VARGPT-v1.1: Improve Visual Autoregressive Large Unified Model via Iterative Instruction Tuning and Reinforcement Learning

In this work, we present VARGPT-v1.1, an advanced unified visual autoregressive model that builds upon our previous framework VARGPT. The model preserves the dual paradigm of next-token prediction for visual understanding and next-scale generation for image synthesis. Specifically, VARGPT-v1.1 integrates: (1) a novel training strategy combining iterative visual instruction tuning with reinforcement learning through Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), (2) an expanded training corpus containing 8.3M visual-generative instruction pairs, (3) an upgraded language model backbone using Qwen2, (4) enhanced image generation resolution, and (5) emergent image editing capabilities without architectural modifications. These advancements enable VARGPT-v1.1 to achieve state-of-the-art performance in multimodal understanding and text-to-image instruction-following tasks, demonstrating significant improvements in both comprehension and generation metrics. Notably, through visual instruction tuning, the model acquires image editing functionality while maintaining architectural consistency with its predecessor, revealing the potential for unified visual understanding, generation, and editing. Our findings suggest that well-designed unified visual autoregressive models can effectively adopt flexible training strategies from large language models (LLMs), exhibiting promising scalability. The codebase and model weights are publicly available atthis https URL.

@article{zhuang2025_2504.02949,
  title={ VARGPT-v1.1: Improve Visual Autoregressive Large Unified Model via Iterative Instruction Tuning and Reinforcement Learning },
  author={ Xianwei Zhuang and Yuxin Xie and Yufan Deng and Dongchao Yang and Liming Liang and Jinghan Ru and Yuguo Yin and Yuexian Zou },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.02949},
  year={ 2025 }
}