Mage-VL
An Efficient Codec-Native Streaming Multimodal Foundation Model

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Mage-VL is a codec-native, proactive-streaming multimodal foundation model for image and video understanding, whose visual encoder is trained entirely from scratch at a compact 4B scale. It targets a modern Moravec's paradox of VLMs — strong at complex offline reasoning, yet slow and compute-heavy on simple real-time streaming perception. Instead of decoding video into uniformly-sampled frames and pushing a dense grid of patch tokens through a frozen web-pretrained ViT, Mage-VL follows the structure of modern video codecs: it separates a stream into anchor (I) frames and predicted (P) frames, keeps every anchor patch, and retains only the predicted-frame patches where the codec spends bits — the regions carrying real motion and new detail. This codec-aligned sparsity cuts visual tokens by over 75% while preserving spatio-temporal context, yielding up to 3.5× wall-clock inference speedup over uniform frame sampling.

The system pairs two components:

• Mage-ViT — a from-scratch Codec-ViT visual encoder that allocates tokens by codec-derived spatio-temporal importance, on a shared 16×16 patch grid with 3D rotary position encoding. It is codec-agnostic: the same interface accepts a traditional codec (H.264/AVC, HEVC/H.265) via motion vectors + residual energy, or a neural codec (DCVC-RT) via its learned rate map — no architecture or retraining change.
• Qwen3-4B causal decoder — a Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507 language backbone (the only pretrained component) that consumes Mage-ViT's variable-length token stream through a lightweight two-layer MLP projector, with a unified interface for images, short/long/ultra-long video, and streaming.

On top of this pair, a System 1 & System 2 dual-process design adds proactive streaming inside a single model: a lightweight cognition gate (System 1) watches each rolling codec window and stays silent on routine content, invoking the full VLM (System 2) only when a response-worthy event completes — no multi-agent pipeline required.

✨ Highlights

• Codec-native & from scratch. The entire visual stack is trained from scratch — no billion-scale image-text ViT initialization. The bio-inspired predictive-patch mechanism (I/P frames at 16×16) cuts visual-token consumption by over 75% (~1/8 or less of dense frame sampling), letting the model train on videos 8× longer under the same budget.
• Codec-native speedup. Codec tokenization sets a superior accuracy–efficiency frontier — up to 3.5× wall-clock inference speedup over uniform frame sampling at matched accuracy, and the fastest of all compared models on most video benchmarks (single 8×B200 node).
• Data-efficient tokenizer. Trained on only ~100M unlabeled images/videos, Mage-ViT matches or beats frontier encoders trained on billions of image-text pairs (SigLIP2 @ 10B, MoonViT @ 2B) — e.g. 99.33% on CIFAR-10 and 85.69% on ImageNet with 256 tokens, showing web-scale pretraining is not essential for a strong VLM front-end.
• Native-resolution scaling. Variable-resolution pretraining lets Mage-ViT improve monotonically with the token budget (peaking >96.1% Food-101 / >86.3% ImageNet at 676 tokens) where fixed-resolution encoders saturate or degrade.
• Matched-LLM video gains. With the 4B Qwen3 backbone held fixed and only the ViT swapped, Mage-VL improves over Qwen3-VL-4B on every reported video and temporal-grounding benchmark — largest on localization-heavy tasks (+22.5 QVHighlight, +17.1 ActivityNet, +11.0 VSI-Bench, +24.5 VideoEval-Pro).
• Strong for its size. On par with Qwen3-VL-4B on static images, and clearly ahead on video understanding and spatial intelligence (+11.0 VSI-Bench, +53.1 CrossPoint, +5.2 EmbSpatial, +22.5 QVHighlight).
• Proactive streaming, single model. A frozen-backbone cognition gate delivers low-latency, event-gated commentary; it tops TimVal / F1 / ROC-AUC / PR-AUC on SoccerNet streaming and generalizes to real 2026 World Cup broadcasts.

