Long-VITA: Scaling Large Multi-modal Models to 1 Million Tokens with Leading Short-Context Accuray

Establishing the long-context capability of large vision-language models is crucial for video understanding, high-resolution image understanding, multi-modal agents and reasoning. We introduce Long-VITA, a simple yet effective large multi-modal model for long-context visual-language understanding tasks. It is adept at concurrently processing and analyzing modalities of image, video, and text over 4K frames or 1M tokens while delivering advanced performances on short-context multi-modal tasks. We propose an effective multi-modal training schema that starts with large language models and proceeds through vision-language alignment, general knowledge learning, and two sequential stages of long-sequence fine-tuning. We further implement context-parallelism distributed inference and logits-masked language modeling head to scale Long-VITA to infinitely long inputs of images and texts during model inference. Regarding training data, Long-VITA is built on a mix of $17$M samples from public datasets only and demonstrates the state-of-the-art performance on various multi-modal benchmarks, compared against recent cutting-edge models with internal data. Long-VITA is fully reproducible and supports both NPU and GPU platforms for training and testing. We hope Long-VITA can serve as a competitive baseline and offer valuable insights for the open-source community in advancing long-context multi-modal understanding.