Embodied Referring Expression Grounding is the task of enabling an agent to navigate in real environments and to localize a remote object based on natural language instructions. In this scenario, the agent needs to select one view for navigation at each step and identify a specific object among all candidate objects at the destination. However, most of the previous approaches fail to distinguish between views and objects, instead processing them using the vanilla vision encoder, which results in ambiguous representations of both views and objects. To address the above issues, we propose ViSMoE, which equips sparse Mixture-of-Experts with a visual-aware routing policy for the embodied agent. This framework processes different types of visual information specifically, resulting in discriminative visual representations for both views and objects. Experimental results on REVERIE and SOON datasets demonstrate that ViSMoE outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods, showing the superiority of our proposed method.
Semantic vision encoders have become a central visual interface for multimodal understanding and semantic conditioning in image generation. However, their final tokens discard fine-grained visual details, leading to poor pixel reconstruction and limiting their use in reconstruction-sensitive tasks such as image generation and editing. In this work, we ask whether understanding, generation, and editing can be modeled in a single visual representation space built from a pretrained semantic ViT. We show that the frozen Transformer blocks of a semantic ViT are not intrinsically unable to preserve visual details. Instead, the original patch parameterization drives the representation toward semantic abstraction, making fine-grained information difficult to recover from the final tokens. Based on this observation, we introduce \emph{Patch Reparameterization}, which preserves the original semantic pathway while adding a reconstruction-aware patch embedding that provides fine-grained visual information to the same frozen ViT blocks. The resulting unified representation preserves multimodal understanding while enabling high-fidelity image reconstruction and a favorable reconstruction--generation trade-off. We further scale this representation into \emph{UniSpace}, an 8B Mixture-of-Transformer-Experts model that performs understanding, generation, and editing in the same visual space without a separate VAE pathway. System-level evaluations demonstrate practical text-to-image generation and instruction-based image editing, showing that a reparameterized pretrained ViT can serve as a unified visual interface for scalable multimodal modeling.
High-quality visual representation is a long-standing pursuit in computer vision. In the context of multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), feeding higher-resolution images can produce more fine-grained visual tokens. However, it introduces additional computational and design complexity, due to multiple forward passes and post-processing of increased tokens. Before simply adopting a higher resolution, have we truly unlocked the model's full perception capability at a standard resolution? Therefore, we study an interesting problem: how to achieve fine visual perception under lower cost without larger images. We present SigLIP-HD in this work. The core is a highly simple fine-to-coarse supervision design. We enforce the coarse feature of a mid-resolution image to mimic the fine-grained feature of its high-resolution version. We build this framework on the advanced SigLIP 2 model. Our final model produces better visual tokens at exactly the same inference budget. It is validated on extensive MLLM benchmarks and consistently delivers stronger results than our baseline model, especially on OCR-related tasks.
When humans see a bird, they recognize far more than just "bird" -- they see a head, wings, and talons, a structured assembly of reusable parts that can be identified across every bird they have ever seen. We ask whether a self-supervised visual model can discover the same compositional structure on its own. To this end, we propose RATS (Register Attention Transformers), which decomposes the classification token into N learnable register tokens that route patch information through an L->N->N->L bottleneck via a three-step compress-communicate-broadcast attention. The N registers are partitioned across the H attention heads, so that registers assigned to different heads do not interact with each other. Without auxiliary losses or part annotations, each register spontaneously specializes into a proto-semantic region whose emerging structure resembles object parts. RATS surpasses all baselines by +12 mIoU on average across five segmentation benchmarks, with consistent gains on ADE20K (+1.11 mIoU) and COCO (+0.2 AP^m). Its register dictionary further exhibits part-level consistency and semantic proximity across related categories. Our results suggest that RATS may provide a useful architectural prior for structured and interpretable visual representation learning.