO show promising results, but in practice their out-of-the-box abilities to accept diverse inputs and perform diverse tasks are limited by the (usually rather small) number of modalities and tasks they are trained on. In this paper, we significantly expand upon the capabilities of 4M by training it on tens of highly diverse modalities and by performing co-training on large-scale multimodal datasets and text corpora. This includes training on several semantic and geometric modalities, feature maps from recent state of the art models like DINOv2 and ImageBind, pseudo labels of specialist models like SAM and 4DHumans, and a range of new modalities that allow for novel ways to interact with the model and steer the generation, for example image metadata or color palettes.

A crucial step in this process is performing tokenization on various modalities, whether they are image-like, neural network feature maps, vectors, structured data like instance segmentation or human poses, or data that can be represented as text.

Through this, we are able to expand on the out-of-the-box capabilities of multimodal models. This enables more fine-grained and controllable multimodal generation capabilities and allows us to study the distillation of models trained on diverse data and objectives into a unified model. We successfully scale the training to a three billion parameter model using tens of modalities and different datasets, observing promising scaling trends.