Everything is a Video: Unifying Modalities through Next-Frame Prediction

TL;DR

This paper introduces a unified framework that reformulates diverse multimodal tasks as next-frame prediction problems, enabling a single model to handle multiple modalities seamlessly and improve generalization across tasks.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel task reformulation approach that unifies multimodal learning into a single next-frame prediction framework, reducing the need for modality-specific components.

Findings

Model generalizes across text, image, audio, and video modalities.

Achieves competitive performance on various multimodal tasks.

Simplifies multimodal model design and enhances transferability.

Abstract

Multimodal learning, which involves integrating information from various modalities such as text, images, audio, and video, is pivotal for numerous complex tasks like visual question answering, cross-modal retrieval, and caption generation. Traditional approaches rely on modality-specific encoders and late fusion techniques, which can hinder scalability and flexibility when adapting to new tasks or modalities. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel framework that extends the concept of task reformulation beyond natural language processing (NLP) to multimodal learning. We propose to reformulate diverse multimodal tasks into a unified next-frame prediction problem, allowing a single model to handle different modalities without modality-specific components. This method treats all inputs and outputs as sequential frames in a video, enabling seamless integration of modalities and effective knowledge transfer across tasks. Our approach is evaluated on a range of tasks, including text-to-text, image-to-text, video-to-video, video-to-text, and audio-to-text, demonstrating the model's ability to generalize across modalities with minimal adaptation. We show that task reformulation can significantly simplify multimodal model design across various tasks, laying the groundwork for more generalized multimodal foundation models.