arXiv subjects

Ibrahim Alabdulmohsin

Publications and source records attributed to Ibrahim Alabdulmohsin.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Gemma 4 Technical Report

We introduce Gemma 4, a new generation of open-weight, natively multimodal language models in the Gemma model family. Designed to advance compute efficiency and reasoning, the Gemma 4 model suite features dense and Mixture-of-Experts architectures, ranging from 2.3B to 31B parameters. Alongside improved vision and audio encoders for all model sizes, we propose a unified, encoder-free architecture for our 12B model, which ingests raw audio and image patches. Furthermore, we integrate a thinking mode, enabling Gemma models to generate reasoning traces prior to responding. We improve inference speed, memory, and compute efficiency, as well as long-context abilities through critical design choices. Gemma 4 establishes a leap in performance across STEM, multimodal, and long-context benchmarks, and rivals larger, frontier open models in human-rated tasks.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

SigLIP 2: Multilingual Vision-Language Encoders with Improved Semantic Understanding, Localization, and Dense Features

We introduce SigLIP 2, a family of new multilingual vision-language encoders that build on the success of the original SigLIP. In this second iteration, we extend the original image-text training objective with several prior, independently developed techniques into a unified recipe -- this includes captioning-based pretraining, self-supervised losses (self-distillation, masked prediction) and online data curation. With these changes, SigLIP 2 models outperform their SigLIP counterparts at all model scales in core capabilities, including zero-shot classification, image-text retrieval, and transfer performance when extracting visual representations for Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Furthermore, the new training recipe leads to significant improvements on localization and dense prediction tasks. We also train variants which support multiple resolutions and preserve the input's native aspect ratio. Finally, we train on a more diverse data-mixture that includes de-biasing techniques, leading to much better multilingual understanding and improved fairness. To allow users to trade off inference cost with performance, we release model checkpoints at four sizes: ViT-B (86M), L (303M), So400m (400M), and g (1B).

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

A Tale of Two Structures: Do LLMs Capture the Fractal Complexity of Language?

Language exhibits a fractal structure in its information-theoretic complexity (i.e. bits per token), with self-similarity across scales and long-range dependence (LRD). In this work, we investigate whether large language models (LLMs) can replicate such fractal characteristics and identify conditions-such as temperature setting and prompting method-under which they may fail. Moreover, we find that the fractal parameters observed in natural language are contained within a narrow range, whereas those of LLMs' output vary widely, suggesting that fractal parameters might prove helpful in detecting a non-trivial portion of LLM-generated texts. Notably, these findings, and many others reported in this work, are robust to the choice of the architecture; e.g. Gemini 1.0 Pro, Mistral-7B and Gemma-2B. We also release a dataset comprising of over 240,000 articles generated by various LLMs (both pretrained and instruction-tuned) with different decoding temperatures and prompting methods, along with their corresponding human-generated texts. We hope that this work highlights the complex interplay between fractal properties, prompting, and statistical mimicry in LLMs, offering insights for generating, evaluating and detecting synthetic texts.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Recursive Inference Scaling: A Winning Path to Scalable Inference in Language and Multimodal Systems

Inspired by recent findings on the fractal geometry of language, we introduce Recursive INference Scaling (RINS) as a complementary, plug-in recipe for scaling inference time in language and multimodal systems. RINS is a particular form of recursive depth that significantly outperforms +55 other variants, including the recent "repeat-all-over" (RAO) strategy in Mobile LLM (Liu et al., 2024) and latent recurrent thinking (Geiping et al., 2025). Unlike prior works, we carry out our comparisons on a compute-matched regime, and demonstrate that for a fixed model size and training compute budget, RINS substantially improves language modeling performance. It also generalizes beyond pure language tasks, delivering gains in multimodal systems, including a +2% improvement in 0-shot ImageNet accuracy for SigLIP-B/16. Additionally, by deriving data scaling laws, we show that RINS improves both the asymptotic performance limits and the scaling exponents. More importantly, with light-weight (linear) adapters (comprising <1% of model parameters) and stochastic dropout, RINS offers a no-regret strategy, meaning that RINS-enabled pretraining improves performance in language modeling even when recursive depth is not applied at inference time. This corresponds to improving performance on a training compute-, parameter-, and inference-matched regime, suggesting its potential as a viable component of LLM pretraining!

