Chat-UniVi: Unified Visual Representation Empowers Large Language Models with Image and Video Understanding

Large language models have demonstrated impressive universal capabilities across a wide range of open-ended tasks and have extended their utility to encompass multimodal conversations. However existing methods encounter challenges in effectively handling both image and video understanding particularly with limited visual tokens. In this work we introduce Chat-UniVi a Unified Vision-language model capable of comprehending and engaging in conversations involving images and videos through a unified visual representation. Specifically we employ a set of dynamic visual tokens to uniformly represent images and videos. This representation framework empowers the model to efficiently utilize a limited number of visual tokens to simultaneously capture the spatial details necessary for images and the comprehensive temporal relationship required for videos. Moreover we leverage a multi-scale representation enabling the model to perceive both high-level semantic concepts and low-level visual details. Notably Chat-UniVi is trained on a mixed dataset containing both images and videos allowing direct application to tasks involving both mediums without requiring any modifications. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that Chat-UniVi consistently outperforms even existing methods exclusively designed for either images or videos. Code is available at https://github.com/PKU-YuanGroup/Chat-UniVi.