STARFlow2: Bridging Language Models and Normalizing Flows for Unified Multimodal Generation
Unified multimodal models that understand, reason over, and generate interleaved text–image sequences remain structurally fragmented: existing approaches either sacrifice visual fidelity through discrete tokenization, impose structural asymmetry by combining causal text generation with iterative diffusion-based denoising, or degrade pretrained understanding when adapting vision-language models for generation. We observe that autoregressive normalizing flows are autoregressive Transformers—sharing the same causal mask, KV-cache mechanism, and left-to-right structure as LLMs—making them the most…
Normalizing flows (NFs) are end-to-end likelihood-based generative models for continuous data, and have recently regained attention with encouraging progress on image generation. Yet in the video generation domain, where spatiotemporal complexity and computational cost are substantially higher, state-of-the-art systems almost exclusively rely on diffusion-based models. In this work, we revisit…
We present STARFlow, a scalable generative model based on normalizing flows that achieves strong performance in high-resolution image synthesis. The core of STARFlow is Transformer Autoregressive Flow (TARFlow), which combines the expressive power of normalizing flows with the structured modeling capabilities of Autoregressive Transformers. We first establish the theoretical universality…
*Equal Contributors A dominant paradigm in large multimodal models is to pair a large language de- coder with a vision encoder. While it is well-known how to pre-train and tune language decoders for multimodal tasks, it is less clear how the vision encoder should be pre-trained. A de facto standard…