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Scaling Pre-training to One Hundred Billion Data for Vision Language Models

We provide an empirical investigation of the potential of pre-training vision-language models on an unprecedented scale: 100 billion examples. We find that model performance tends to saturate at this scale on many common Western-centric classification and retrieval benchmarks, such as COCO Captions. Nevertheless, tasks of cultural diversity achieve more substantial gains from the 100-billion scale web data, thanks to its coverage of long-tail concepts. Furthermore, we analyze the model's multilinguality and show gains in low-resource languages as well. In addition, we observe that reducing the size of the pretraining dataset via quality filters like using CLIP, typically used to enhance performance, may inadvertently reduce the cultural diversity represented in large-scale datasets. Our results highlight that while traditional benchmarks may not benefit significantly from scaling noisy, raw web data to 100 billion examples, this data scale is vital for building truly inclusive multimodal systems.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

PaliGemma 2: A Family of Versatile VLMs for Transfer

PaliGemma 2 is an upgrade of the PaliGemma open Vision-Language Model (VLM) based on the Gemma 2 family of language models. We combine the SigLIP-So400m vision encoder that was also used by PaliGemma with the whole range of Gemma 2 models, from the 2B one all the way up to the 27B model. We train these models at three resolutions (224px, 448px, and 896px) in multiple stages to equip them with broad knowledge for transfer via fine-tuning. The resulting family of base models covering different model sizes and resolutions allows us to investigate factors impacting transfer performance (such as learning rate) and to analyze the interplay between the type of task, model size, and resolution. We further increase the number and breadth of transfer tasks beyond the scope of PaliGemma including different OCR-related tasks such as table structure recognition, molecular structure recognition, music score recognition, as well as long fine-grained captioning and radiography report generation, on which PaliGemma 2 obtains state-of-the-art results.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

PaliGemma: A versatile 3B VLM for transfer

PaliGemma is an open Vision-Language Model (VLM) that is based on the SigLIP-So400m vision encoder and the Gemma-2B language model. It is trained to be a versatile and broadly knowledgeable base model that is effective to transfer. It achieves strong performance on a wide variety of open-world tasks. We evaluate PaliGemma on almost 40 diverse tasks including standard VLM benchmarks, but also more specialized tasks such as remote-sensing and segmentation.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Fractal Patterns May Illuminate the Success of Next-Token Prediction

We study the fractal structure of language, aiming to provide a precise formalism for quantifying properties that may have been previously suspected but not formally shown. We establish that language is: (1) self-similar, exhibiting complexities at all levels of granularity, with no particular characteristic context length, and (2) long-range dependent (LRD), with a Hurst parameter of approximately H=0.7. Based on these findings, we argue that short-term patterns/dependencies in language, such as in paragraphs, mirror the patterns/dependencies over larger scopes, like entire documents. This may shed some light on how next-token prediction can capture the structure of text across multiple levels of granularity, from words and clauses to broader contexts and intents. In addition, we carry out an extensive analysis across different domains and architectures, showing that fractal parameters are robust. Finally, we demonstrate that the tiny variations in fractal parameters seen across LLMs improve upon perplexity-based bits-per-byte (BPB) in predicting their downstream performance. We hope these findings offer a fresh perspective on language and the mechanisms underlying the success of LLMs.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

No Filter: Cultural and Socioeconomic Diversity in Contrastive Vision-Language Models

We study cultural and socioeconomic diversity in contrastive vision-language models (VLMs). Using a broad range of benchmark datasets and evaluation metrics, we bring to attention several important findings. First, the common filtering of training data to English image-text pairs disadvantages communities of lower socioeconomic status and negatively impacts cultural understanding. Notably, this performance gap is not captured by - and even at odds with - the currently popular evaluation metrics derived from the Western-centric ImageNet and COCO datasets. Second, pretraining with global, unfiltered data before fine-tuning on English content can improve cultural understanding without sacrificing performance on said popular benchmarks. Third, we introduce the task of geo-localization as a novel evaluation metric to assess cultural diversity in VLMs. Our work underscores the value of using diverse data to create more inclusive multimodal systems and lays the groundwork for developing VLMs that better represent global perspectives.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

