Why Removing the Vision Encoder Can Be Better — From an Infra Perspective

liuziwei7 · x · 2026-08-19

A technical article discusses the potential of removing vision encoders in multimodal models, arguing from an infrastructure efficiency perspective.

The article notes a trend over the past six months towards "Encoder-Free" multimodal models. Influenced by @paranioar's work, the author suggests that eliminating the standalone vision encoder could offer system-level advantages, particularly in efficiency when aligning high-dimensional visual data with language models.

Related event: Why encoder-free multimodal models make better infrastructure(3 posts)→

Original post →

More from Infra

Infra channel →