📥 Model

A single checkpoint, microsoft/Mage-VL, is one unified model that simultaneously provides image & video understanding and the proactive streaming gate — the same weights answer offline image/video questions and drive event-gated commentary. It covers every Mage-VL capability: image understanding, frame-sampled video, traditional H.264/HEVC codec video, neural DCVC-RT codec video, and event-gated streaming. The repository bundles the codec processor, the neural codec package, and the proactive gate weights — no separate understanding, NVC, or streaming checkpoint is required.

We additionally release microsoft/Mage-ViT — the standalone visual encoder from the two-stage, from-scratch ViT pre-training (cluster-discrimination on ~100M unlabeled image/video frames). This is the ViT-pre-trained checkpoint only: it has not gone through the joint VLM training with the language model. Use it as a data-efficient, codec-native visual encoder or as a drop-in ViT for your own multimodal training.

Model	Task	Backbone	Hugging Face
Mage-VL	image & video understanding + proactive streaming gate	Mage-ViT + Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507	🤗 microsoft/Mage-VL
Mage-ViT	codec-native visual encoder — ViT pre-training only, no VLM joint training	Codec-ViT (from scratch)	🤗 microsoft/Mage-ViT

🏗️ Architecture

Proactive streaming framework — Mage-ViT incrementally encodes the continuous stream into codec-native visual features shared by the event gate and the causal decoder. The gate scores each rolling window and stays silent on routine content; when it opens, the decoder emits an event-conditioned response.

Mage-ViT — a from-scratch Codec-ViT visual encoder. On a 16×16 patch grid it keeps all anchor (I) frame patches and only the motion-salient predicted (P) frame patches, cutting visual tokens by over 75% while a shared 3D RoPE preserves spatio-temporal positions.

Mage-VL — a unified model where projected visual tokens and text tokens share one causal Qwen3 decoder. Still images become a single spatial block; videos become temporally-ordered codec windows. In streaming mode, a lightweight cognition gate predicts p_speak = g(h_t) per rolling window (over a recurrent streaming memory kept by an event-preserving feature extractor) and triggers generation when p_speak ≥ τ; the response is decoded by the frozen base model from a local sliding window of the most recent codec segments, and a text query can be injected at any time.

Training — a progressive five-stage supervised curriculum (no preference/RL post-training) that produces one unified model:

1. Multimodal alignment via captions — ~350M dense image captions + 4.2M short-video captions.
2. Instruction tuning + short temporal grounding — ~54M image-instruction samples + 3.4M 30–180s video captions.
3. Temporal-horizon expansion — medium/long video (LLaVA-Video, TimeLens, VideoChat-Flash, Molmo2) with retained image SFT.
4. Codec-native long-context adaptation — 350K long videos as rolling codec windows (up to 384/768 frames).
5. Proactive streaming alignment — a cognition gate fine-tuned on ~3.3M streaming samples with the visual encoder and LLM kept frozen (only the gate is trained).

The five stages together produce a single unified model, Mage-VL, that handles image understanding, offline video reasoning, and proactive streaming — no separate variants are shipped.

Two parts of the pipeline apply an AI4AI (AI-for-AI) paradigm: (1) dense recaptioning runs through an agentic closed loop where a GPT-5 rubric scorer grades captions and a Copilot coding agent co-designs the prompt and harness code (e.g. rendering timestamp overlays) under a human validation gate — improving every downstream OCR/doc/chart/perception benchmark and inspiring SkillOpt-Lite; and (2) Stage-3 uses AI-based diagnostics to decide which video categories, resolutions, and frame counts to train on.

📊 Performance

Image understanding & spatial intelligence — click to expand

Performance comparison across models. Mage-VL-4B and Qwen3-VL-4B use the same 4B Qwen3 LLM backbone; Phi-4-Multimodal-Instruct (Phi-4-MM, 5.6B) and Phi-4-Reasoning-Vision (Phi-4-R-V, 15B) are reported for reference. – = not run. Bold = best in row.

