Visual General Intelligence: A White Paper
Organizations: National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) · Visual Geometry Group (VGG), University of Oxford · CADDi · OpenAI ·
Abstract
This paper reconsiders intelligence from a vision-centered perspective and examines whether intelligence emerging from visual experience and learning may provide a pathway toward AGI. In the language domain, beginning with the introduction of the Transformer architecture, the GPT series has demonstrated transfer to unseen tasks through autoregressive language modeling on web-scale text combined with aggressive scaling. This raises a natural question, namely, what capabilities and forms of intelligence can emerge from visual modalities such as images, videos, and geometry? In this paper, we discuss whether visual intelligence can serve as a pathway toward AGI, referred to in this paper as visual general intelligence (VGI), by bringing together contributors from diverse standpoints and affiliations. Our aim is not to offer a single definition of visual intelligence, but to clarify the principles that computer vision should pursue in the AGI era, the visual input modalities, the benchmarks, the learning paradigms, and the relationship between vision, when taken as the core, and other modalities such as language.
Figures & tables
| Contributor | Position |
|---|---|
| Robert Geirhos | Generative video models will become visual foundation models. |
| Aditi Raghunathan | Creativity, measured through coherence, structural diversity, originality, and utility, should be a central test of visual general intelligence. |
| Yuki M. Asano | VGI should continuously and autonomously learn from visual experience, rather than remain fixed after large-scale pre-training. |
| Deva Ramanan et al. | Visual intelligence should be multimodal, generative, and computationally efficient, combining vision with signals such as touch, audio, and proprioception. |
| David Fouhey | Visual intelligence should support scientific discovery from specialized and limited observations through validation against physical knowledge, other instruments, and sensor systematics. |
| Andrew J. Davison | Spatial AI requires persistent world representations that integrate state estimation, learning, real-time computation, and efficient hardware. |
Artificial General Intelligence
Artificial General Intelligence studies AI systems that can learn, reason, and act across diverse tasks and environments.
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