Preprint
Sep 2026
How Far Are We from Removing the Visual Encoder? Scaling Laws for Encoder-Free Multimodal Pretraining
Most modern multimodal large language models (MLLMs) build on a pretrained visual encoder that provides a strong visual prior. Encoder-free MLLMs instead learn visual representations directly from raw pixels, offering a simple and unified architecture, but their scaling behavior has not been systematically characterize...
Lin Chen, Bo-Lin Ni, Qi Yang et al.
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