A Token-level Text Image Foundation Model for Document Understanding

In recent years, general visual foundation models (VFMs) have witnessed increasing adoption, particularly as image encoders for popular multi-modal large language models (MLLMs). However, without semantically fine-grained supervision, these models still encounter fundamental prediction errors in the context of downstream text-image-related tasks, i.e., perception, understanding and reasoning with images containing small and dense texts. To bridge this gap, we develop TokenFD, the first token-level visual foundation model specifically tailored for text-image-related tasks, designed to support a variety of traditional downstream applications. To facilitate the pretraining of TokenFD, we also devise a high-quality data production pipeline that constructs the first token-level image text dataset, TokenIT, comprising 20 million images and 1.8 billion token-mask pairs. Furthermore, leveraging this foundation with exceptional image-as-text capability, we seamlessly replace previous VFMs with TokenFD to construct a token-level visual-language MLLM, TokenVL, for VQA-based document understanding tasks. Finally, extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of TokenFD and TokenVL. Code, demo, datasets, and weights will be available soon.