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LongCat-Next: Lexicalizing Modalities as Discrete Tokens

Meituan LongCat Team, Bin Xiao, Chao Wang, Chengjiang Li, Chi Zhang, Chong Peng, Hang Yu, Hao Yang, Haonan Yan, Haoze Sun, Haozhe Zhao, Hong Liu, Hui Su, Jiaqi Zhang, Jiawei Wang, Jing Li, Kefeng Zhang, Manyuan Zhang, Minhao Jing, Peng Pei, Quan Chen, Taofeng Xue, Tongxin Pan, Xiaotong Li, Xiaoyang Li, Xiaoyu Zhao, Xing Hu, Xinyang Lin, Xunliang Cai, Yan Bai, Yan Feng, Yanjie Li, Yao Qiu, Yerui Sun, Yifan Lu, Ying Luo, Yipeng Mei, Yitian Chen, Yuchen Xie, Yufang Liu, Yufei Chen, Yulei Qian, Yuqi Peng, Zhihang Yu, Zhixiong Han, Changran Wang, Chen Chen, Dian Zheng, Fengjiao Chen, Ge Yang, Haowei Guo, Haozhe Wang, Hongyu Li, Huicheng Jiang, Jiale Hong, Jialv Zou, Jiamu Li, Jianping Lin, Jiaxing Liu, Jie Yang, Jing Jin, Jun Kuang, Juncheng She, Kunming Luo, Kuofeng Gao, Lin Qiu, Linsen Guo, Mianqiu Huang, Qi Li, Qian Wang, Rumei Li, Siyu Ren, Wei Wang, Wenlong He, Xi Chen, Xiao Liu, Xiaoyu Li, Xu Huang, Xuanyu Zhu, Xuezhi Cao, Yaoming Zhu, Yifei Cao, Yimeng Jia, Yizhen Jiang, Yufei Gao, Zeyang Hu, Zhenlong Yuan, Zijian Zhang, Ziwen Wang

Abstract

The prevailing Next-Token Prediction (NTP) paradigm has driven the success of large language models through discrete autoregressive modeling. However, contemporary multimodal systems remain language-centric, often treating non-linguistic modalities as external attachments, leading to fragmented architectures and suboptimal integration. To transcend this limitation, we introduce Discrete Native Autoregressive (DiNA), a unified framework that represents multimodal information within a shared discrete space, enabling a consistent and principled autoregressive modeling across modalities. A key innovation is the Discrete Native Any-resolution Visual Transformer (dNaViT), which performs tokenization and de-tokenization at arbitrary resolutions, transforming continuous visual signals into hierarchical discrete tokens. Building on this foundation, we develop LongCat-Next, a native multimodal model that processes text, vision, and audio under a single autoregressive objective with minimal modality-specific design. As an industrial-strength foundation model, it excels at seeing, painting, and talking within a single framework, achieving strong performance across a wide range of multimodal benchmarks. In particular, LongCat-Next addresses the long-standing performance ceiling of discrete vision modeling on understanding tasks and provides a unified approach to effectively reconcile the conflict between understanding and generation. As an attempt toward native multimodality, we open-source the LongCat-Next and its tokenizers, hoping to foster further research and development in the community. GitHub: https://github.com/meituan-longcat/LongCat-Next

LongCat-Next: Lexicalizing Modalities as Discrete Tokens

Abstract

The prevailing Next-Token Prediction (NTP) paradigm has driven the success of large language models through discrete autoregressive modeling. However, contemporary multimodal systems remain language-centric, often treating non-linguistic modalities as external attachments, leading to fragmented architectures and suboptimal integration. To transcend this limitation, we introduce Discrete Native Autoregressive (DiNA), a unified framework that represents multimodal information within a shared discrete space, enabling a consistent and principled autoregressive modeling across modalities. A key innovation is the Discrete Native Any-resolution Visual Transformer (dNaViT), which performs tokenization and de-tokenization at arbitrary resolutions, transforming continuous visual signals into hierarchical discrete tokens. Building on this foundation, we develop LongCat-Next, a native multimodal model that processes text, vision, and audio under a single autoregressive objective with minimal modality-specific design. As an industrial-strength foundation model, it excels at seeing, painting, and talking within a single framework, achieving strong performance across a wide range of multimodal benchmarks. In particular, LongCat-Next addresses the long-standing performance ceiling of discrete vision modeling on understanding tasks and provides a unified approach to effectively reconcile the conflict between understanding and generation. As an attempt toward native multimodality, we open-source the LongCat-Next and its tokenizers, hoping to foster further research and development in the community. GitHub: https://github.com/meituan-longcat/LongCat-Next

Paper Structure

This paper contains 71 sections, 10 equations, 25 figures, 9 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Methodology
  3. Model Architecture
  4. Vision Tokenizer
  5. Design Motivation
  6. Semantic-and-Aligned Encoder (SAE)
  7. Tokenization
  8. De-tokenization
  9. dNaViT: Discrete Native Resolution Vision Transformer
  10. Audio Tokenizer
  11. Language Model Backbone
  12. Multimodality Component
  13. End-to-End Multimodal Embedding
  14. Multimodality Head
  15. Internal Linguistic Guidance
  16. ...and 56 more sections

Figures (25)

  • Figure 1: Benchmark performance of LongCat-Next.
  • Figure 2: Overview of the LongCat-Next architecture, designed under a Discrete Native Autoregression (DiNA) paradigm that extends multimodality into a native language-style modeling framework via paired tokenizers.
  • Figure 3: Overview of the discrete Native-Resolution Vision Transformer (dNaViT) design.
  • Figure 4: The tokenizer and de-tokenizer training pipeline of the proposed dNaViT, which encodes images into discrete tokens via RVQ and decodes them back into the image space through a pixel decoder at arbitrary resolutions.
  • Figure 5: Visual reconstruction from different frozen vision encoders, trained with a lightweight pixel decoder. The results suggest that residual connections inherently preserve a latent pathway for low-level signal propagation.
  • ...and 20 more figures