Benchmark	Mage-VL-4B	Qwen3-VL-4B	Phi-4-MM-5.6B	Phi-4-R-V-15B
Document understanding
DocVQA-val	95.14	94.69	92.79	76.20
InfoVQA-val	80.33	79.50	71.84	55.41
AI2D w/ Mask	83.16	81.54	81.83	82.87
ChartQA	84.88	83.96	83.76	83.40
OCRBench	81.80	81.60	81.70	73.90
MultiDocVQA-val	87.46	87.21	46.84	58.35
ChartQAPro	32.57	26.79	0.13	25.38
TextVQA-val	77.28	80.55	39.93	76.06
CC-OCR Doc	32.25	39.69	4.99	17.65
General VQA
MMBench-EN-dev	84.02	83.25	65.81	84.19
MMBench-CN-dev	82.04	80.58	75.17	79.47
MMStar	67.32	62.04	61.24	59.63
MME-Perception	1709.54	1703.50	1409.66	1590.21
SeedBench (All)	76.78	75.65	68.28	73.70
CV-Bench	87.79	85.37	57.09	81.31
MME-RealWorld	66.52	63.20	32.45	57.80
Spatial intelligence
CV-Bench-2D	82.13	81.00	56.12	80.11
CV-Bench-3D	94.75	92.30	56.92	82.50
BLINK	65.11	65.10	35.24	57.80
EmbSpatial	82.67	77.50	41.51	72.67
CrossPoint	80.00	26.90	12.20	47.73
CRPE-Relation	76.12	77.70	34.60	74.46
SAT	67.33	69.30	55.33	66.67

Video understanding & temporal grounding — click to expand

Bold = best in row.

Benchmark	Mage-VL-4B	Qwen3-VL-4B	Phi-4-MM-5.6B	Phi-4-R-V-15B
Video QA
MV-Bench	65.1	66.7	44.9	49.2
NextQA	83.1	79.8	54.1	69.0
VideoMME	64.0	59.7	44.7	55.3
LongVideoBench	61.3	57.7	41.14	51.2
LVBench	41.8	39.2	25.31	34.4
MLVU-dev	68.7	61.5	44.18	51.8
VideoEval-Pro	45.2	20.7	14.35	16.8
Temporal grounding
Timelens-Charades	50.7	43.1	4.09	20.6
Timelens-ActivityNet	45.4	28.4	2.03	23.0
Timelens-QVHighlight	57.4	34.9	2.47	11.6
Spatial reasoning
VSI-Bench	64.3	53.3	24.09	25.5
Tracking (J&F)
Ref-DAVIS17	25.83	7.48	3.14	2.15
MeViS-ValidU	22.55	3.16	10.28	1.53
ReasonVOS	17.76	9.66	9.50	9.77
Ref-YT-VOS	25.57	5.28	8.64	3.85

Proactive streaming (SoccerNet) & online video (OVO-Bench) — click to expand

SoccerNet — response timing (StreamMind protocol, codec-native inputs, zero-tolerance canvas matching). Bold = best in column.

Method	TriggerAcc	TimVal	F1	ROC-AUC	PR-AUC
StreamMind	52.18	47.36	–	–	–
JoyAI-VL-Interaction-9B	97.98	19.25	3.55	56.26	1.68
Mage-VL-4B	79.21	55.54	16.35	83.14	9.30

JoyAI's high TriggerAcc comes from predicting silence almost everywhere under SoccerNet's heavy class imbalance, so it collapses on the precision-sensitive metrics; StreamMind is trained in-distribution on SoccerNet, whereas Mage-VL is not.

OVO-Bench — online video understanding (SimpleStream recent-window protocol, 4 frames @ 1 fps; no streaming-specific fine-tuning). Mage-VL sets a new state-of-the-art overall score among streaming architectures. RT-Avg / BT-Avg are the Real-Time Visual Perception / Backward Tracing sub-task averages; Overall is their mean. Bold = best model per column (Human is the reference upper bound).

