LaTtE-Flow: Layerwise Timestep-Expert Flow-based Transformer

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Shen, Ying, Xu, Zhiyang, Chen, Jiuhai, Diao, Shizhe, Zhang, Jiaxin, Yao, Yuguang, Rimchala, Joy, Lourentzou, Ismini, Huang, Lifu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Shen, Ying
Xu, Zhiyang
Chen, Jiuhai
Diao, Shizhe
Zhang, Jiaxin
Yao, Yuguang
Rimchala, Joy
Lourentzou, Ismini
Huang, Lifu
author_facet Shen, Ying
Xu, Zhiyang
Chen, Jiuhai
Diao, Shizhe
Zhang, Jiaxin
Yao, Yuguang
Rimchala, Joy
Lourentzou, Ismini
Huang, Lifu
contents Recent advances in multimodal foundation models unifying image understanding and generation have opened exciting avenues for tackling a wide range of vision-language tasks within a single framework. Despite progress, existing unified models typically require extensive pretraining and struggle to achieve the same level of performance compared to models dedicated to each task. Additionally, many of these models suffer from slow image generation speeds, limiting their practical deployment in real-time or resource-constrained settings. In this work, we propose Layerwise Timestep-Expert Flow-based Transformer (LaTtE-Flow), a novel and efficient architecture that unifies image understanding and generation within a single multimodal model. LaTtE-Flow builds upon powerful pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to inherit strong multimodal understanding capabilities, and extends them with a novel Layerwise Timestep Experts flow-based architecture for efficient image generation. LaTtE-Flow distributes the flow-matching process across specialized groups of Transformer layers, each responsible for a distinct subset of timesteps. This design significantly improves sampling efficiency by activating only a small subset of layers at each sampling timestep. To further enhance performance, we propose a Timestep-Conditioned Residual Attention mechanism for efficient information reuse across layers. Experiments demonstrate that LaTtE-Flow achieves strong performance on multimodal understanding tasks, while achieving competitive image generation quality with around 6x faster inference speed compared to recent unified multimodal models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_06952
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LaTtE-Flow: Layerwise Timestep-Expert Flow-based Transformer
Shen, Ying
Xu, Zhiyang
Chen, Jiuhai
Diao, Shizhe
Zhang, Jiaxin
Yao, Yuguang
Rimchala, Joy
Lourentzou, Ismini
Huang, Lifu
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Recent advances in multimodal foundation models unifying image understanding and generation have opened exciting avenues for tackling a wide range of vision-language tasks within a single framework. Despite progress, existing unified models typically require extensive pretraining and struggle to achieve the same level of performance compared to models dedicated to each task. Additionally, many of these models suffer from slow image generation speeds, limiting their practical deployment in real-time or resource-constrained settings. In this work, we propose Layerwise Timestep-Expert Flow-based Transformer (LaTtE-Flow), a novel and efficient architecture that unifies image understanding and generation within a single multimodal model. LaTtE-Flow builds upon powerful pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to inherit strong multimodal understanding capabilities, and extends them with a novel Layerwise Timestep Experts flow-based architecture for efficient image generation. LaTtE-Flow distributes the flow-matching process across specialized groups of Transformer layers, each responsible for a distinct subset of timesteps. This design significantly improves sampling efficiency by activating only a small subset of layers at each sampling timestep. To further enhance performance, we propose a Timestep-Conditioned Residual Attention mechanism for efficient information reuse across layers. Experiments demonstrate that LaTtE-Flow achieves strong performance on multimodal understanding tasks, while achieving competitive image generation quality with around 6x faster inference speed compared to recent unified multimodal models.
title LaTtE-Flow: Layerwise Timestep-Expert Flow-based Transformer
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06952