Aurea: Adaptive Multimodal Fusion for Vision-Language Models

Aurea is an open-source research framework centered on an adaptive spatial-range attention module that fuses spatial and semantic cues from encoder features, yielding richer, context-aware representations for downstream tasks.

Explore the full source code and technical documentation on GitHub

Key Features

Multiple Vision Encoders: Input images are encoded separately by DINOv2 and SigLIP2.
Multi-stage Fusion: The SpatialRangeBlock fuses these inputs through multiple layers of SpatialRangeAttention, which selectively aggregates features by jointly considering spatial proximity and semantic similarity. This is performed with a highly optimized fused CUDA kernel.
Flexible Language Model Integration: While Phi-4 is the default language model, Aurea is designed for easy adaptation to other pretrained language models with minimal engineering effort.
Model Weights: Two model checkpoints are provided: (1) base pretrained weights (trained on a ~558k image subset of LAION) and (2) instruction-tuned weights (further fine-tuned on ~625k samples from LLaVA 1.5 datasets). All checkpoints can be downloaded directly from this repository.
Extensible and Modular: The code supports straightforward extension, experimentation, and integration with novel encoders or downstream tasks.

Installation

Clone the source repository

git clone https://github.com/Dcas89/Aurea.git
cd Aurea

Install Python dependencies

pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

First, initialize the Aurea model:

from entry import Aurea

aurea = Aurea(root_dir='/path/to/Aurea')

Note: When initializing the model, all required model checkpoints will be downloaded automatically.

Image + Text Generation (Basic)

Generate text based on an image and prompt:

# Basic image + text generation
response = aurea.generate(
    prompt="How many remote control devices are in this image?", 
    image_path='./assets/cats.png'  # Example image included in the repo
)
print(response)

Generation with Custom Parameters

Tune generation parameters for more control:

# Advanced generation with custom parameters
response = aurea.generate(
    prompt="Only one cat is wearing a collar in the image. Which cat is it? Answer Briefly: Left, Right, or Both", 
    image_path='./assets/cats.png',  # Example image included in the repo
    max_new_tokens=50,          # Maximum number of tokens to generate
    temperature=0.1,            # Lower values make output more deterministic
    repetition_penalty=1.1,     # Penalizes token repetition (>1.0)
    filter_kwargs={'thres': 0.90, 'top_k': 50},  # Parameters for filtering function
    use_dynamic_top_k=False,    # Whether to use dynamic top-k sampling
    min_top_k=50,               # Minimum top-k value if using dynamic top-k
    max_top_k=90,               # Maximum top-k value if using dynamic top-k
    filter_fn=None,             # Custom filtering function
    exclude_prompt=True         # Whether to exclude prompt from returned text
)
print(response)

Logit Filtering

Using a specific filtering function (e.g., top_p):

from generate import top_p

response = aurea.generate(
    prompt="Only one cat is wearing a collar in the image. What is the color of the collar? Answer Briefly: Blue, Light Green, Yellow", 
    image_path='./assets/cats.png',  # Example image included in the repo
    max_new_tokens=50,
    temperature=0.1,
    repetition_penalty=1.1,
    filter_kwargs={'thres': 0.99, 'top_k': 50},
    filter_fn=top_p,            # Using top-p sampling
    exclude_prompt=True
)
print(response)

Dynamic Top-K Sampling

Example using dynamic top-k sampling (interpolating from max_top_k to min_top_k over generation):

response = aurea.generate(
    prompt="What does the logo say and what does it represent?", 
    image_path='./assets/mazure.png',
    max_new_tokens=100,
    temperature=0.1,
    repetition_penalty=1.1,
    filter_kwargs={'thres': 0.99, 'top_k': 50},
    use_dynamic_top_k=True,     # Enable dynamic top-k sampling
    min_top_k=50,               # Lower bound for top-k
    max_top_k=90,               # Upper bound for top-k
    filter_fn=None,
    exclude_prompt=True
)

print(response)

Text-Only Generation

Aurea can also be used for text-only tasks:

# Text-only generation (no image)
response = aurea.generate(
    prompt="What is CUDA programming?",
    max_new_tokens=200,
    temperature=0.1,
    repetition_penalty=1.1,
    filter_kwargs={'thres': 0.9, 'top_k': 50},
    exclude_prompt=True
)
print(response)

References

License

This project is released under the Apache 2.0 License.

Acknowledgements

The CUDA spatial-range attention is inspired by and adapted from LLaVA-UHD.
Some components were adapted from lucidrains repositories, which provide excellent implementations of various transformer and attention mechanisms.
Thanks to the open-source community for DINOv2, SigLIP2, LLaVA, LlaVA-UHD, and Phi-4.
Thanks to Hugging Face for their Transformers and Accelerate libraries.

This project incorporates code and models from:

Dcas89
/

Aurea