Unified Vision Transformer with Native Resolution
Limeng Qiao, Yiyang Gan, Bairui Wang, Jie Qin, Shuang Xu, Siqi Yang, Lin Ma
Conventional Vision Transformer streamlines visual modeling by employing a uniform input resolution, which underestimates the inherent variability of natural visual data and incurs a cost in spatial-contextual fidelity. While preliminary explorations have superficially investigated native resolution modeling, existing works still lack systematic training recipe from the visual representation perspective. To bridge this gap, we introduce Unified Vision Transformer with Native Resolution, i.e. UniViTAR, a family of homogeneous vision foundation models tailored for unified visual modality and native resolution scenario in the era of multimodal. Our framework first conducts architectural upgrades to the vanilla paradigm by integrating multiple advanced components. Building upon these improvements, a progressive training paradigm is introduced, which strategically combines two core mechanisms: (1) resolution curriculum learning, transitioning from fixed-resolution pretraining to native resolution tuning, thereby leveraging ViT’s inherent adaptability to variable-length sequences, and (2) visual modality adaptation via inter-batch image-video switching, which balances computational efficiency with enhanced temporal reasoning. In parallel, a hybrid training framework further synergizes sigmoid-based contrastive loss with feature distillation from a frozen teacher model, thereby accelerating early-stage convergence. Finally, trained exclusively on public accessible image-caption data, our UniViTAR family across multiple model scales from 0.3B to 1B achieves state-of-the-art performance on a wide variety of visual-related tasks. The code and models will be available soon.