Researchers Release Open-Source MODUS Decoder-Only Any-To-Any Multimodal Model

A major question in multimodal modeling is how to leverage strong pre-trained models, such as industry-scale LLMs and VLMs, during training to avoid starting from scratch. This is important as the demand for rich and domain-specific multimodal models continues to increase, while training them from scratch is obviously impractical due to limited data and compute. The so-called “any-to-any” multimodal models can model a large diverse dictionary of modalities. That’s good. Their downside is that their architectures are often not decoder-only, which has limited their performance in practice and prevents them from leveraging strong pre-trained decoder-only models as priors. We are releasing MODUS (@icmlconf '26) a decoder-only any-to-any multimodal model to address some of these questions. A single transformer decoder predicts any modality from any others with no modality-specific heads, losses, or task pipelines. We show efficient adaptation of established models, e.g., BAGEL, to rich any-to-any multimodal modeling. We are releasing 14B to 77B parameter models. All materials are open-source. The download links and demos here https://modus-multimodal.epfl.ch/ 🧵