Model	#Frames	RT-Avg	BT-Avg	Overall
Human	–	93.2	92.3	92.77
Offline video LLMs
Qwen2.5-VL-7B	1 fps	59.9	44.7	52.28
LLaVA-Video-7B	64	63.5	40.4	51.95
Qwen3-VL-4B	64	72.8	53.1	63.00
Online / streaming video LLMs
VideoLLM-online-8B	2 fps	20.8	17.7	19.26
Flash-VStream-7B	1 fps	28.4	27.4	27.90
Dispider-7B	1 fps	54.6	36.1	45.35
TimeChat-Online-7B	1 fps	61.9	41.7	51.80
StreamForest-7B	1 fps	61.2	52.0	56.60
Streamo-7B	1 fps	66.0	46.1	56.05
HERMES-7B†	1 fps	69.0	49.4	59.20
JoyAI-VL-Interaction-9B	1 fps	68.4	48.6	58.50
Mage-VL-4B	1 fps	79.84	48.15	64.00

_{^† HERMES = Qwen2.5-VL-7B + HERMES (4K tokens). Baseline results and table structure follow SimpleStream.}

🔬 Key Findings

Beyond the model, the report distills seven empirical findings for efficient multimodal training:

1. Web-scale pretraining is not essential. A from-scratch backbone on ~100M unlabeled frames matches encoders trained on billions of image-text pairs.
2. Variable-resolution pretraining scales monotonically. Quality keeps improving with the visual-token budget instead of saturating/degrading like fixed-resolution encoders.
3. Codec-native tokenization sets a better accuracy–efficiency frontier — up to 3.5× wall-clock inference speedup over uniform frame sampling.
4. Explicit VideoQA SFT is redundant. Dense video captions + standard image SFT are sufficient for strong zero-shot VideoQA.
5. Motion–spatial synergy. Dynamic video training substantially improves static 2D/3D spatial reasoning.
6. AI4AI data pipeline. Agentic closed-loop feedback + prompt/code co-design systematically lift caption quality and downstream scores (inspired SkillOpt-Lite).
7. Zero-Vision SFT for multimodal RL. Bypassing visual SFT in favor of pure-text reasoning SFT unlocks stronger multimodal RL — a compute-efficient path.

🚀 Quick Start

A single checkpoint, microsoft/Mage-VL, covers every capability below.

Capability	Script	How to run
Image understanding	inference.py	--mode offline --image
Frame-sampled video	inference.py	--mode offline --video --video-backend frames
Traditional H.264/HEVC codec video	inference.py	--mode offline --video --video-backend codec --codec-engine traditional
Neural DCVC-RT codec video	inference.py	--mode offline --video --video-backend codec --codec-engine neural
Online image / video (SGLang)	inference.py	--mode online … --base-url <server>
Event-gated streaming commentary	inference_streaming.py	in the GitHub repo

Installation

For offline Transformers inference:

pip install "transformers>=5.7" accelerate pillow torch torchvision \
  opencv-python codec-video-prep

Codec-based video inference also requires ffmpeg and ffprobe on PATH.

Examples

Two sample inputs ship with this repository:

Input	Question	Content
examples/dog.jpg	Describe this image in detail.	Photo of a dog sitting in front of a patterned rug
examples/soccer-broadcast.mp4	Describe this video.	30s, 960×540 football broadcast clip

Offline inference

Download inference.py. Offline mode loads the checkpoint with AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained and supports images, frame sampling, and both codec engines:

# image
python inference.py --mode offline --image examples/dog.jpg \
  --question "Describe this image in detail."

The image depicts a dog sitting on a patterned rug. The dog appears to be a medium-sized breed with a thick, fluffy coat. Its fur is primarily white with patches of black and brown. The dog's ears are perked up, and it has a calm and attentive expression. [...]

# video — uniform frame sampling
python inference.py --mode offline --video examples/soccer-broadcast.mp4 \
  --video-backend frames --num-frames 32 \
  --question "Describe this video."

The video opens with a man in a black polo shirt, sporting a short haircut, standing in a stadium. He is holding a yellow microphone with the BBC Sport logo on it. The background reveals a large crowd of spectators. [...]

