Today’s most advanced vision-language models (VLMs) remain proprietary. The strongest open-weight models rely heavily on synthetic data from proprietary VLMs to achieve good performance, effectively distilling these closed VLMs into open ones. As a result, the community has been missing foundational knowledge about how to build performant VLMs from scratch. We present Molmo, a new family of VLMs that are state-of-the-art in their class of openness. Our key contribution is a collection of new datasets called PixMo, including a dataset of highly detailed image captions for pre-training, a free-form image Q&A dataset for fine-tuning, and an innovative 2D pointing dataset, all collected without the use of external VLMs. The success of our approach relies on careful modeling choices, a well- tuned training pipeline, and, most critically, the quality of our newly collected datasets. Our best-in-class 72B model not only outperforms others in the class of open weight and data models, but also outperforms larger proprietary models including Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Gemini 1.5 Pro and Flash, second only to GPT-4o based on both academic benchmarks and on a large human evaluation. Our model weights, new datasets, and source code are available at https://molmo.allenai.org/blog.

Existing image editing models struggle to meet real-world demands; despite excelling in academic benchmarks, we are yet to see them adopted to solve real user needs. The datasets that power these models use artificial edits, lacking the scale and ecological validity necessary to address the true diversity of user requests. In response, we introduce RealEdit, a large-scale image editing dataset with authentic user requests and human-made edits sourced from Reddit. RealEdit contains a test set of 9.3K examples the community can use to evaluate models on real user requests. Our results show that existing models fall short on these tasks, implying a need for realistic training data. So, we introduce 48K training examples, with which we train our RealEdit model. Our model achieves substantial gains—outperforming competitors by up to 165 Elo points in human judgment and 92% relative improvement on the automated VIEScore metric on our test set. We deploy our model back on Reddit, testing it on new requests, and receive positive feedback. Beyond image editing, we explore RealEdit ’s potential in detecting edited images by partnering with a deepfake detection non-profit. Finetuning their model on RealEdit data improves its F1-score by 14 percentage points, underscoring the dataset’s value for broad, impactful applications.1

Dense self-supervised learning has shown great promise for learning pixel- and patch-level representations, but extending it to videos remains challenging due to the complexity of motion dynamics. Existing approaches struggle as they rely on static augmentations that fail under object deformations, occlusions, and camera movement, leading to inconsistent feature learning over time. We propose a motion-guided self-supervised learning framework that clusters dense point tracks to learn spatiotemporally consistent representations. By leveraging an off-the-shelf point tracker, we extract long-range motion trajectories and optimize feature clustering through a momentum-encoder-based optimal transport mechanism. To ensure temporal coherence, we propagate cluster assignments along tracked points, enforcing feature consistency across views despite viewpoint changes. Integrating motion as an implicit supervisory signal, our method learns representations that generalize across frames, improving robustness in dynamic scenes and challenging occlusion scenarios. By initializing from strong image-pretrained models and leveraging video data for training, we improve state-of-the-art by 1% to 6% on six image and video datasets and four evaluation benchmarks. The implementation is publicly available at our GitHub repository: https://github.com/SMSD75/MoSiC/tree/main

We introduce NeCo: Patch Neighbor Consistency, a novel self-supervised training loss that enforces patch-level nearest neighbor consistency across a student and teacher model. Compared to contrastive approaches that only yield binary learning signals, i.e. "attract" and "repel", this approach benefits from the more fine-grained learning signal of sorting spatially dense features relative to reference patches. Our method leverages differentiable sorting applied on top of pretrained representations, such as DINOv2-registers to bootstrap the learning signal and further improve upon them. This dense post-pretraining leads to superior performance across various models and datasets, despite requiring only 19 hours on a single GPU. This method generates high-quality dense feature encoders and establishes several new state-of-the-art results such as +2.3 % and +4.2% for non-parametric in-context semantic segmentation on ADE20k and Pascal VOC, +1.6% and +4.8% for linear segmentation evaluations on COCO-Things and -Stuff and improvements in the 3D understanding of multi-view consistency on SPair-71k, by more than 1.5%.

