PixelWorld: How Far Are We from Perceiving Everything as Pixels?

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Lyu, Zhiheng, Ma, Xueguang, Chen, Wenhu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Lyu, Zhiheng
Ma, Xueguang
Chen, Wenhu
author_facet Lyu, Zhiheng
Ma, Xueguang
Chen, Wenhu
contents Recent agentic language models increasingly need to interact with real-world environments that contain tightly intertwined visual and textual information, often through raw camera pixels rather than separately processed images and tokenized text. This shift highlights the need for a unified perception paradigm. To investigate this idea, we explore Perceive Everything as Pixels (PEAP) and introduce PixelWorld, a benchmark that renders natural-language, tabular, mathematical, and diagrammatic inputs into a shared pixel space. Experiments across multiple benchmarks show that PEAP achieves comparable performance to token-based approaches on semantic understanding tasks, suggesting that vision transformers can partially capture global textual semantics without explicit tokenization. In contrast, reasoning-intensive tasks such as mathematics and code show notable performance degradation, although Chain-of-Thought prompting helps mitigate this gap by compensating for missing symbolic structure. We further find that when visual and textual information are closely integrated, representing everything as pixels simplifies preprocessing and avoids cross-modal misalignment. PixelWorld thus provides a systematic and practical framework for evaluating unified vision--language models and facilitates further exploration of pixel-based multimodal learning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_19339
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PixelWorld: How Far Are We from Perceiving Everything as Pixels?
Lyu, Zhiheng
Ma, Xueguang
Chen, Wenhu
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
Recent agentic language models increasingly need to interact with real-world environments that contain tightly intertwined visual and textual information, often through raw camera pixels rather than separately processed images and tokenized text. This shift highlights the need for a unified perception paradigm. To investigate this idea, we explore Perceive Everything as Pixels (PEAP) and introduce PixelWorld, a benchmark that renders natural-language, tabular, mathematical, and diagrammatic inputs into a shared pixel space. Experiments across multiple benchmarks show that PEAP achieves comparable performance to token-based approaches on semantic understanding tasks, suggesting that vision transformers can partially capture global textual semantics without explicit tokenization. In contrast, reasoning-intensive tasks such as mathematics and code show notable performance degradation, although Chain-of-Thought prompting helps mitigate this gap by compensating for missing symbolic structure. We further find that when visual and textual information are closely integrated, representing everything as pixels simplifies preprocessing and avoids cross-modal misalignment. PixelWorld thus provides a systematic and practical framework for evaluating unified vision--language models and facilitates further exploration of pixel-based multimodal learning.
title PixelWorld: How Far Are We from Perceiving Everything as Pixels?
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.19339