LocCa: Visual Pretraining with Location-aware Captioners

Image captioning has been shown as an effective pretraining method similar to contrastive pretraining. However, the incorporation of location-aware information into visual pretraining remains an area with limited research. In this paper, we propose a simple visual pretraining method with location-aware captioners (LocCa). LocCa uses a simple image captioner task interface, to teach a model to read out rich information, i.e. bounding box coordinates, and captions, conditioned on the image pixel input. Thanks to the multitask capabilities of an encoder-decoder architecture, we show that an image captioner can easily handle multiple tasks during pretraining. Our experiments demonstrate that LocCa outperforms standard captioners significantly on localization downstream tasks while maintaining comparable performance on holistic tasks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

CLIP the Bias: How Useful is Balancing Data in Multimodal Learning?

We study the effectiveness of data-balancing for mitigating biases in contrastive language-image pretraining (CLIP), identifying areas of strength and limitation. First, we reaffirm prior conclusions that CLIP models can inadvertently absorb societal stereotypes. To counter this, we present a novel algorithm, called Multi-Modal Moment Matching (M4), designed to reduce both representation and association biases (i.e. in first- and second-order statistics) in multimodal data. We use M4 to conduct an in-depth analysis taking into account various factors, such as the model, representation, and data size. Our study also explores the dynamic nature of how CLIP learns and unlearns biases. In particular, we find that fine-tuning is effective in countering representation biases, though its impact diminishes for association biases. Also, data balancing has a mixed impact on quality: it tends to improve classification but can hurt retrieval. Interestingly, data and architectural improvements seem to mitigate the negative impact of data balancing on performance; e.g. applying M4 to SigLIP-B/16 with data quality filters improves COCO image-to-text retrieval @5 from 86% (without data balancing) to 87% and ImageNet 0-shot classification from 77% to 77.5%! Finally, we conclude with recommendations for improving the efficacy of data balancing in multimodal systems.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Getting ViT in Shape: Scaling Laws for Compute-Optimal Model Design

Scaling laws have been recently employed to derive compute-optimal model size (number of parameters) for a given compute duration. We advance and refine such methods to infer compute-optimal model shapes, such as width and depth, and successfully implement this in vision transformers. Our shape-optimized vision transformer, SoViT, achieves results competitive with models that exceed twice its size, despite being pre-trained with an equivalent amount of compute. For example, SoViT-400m/14 achieves 90.3% fine-tuning accuracy on ILSRCV2012, surpassing the much larger ViT-g/14 and approaching ViT-G/14 under identical settings, with also less than half the inference cost. We conduct a thorough evaluation across multiple tasks, such as image classification, captioning, VQA and zero-shot transfer, demonstrating the effectiveness of our model across a broad range of domains and identifying limitations. Overall, our findings challenge the prevailing approach of blindly scaling up vision models and pave a path for a more informed scaling.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

PaLI-3 Vision Language Models: Smaller, Faster, Stronger

This paper presents PaLI-3, a smaller, faster, and stronger vision language model (VLM) that compares favorably to similar models that are 10x larger. As part of arriving at this strong performance, we compare Vision Transformer (ViT) models pretrained using classification objectives to contrastively (SigLIP) pretrained ones. We find that, while slightly underperforming on standard image classification benchmarks, SigLIP-based PaLI shows superior performance across various multimodal benchmarks, especially on localization and visually-situated text understanding. We scale the SigLIP image encoder up to 2 billion parameters, and achieves a new state-of-the-art on multilingual cross-modal retrieval. We hope that PaLI-3, at only 5B parameters, rekindles research on fundamental pieces of complex VLMs, and could fuel a new generation of scaled-up models.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Patch n' Pack: NaViT, a Vision Transformer for any Aspect Ratio and Resolution

