Multimodal AI

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

ZZhixiang WeiYYi LiZZhehan KanXXinghua JiangZZuwei LongSShifeng LiuHHongze ShenWWei LiuXXiaoyu TanHHaojia LinYYubo ZhuQQianyu LiDDi YinHHaoyu CaoWWeibo GuXXin LiYYinsong LiuDDeqiang JiangXXing SunYYunsheng WuMMingkong TangSShuangyin LiuLLexiang TangHHaodong LinJJunru LuJJiarui QinLLingfeng QiaoRRuizhi QiaoBBo KeJJianfeng HeKKe LiYYangning LiYYunhang ShenMMengdan ZhangPPeixian ChenKKun YinBBing LiuYYunfei WuHHuang ChenZZhongpeng CaiXXiaotian Li
Published
January 27, 2026
Authors
41

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.

Keywords

Vision-Language Modelsautoregressive supervisionvision-as-targetvision-as-inputvisual tokensmultimodal comprehensionvision-centric tasksgeneralist visual agents

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