4 papers
From Reasoning to Pixels: Benchmarking the Alignment Gap in Unified Multimodal Models
Cheng Yang, Chufan Shi, Bo Shui +7
Unified multimodal models (UMMs) aim to integrate multimodal understanding and generation within a unified architecture, yet it remains unclear to what extent their representations…
The Format Tax
Ivan Yee Lee, Loris D'Antoni, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick
Asking a large language model to respond in JSON should be a formatting choice, not a capability tax. Yet we find that structured output requirements -- JSON, XML, LaTeX, Markdown…
Optical Context Compression Is Just (Bad) Autoencoding
Ivan Yee Lee, Cheng Yang, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick
DeepSeek-OCR shows that rendered text can be reconstructed from a small number of vision tokens, sparking excitement about using vision as a compression medium for long textual con…
Readability Learnability: Rethinking the Role of Simplicity in Training Small Language Models
Ivan Lee, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick
Recent studies suggest that very small language models (SLMs) can generate surprisingly coherent text when trained on simplified, child-directed corpora such as TinyStories. These…