The ubiquitous and demonstrably suboptimal choice of resizing images to a fixed resolution before processing them with computer vision models has not yet been successfully challenged. However, models such as the Vision Transformer (ViT) offer flexible sequence-based modeling, and hence varying input sequence lengths. We take advantage of this with NaViT (Native Resolution ViT) which uses sequence packing during training to process inputs of arbitrary resolutions and aspect ratios. Alongside flexible model usage, we demonstrate improved training efficiency for large-scale supervised and contrastive image-text pretraining. NaViT can be efficiently transferred to standard tasks such as image and video classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation and leads to improved results on robustness and fairness benchmarks. At inference time, the input resolution flexibility can be used to smoothly navigate the test-time cost-performance trade-off. We believe that NaViT marks a departure from the standard, CNN-designed, input and modelling pipeline used by most computer vision models, and represents a promising direction for ViTs.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

PaLI-X: On Scaling up a Multilingual Vision and Language Model

We present the training recipe and results of scaling up PaLI-X, a multilingual vision and language model, both in terms of size of the components and the breadth of its training task mixture. Our model achieves new levels of performance on a wide-range of varied and complex tasks, including multiple image-based captioning and question-answering tasks, image-based document understanding and few-shot (in-context) learning, as well as object detection, video question answering, and video captioning. PaLI-X advances the state-of-the-art on most vision-and-language benchmarks considered (25+ of them). Finally, we observe emerging capabilities, such as complex counting and multilingual object detection, tasks that are not explicitly in the training mix.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

FlexiViT: One Model for All Patch Sizes

Vision Transformers convert images to sequences by slicing them into patches. The size of these patches controls a speed/accuracy tradeoff, with smaller patches leading to higher accuracy at greater computational cost, but changing the patch size typically requires retraining the model. In this paper, we demonstrate that simply randomizing the patch size at training time leads to a single set of weights that performs well across a wide range of patch sizes, making it possible to tailor the model to different compute budgets at deployment time. We extensively evaluate the resulting model, which we call FlexiViT, on a wide range of tasks, including classification, image-text retrieval, open-world detection, panoptic segmentation, and semantic segmentation, concluding that it usually matches, and sometimes outperforms, standard ViT models trained at a single patch size in an otherwise identical setup. Hence, FlexiViT training is a simple drop-in improvement for ViT that makes it easy to add compute-adaptive capabilities to most models relying on a ViT backbone architecture. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/google-research/big_vision

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Diagnosing failures of fairness transfer across distribution shift in real-world medical settings

Diagnosing and mitigating changes in model fairness under distribution shift is an important component of the safe deployment of machine learning in healthcare settings. Importantly, the success of any mitigation strategy strongly depends on the structure of the shift. Despite this, there has been little discussion of how to empirically assess the structure of a distribution shift that one is encountering in practice. In this work, we adopt a causal framing to motivate conditional independence tests as a key tool for characterizing distribution shifts. Using our approach in two medical applications, we show that this knowledge can help diagnose failures of fairness transfer, including cases where real-world shifts are more complex than is often assumed in the literature. Based on these results, we discuss potential remedies at each step of the machine learning pipeline.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Scaling Vision Transformers to 22 Billion Parameters

The scaling of Transformers has driven breakthrough capabilities for language models. At present, the largest large language models (LLMs) contain upwards of 100B parameters. Vision Transformers (ViT) have introduced the same architecture to image and video modelling, but these have not yet been successfully scaled to nearly the same degree; the largest dense ViT contains 4B parameters (Chen et al., 2022). We present a recipe for highly efficient and stable training of a 22B-parameter ViT (ViT-22B) and perform a wide variety of experiments on the resulting model. When evaluated on downstream tasks (often with a lightweight linear model on frozen features), ViT-22B demonstrates increasing performance with scale. We further observe other interesting benefits of scale, including an improved tradeoff between fairness and performance, state-of-the-art alignment to human visual perception in terms of shape/texture bias, and improved robustness. ViT-22B demonstrates the potential for "LLM-like" scaling in vision, and provides key steps towards getting there.

cs.CV↗