@inproceedings{tai-etal-2024-pixar,
title = "{PIXAR}: Auto-Regressive Language Modeling in Pixel Space",
author = "Tai, Yintao and
Liao, Xiyang and
Suglia, Alessandro and
Vergari, Antonio",
editor = "Ku, Lun-Wei and
Martins, Andre and
Srikumar, Vivek",
booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024",
month = aug,
year = "2024",
address = "Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.874",
pages = "14673--14695",
abstract = "Recent work showed the possibility of building open-vocabulary large language models (LLMs) that directly operate on pixel representations. These models are implemented as autoencoders that reconstruct masked patches of rendered text.However, these pixel-based LLMs are limited to discriminative tasks (e.g., classification) and, similar to BERT, cannot be used to generate text.Therefore, they cannot be used for generative tasks such as free-form question answering. In this work, we introduce PIXAR, the first pixel-based autoregressive LLM that performs text generation. Consisting of only a decoder, PIXAR can perform free-form generative tasks while keeping the number of parameters on par with previous encoder-decoder models.Furthermore, we highlight the challenges of generating text as non-noisy images and show this is due to using a maximum likelihood objective. To overcome this problem, we propose an adversarial pretraining stage that improves the readability and accuracy of PIXAR by 8.1 on LAMBADA and 8.5 on bAbI{---} making it comparable to GPT-2 on text generation tasks.This paves the way to build open-vocabulary LLMs that operate on perceptual input only and calls into question the necessity of the usual symbolic input representation, i.e., text as (sub)tokens.",
}
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<abstract>Recent work showed the possibility of building open-vocabulary large language models (LLMs) that directly operate on pixel representations. These models are implemented as autoencoders that reconstruct masked patches of rendered text.However, these pixel-based LLMs are limited to discriminative tasks (e.g., classification) and, similar to BERT, cannot be used to generate text.Therefore, they cannot be used for generative tasks such as free-form question answering. In this work, we introduce PIXAR, the first pixel-based autoregressive LLM that performs text generation. Consisting of only a decoder, PIXAR can perform free-form generative tasks while keeping the number of parameters on par with previous encoder-decoder models.Furthermore, we highlight the challenges of generating text as non-noisy images and show this is due to using a maximum likelihood objective. To overcome this problem, we propose an adversarial pretraining stage that improves the readability and accuracy of PIXAR by 8.1 on LAMBADA and 8.5 on bAbI— making it comparable to GPT-2 on text generation tasks.This paves the way to build open-vocabulary LLMs that operate on perceptual input only and calls into question the necessity of the usual symbolic input representation, i.e., text as (sub)tokens.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T PIXAR: Auto-Regressive Language Modeling in Pixel Space
%A Tai, Yintao
%A Liao, Xiyang
%A Suglia, Alessandro
%A Vergari, Antonio
%Y Ku, Lun-Wei
%Y Martins, Andre
%Y Srikumar, Vivek
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024
%D 2024
%8 August
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting
%F tai-etal-2024-pixar
%X Recent work showed the possibility of building open-vocabulary large language models (LLMs) that directly operate on pixel representations. These models are implemented as autoencoders that reconstruct masked patches of rendered text.However, these pixel-based LLMs are limited to discriminative tasks (e.g., classification) and, similar to BERT, cannot be used to generate text.Therefore, they cannot be used for generative tasks such as free-form question answering. In this work, we introduce PIXAR, the first pixel-based autoregressive LLM that performs text generation. Consisting of only a decoder, PIXAR can perform free-form generative tasks while keeping the number of parameters on par with previous encoder-decoder models.Furthermore, we highlight the challenges of generating text as non-noisy images and show this is due to using a maximum likelihood objective. To overcome this problem, we propose an adversarial pretraining stage that improves the readability and accuracy of PIXAR by 8.1 on LAMBADA and 8.5 on bAbI— making it comparable to GPT-2 on text generation tasks.This paves the way to build open-vocabulary LLMs that operate on perceptual input only and calls into question the necessity of the usual symbolic input representation, i.e., text as (sub)tokens.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.874
%P 14673-14695
Markdown (Informal)
[PIXAR: Auto-Regressive Language Modeling in Pixel Space](https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.874) (Tai et al., Findings 2024)
ACL
- Yintao Tai, Xiyang Liao, Alessandro Suglia, and Antonio Vergari. 2024. PIXAR: Auto-Regressive Language Modeling in Pixel Space. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, pages 14673–14695, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.