Glyph: Scaling Context Windows via Visual-Text Compression

About this episode

🤗 Upvotes: 43 | cs.CV, cs.CL, cs.LG

        <strong>Authors:</strong><br />
        Jiale Cheng, Yusen Liu, Xinyu Zhang, Yulin Fei, Wenyi Hong, Ruiliang Lyu, Weihan Wang, Zhe Su, Xiaotao Gu, Xiao Liu, Yushi Bai, Jie Tang, Hongning Wang, Minlie Huang</p>

        <strong>Title:</strong><br />
        Glyph: Scaling Context Windows via Visual-Text Compression</p>

        <strong>Arxiv:</strong><br />
        <a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/2510.17800v2">http://arxiv.org/abs/2510.17800v2</a></p>

        <strong>Abstract:</strong><br />
        Large language models (LLMs) increasingly rely on long-context modeling for tasks such as document understanding, code analysis, and multi-step reasoning. However, scaling context windows to the million-token level brings prohibitive computational and memory costs, limiting the practicality of long-context LLMs. In this work, we take a different perspective-visual context scaling-to tackle this challenge. Instead of extending token-based sequences, we propose Glyph, a framework that renders long texts into images and processes them with vision-language models (VLMs). This approach substantially compresses textual input while preserving semantic information, and we further design an LLM-driven genetic search to identify optimal visual rendering configurations for balancing accuracy and compression. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our method achieves 3-4x token compression while maintaining accuracy comparable to leading LLMs such as Qwen3-8B on various long-context benchmarks. This compression also leads to around 4x faster prefilling and decoding, and approximately 2x faster SFT training. Furthermore, under extreme compression, a 128K-context VLM could scale to handle 1M-token-level text tasks. In addition, the rendered text data benefits real-world multimodal tasks, such as document understanding. Our code and model are released at https://github.com/thu-coai/Glyph