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has achieved major advances in natural images and video understanding, but challenges remain in domains like echocardiography (heart ultrasound) due to subtle anatomical structures, complex temporal dynamics, and the current lack of domain-specific pre-trained models. Existing SSL approaches such as contrastive, masked modeling, and clustering-based methods struggle with high intersample similarity, sensitivity to low PSNR inputs common in ultrasound, or aggressive augmentations that distort clinically relevant features. We present DISCOVR (Distilled Image Supervision for Cross Modal Video Representation), a self-supervised dual-branch framework for cardiac ultrasound video representation learning. DISCOVR combines a clustering-based video encoder that models temporal dynamics with an online image encoder that extracts fine-grained spatial semantics. These branches are connected through a semantic cluster distillation loss that transfers anatomical knowledge from the evolving image encoder to the video encoder, enabling temporally coherent representations enriched with fine-grained semantic understanding. Evaluated on six echocardiography datasets spanning fetal, pediatric, and adult populations, DISCOVR outperforms both specialized video anomaly detection methods and state-of-the-art video-SSL baselines in zero-shot and linear probing setups, achieving superior segmentation transfer and strong downstream performance on clinically relevant tasks such as LVEF prediction. **Code available at:** [https://github.com/mdivyanshu97/DISCOVR](https://github.com/mdivyanshu97/DISCOVR)

Our world is full of varied actions and moves in specialized fields that we, as humans, seek to identify and learn about. To evaluate the effectiveness of multi-modal models in helping us recognize such fine-grained actions, we introduce ActionAtlas, a video question answering (VideoQA) benchmark on fine-grained action recognition with short videos across various sports. ActionAtlas contains 554 videos spanning 284 actions across 42 sports with 1161 actions as total potential choices. Unlike most existing action recognition benchmarks that focus on simplistic actions, often identifiable from a single frame, ActionAtlas focuses on intricate movements and tests the models' ability to discern subtle differences. Additionally, each video in ActionAtlas also includes a question, which helps to more accurately pinpoint the action's performer in scenarios where multiple individuals are involved in different activities. We evaluate proprietary and open models on this benchmark and show that the state-of-the-art models only perform at most 48.73% accurately where random chance is 20%. Furthermore, our results show that a high frame sampling rate is essential for recognizing actions in ActionAtlas, a feature that current top proprietary models like Gemini lack in their default settings.

Spatially dense self-supervised learning is a rapidly growing problem domain with promising applications for unsupervised segmentation and pretraining for dense downstream tasks. Despite the abundance of temporal data in the form of videos, this information-rich source has been largely overlooked. Our paper aims to address this gap by proposing a novel approach that incorporates temporal consistency in dense self-supervised learning. While methods designed solely for images face difficulties in achieving even the same performance on videos, our method improves not only the representation quality for videos – but also images. Our approach, which we call time-tuning, starts from image-pretrained models and fine-tunes them with a novel self-supervised temporal-alignment clustering loss on unlabeled videos. This effectively facilitates the transfer of high-level information from videos to image representations. Time-tuning improves the state-of-the-art by 8-10% for unsupervised semantic segmentation on videos and matches it for images. We believe this method paves the way for further self-supervised scaling by leveraging the abundant availability of videos. The implementation can be found here : https://github.com/SMSD75/Timetuning

