Beyond Text: Frozen Large Language Models in Visual Signal Comprehension

Lei Zhu, Fangyun Wei, Yanye Lu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 27047-27057

In this work we investigate the potential of a large language model (LLM) to directly comprehend visual signals without the necessity of fine-tuning on multi-modal datasets. The foundational concept of our method views an image as a linguistic entity and translates it to a set of discrete words derived from the LLM's vocabulary. To achieve this we present the Vision-to-Language Tokenizer abbreviated as V2T Tokenizer which transforms an image into a "foreign language" with the combined aid of an encoder-decoder the LLM vocabulary and a CLIP model. With this innovative image encoding the LLM gains the ability not only for visual comprehension but also for image denoising and restoration in an auto-regressive fashion--crucially without any fine-tuning. We undertake rigorous experiments to validate our method encompassing understanding tasks like image recognition image captioning and visual question answering as well as image denoising tasks like inpainting outpainting deblurring and shift restoration. Code and models are available at https://github.com/zh460045050/V2L-Tokenizer.