# video — traditional codec (HEVC/H.264)
python inference.py --mode offline --video examples/soccer-broadcast.mp4 \
  --video-backend codec --codec-engine traditional --num-frames 32 \
  --question "Describe this video."

The video opens with a BBC Sport broadcast, featuring a presenter in a black shirt holding a yellow microphone. The background reveals a packed stadium, with the scoreboard displaying "ENG 1 ARG 2 FT", indicating the final score of the match. [...]

# video — neural codec (DCVC-RT)
python inference.py --mode offline --video examples/soccer-broadcast.mp4 \
  --video-backend codec --codec-engine neural --num-frames 32 \
  --question "Describe this video."

The video opens with a BBC Sport broadcast, featuring a presenter standing in a stadium filled with spectators. The presenter, dressed in a black shirt, holds a yellow BBC Sport microphone and wears a black earpiece. [...]

Online inference

Online mode talks to an OpenAI-compatible SGLang server. First build and launch the server with the Mage-VL SGLang branch (building it needs protobuf-compiler and a Rust toolchain):

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y protobuf-compiler
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs \
  | sh -s -- -y --profile minimal --default-toolchain 1.90.0
source "$HOME/.cargo/env"

git clone -b feat/mage-vl https://github.com/kcz358/sglang
cd sglang
pip install -e 'python[all]'
python -m sglang.launch_server \
  --model-path microsoft/Mage-VL \
  --trust-remote-code

Then send an image or sampled video frames to the running server:

pip install openai

python inference.py --mode online --image examples/dog.jpg \
  --question "Describe this image in detail." \
  --base-url http://localhost:30000/v1

python inference.py --mode online --video examples/soccer-broadcast.mp4 \
  --num-frames 32 \
  --question "Describe this video." \
  --base-url http://localhost:30000/v1

Use --model, --max-new-tokens, and --api-key to override their defaults.

Streaming inference

streammind_gate.safetensors in this repository holds the event gate. Streaming inference splits a video into non-overlapping segments, stays silent on routine content, and generates a caption only when a response-worthy event is detected. Run it with inference_streaming.py from the GitHub repository:

python inference_streaming.py \
  --video examples/soccer-broadcast.mp4 \
  --video_backend codec \
  --segment_sec 8

[t=0.0-8.0s] gate=silence (p=0.19)
[t=8.0-16.0s] gate=response (p=0.55) -> The video features a live sports broadcast from BBC Sport, set in a large stadium filled with spectators. The broadcast focuses on a football match between England and Argentina, with the score displayed as England 1, Argentina 2. [...]
[t=16.0-24.0s] gate=response (p=0.73) -> The video features a sports broadcast set in a large stadium filled with spectators. Four commentators are gathered around a table with a 'BBC Sport' logo, each holding a yellow microphone. [...]
[t=24.0-30.0s] gate=silence (p=0.31)

The gate is trained on codec inputs, so --video_backend codec is the intended setting. Use --video_backend frames for direct frame sampling. Additional controls include --num_frames, --cur_fps, --max_segments, --max_new_tokens, --gate_threshold, and --attn_impl.

📝 Citation

@article{mage2026magevl,
  title={Mage-VL: An Efficient Codec-Native Streaming Multimodal Foundation Model},
  author={Yang, Senqiao and Zhang, Kaichen and Jia, Zhaoyang and Guo, Jinghao and Shen, Yifei and Zhang, Xinjie and Zhang, Xiaoyi and Wang, Haoqing and Li, Xiao and An, Xiang and Xie, Yin and Liu, Zhening and Guo, Xun and Li, Jiahao and Zheng, Shicheng and Wang, Jinglu and Guo, Zongyu and Xie, Wenxuan and Zheng, Zihan and Luo, Yuxuan and Li, Bin and Lu, Yan},
  journal={arXiv preprint},
  year={2026}
}

📄 License

Mage-VL is released under the Apache-2.0 License.