Jointly Training Large Autoregressive Multimodal Models

In recent years, advances in the large-scale pretraining of language and text-toimage models have revolutionized the field of machine learning. Yet, integrating these two modalities into a single, robust model capable of generating seamless multimodal outputs remains a significant challenge. To address this gap, we present the Joint Autoregressive Mixture (JAM) framework, a modular approach that systematically fuses existing text and image generation models. We also introduce a specialized, data-efficient instruction-tuning strategy, tailored for mixedmodal generation tasks. Our final instruct-tuned model demonstrates unparalleled performance in generating high-quality multimodal outputs and represents the first model explicitly designed for this purpose. Autoregressive text-to-image models, as exemplified by works such as Yu et al. (2023; 2022), have made remarkable strides in generating highly detailed images, paralleling the achievements of Diffusion Models Nichol et al. (2022); ...