FLAT makes one token stream serve retrieval and generation
FLAT gives image and text models one shared sequence of up to 256 continuous tokens, so the same representation can power retrieval, captioning, and image generation instead of separate systems. Nested dropout orders those tokens from broad meaning to fine detail: use a short prefix for cheaper, coarse results, or add tokens to recover composition and attributes. The page reports 83.1 GenEval and 138.6 COCO CIDEr, while COCO retrieval changes by less than one point from one token to 256.