Current language models fall short in understanding aspects of the world not easily described in words, and struggle with complex, long-form tasks. Video sequences offer valuable temporal information absent in language and static images, making them attractive for joint modeling with language. Such models could develop a understanding of both human textual knowledge and the physical world, enabling broader AI capabilities for assisting humans. However, learning from millions of tokens of video and language sequences poses challenges due to memory constraints, computational complexity, and limited datasets. To address these challenges, we curate a large dataset of diverse videos and books, utilize the RingAttention technique to scalably train on long sequences, and gradually increase context size from 4K to 1M tokens. This paper makes the following contributions: (a)  Largest context size neural network: We train one of the largest context size transformers on long video and language sequences, setting new benchmarks in difficult retrieval tasks and long video understanding. (b)  Solutions for overcoming vision-language training challenges, including using masked sequence packing for mixing different sequence lengths, loss weighting to balance language and vision, and model-generated QA dataset for long sequence chat. (c)  A highly-optimized implementation with RingAttention, masked sequence packing, and other key features for training on millions-length multimodal sequences. (d)  Fully open-sourced a family of 7B parameter models capable of processing long text documents (LWM-Text, LWM-Text-Chat)  and videos (LWM, LWM-Chat)  of over 1M tokens.
This work paves the way for training on massive datasets of long video and language to develop understanding of both human knowledge and the multimodal world, and broader capabilities.