Training Long-Context Vision-Language Models Effectively with Generalization Beyond 128K Context

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.13831v1
• Date: Wed, 13 May 2026 17:52:53 GMT
• Title: Training Long-Context Vision-Language Models Effectively with Generalization Beyond 128K Context
• Abstract summary: We present a systematic study of long-context continued pre-training for LVLMs.<n>We first show that long-document VQA is substantially more effective than OCR transcription.<n>We introduce MMProLong, obtained by long-context continued pre-training from Qwen2.5-VL-7B with only a 5B-token budget.
• Score: 64.09777482878083
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Long-context modeling is becoming a core capability of modern large vision-language models (LVLMs), enabling sustained context management across long-document understanding, video analysis, and multi-turn tool use in agentic workflows. Yet practical training recipes remain insufficiently explored, particularly for designing and balancing long-context data mixtures. In this work, we present a systematic study of long-context continued pre-training for LVLMs, extending a 7B model from 32K to 128K context with extensive ablations on long-document data. We first show that long-document VQA is substantially more effective than OCR transcription. Building on this observation, our ablations further yield three key findings: i) for sequence-length distribution, balanced data outperforms target-length-focused data (e.g., 128K), suggesting that long-context ability requires generalizable key-information retrieval across various lengths and positions; ii) retrieval remains the primary bottleneck, favoring retrieval-heavy mixtures with modest reasoning data for task diversity; and iii) pure long-document VQA largely preserves short-context capabilities, suggesting that instruction-formatted long data reduces the need for short-data mixing. Based on these findings, we introduce MMProLong, obtained by long-context continued pre-training from Qwen2.5-VL-7B with only a 5B-token budget. MMProLong improves long-document VQA scores by 7.1% and maintains strong performance at 256K and 512K contexts beyond its 128K training window, without additional training. It further generalizes to webpage-based multimodal needle retrieval, long-context vision-text compression, and long-video understanding without task-specific supervision. Overall, our study establishes a practical LongPT recipe and an empirical foundation for advancing long-context vision-language models.

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