As humans, we navigate a multimodal world, building a holistic understanding from all our senses. We introduce @MERLOT RESERVE, a model that represents videos jointly over time - through a new training objective that learns from audio, subtitles, and video frames. Given a video, we replace snippets of text and audio with a MASK token; the model learns by choosing the correct masked-out snippet. Our objective learns faster than alternatives, and performs well at scale: we pretrain on 20 million YouTube videos. Empirical results show that @MERLOT RESERVE learns strong multimodal representations. When finetuned, it sets state-of-the-art on Visual Commonsense Reasoning (VCR), TVQA, and Kinetics-600; outperforming prior work by 5%, 7%, and 1.5% respectively. Ablations show that these tasks benefit from audio pretraining - even VCR, a QA task centered around images (without sound). Moreover, our objective enables out-of-the-box prediction, revealing strong multimodal commonsense understanding. In a fully zero-shot setting, our model obtains competitive results on four video tasks, even outperforming supervised approaches on the recently proposed Situated Reasoning (STAR) benchmark. We analyze why audio enables better vision-language representations, suggesting significant opportunities for future research. We conclude by discussing ethical and societal implications of multimodal pretraining.

This work introduces a new multi-task, parameter-efficient language model (LM) tuning method that learns to transfer knowledge across different tasks via a mixture of soft prompts-small prefix embedding vectors pretrained for different tasks.Our method, called ATTEMPT (ATTEntional Mixtures of Prompt Tuning), obtains source prompts as encodings of large-scale source tasks into a small number of parameters and trains an attention module to interpolate the source prompts and a newly initialized target prompt for every instance in the target task.During training, only the target task prompt and the attention weights, which are shared between tasks in multi-task training, are updated, while the original LM and source prompts are intact.ATTEMPT is highly parameter-efficient (e.g., updates 2,300 times fewer parameters than full fine-tuning), while achieving high task performance using knowledge from high-resource tasks.Moreover, it is modular using pre-trained soft prompts and can flexibly add or remove source prompts for effective knowledge transfer.Our experimental results across 21 diverse NLP datasets show that ATTEMPT significantly outperforms prompt tuning and outperforms or matches fully finetuned or other parameter-efficient tuning approaches that use over ten times more parameters.Finally, ATTEMPT outperforms previous work in few-shot learning settings.

Unsupervised representation learning has proved to be a critical component of anomaly detection/localization in images. The challenges to learn such a representation are two-fold. Firstly, the sample size is not often large enough to learn a rich generalizable representation through conventional techniques. Secondly, while only normal samples are available at training, the learned features should be discriminative of normal and anomalous samples. Here, we propose to use the "distillation" of features at various layers of an expert network, which is pre-trained on ImageNet, into a simpler cloner network to tackle both issues. We detect and localize anomalies using the discrepancy between the expert and cloner networks’ intermediate activation values given an input sample. We show that considering multiple intermediate hints in distillation leads to better exploitation of the expert’s knowledge and a more distinctive discrepancy between the two networks, compared to utilizing only the last layer activation values. Notably, previous methods either fail in precise anomaly localization or need expensive region-based training. In contrast, with no need for any special or intensive training procedure, we incorporate interpretability algorithms in our novel framework to localize anomalous regions. Despite the striking difference between some test datasets and ImageNet, we achieve competitive or significantly superior results compared to SOTA on MNIST, F-MNIST, CIFAR-10, MVTecAD, Retinal-OCT, and two other medical datasets on both anomaly detection and localization.

Neural sequence to sequence text generation has been proved to be a viable approach to paraphrase generation. Despite promising results, paraphrases generated by these models mostly suffer from lack of quality and diversity. To address these problems, we propose a novel retrieval-based method for paraphrase generation. Our model first retrieves a paraphrase pair similar to the input sentence from a pre-defined index. With its novel editor module, the model then paraphrases the input sequence by editing it using the extracted relations between the retrieved pair of sentences. In order to have fine-grained control over the editing process, our model uses the newly introduced concept of Micro Edit Vectors. It both extracts and exploits these vectors using the attention mechanism in the Transformer architecture. Experimental results show the superiority of our paraphrase generation method in terms of both automatic metrics, and human evaluation of relevance, grammaticality, and diversity of generated paraphrases.