The paper investigates how visual understanding and generation objectives interact within unified multimodal models (UMMs). At the representation level, each objective enriches the other, but forcing them through the same computation path can cause one to dominate; a task‑decoupled architecture mitigates this. At the task and system levels, the authors demonstrate bidirectional transfer between shared knowledge and superior performance of an end‑to‑end UMM over a planner–executor pipeline on complex tasks.
By Penghao Wu, Haiwen Diao, Weichen Fan, Lewei Lu, Dahua Lin, Ziwei Liu
arXiv:2608. 05000v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision offers a critical axis for advancing foundation models, driving a shift towards natively unified multimodal pretraining.
By Junlin Han, Shengbang Tong, David Fan, Minghao Chen, Philip Torr, Filippos Kokkinos, Mike Lewis
arXiv:2607. 04423v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) integrate image understanding and generation within a single architecture, yet how the two tasks interact remains understudied.
By Jiwon Kang, Heeji Yoon, Jaewoo Jung, Jaewon Min, Minkyeong Jeon, Biyeon Hwang, Sangwon Jung, Seungryong Kim
arXiv:2609.38485v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Unified multimodal models (UMMs) train image understanding and autoregressive image generation on shared parameters, and the two objectives are known t...
By Shuyang Jiang, Fucheng Deng, Yuchuan Luo, Zhenyu Wu
ReVisIT is a train‑free framework that turns retrieved image‑label pairs into units of visual thought, combining structured class definitions, multimodal retrieval, and alternating user/assistant injection before joint decoding. On several benchmarks—including Fast Open MiniImageNet, Bongard‑OpenWorld, and the newly released MAAC‑Bench—ReVisIT achieves performance comparable to or surpassing large, trained models while using far fewer parameters. The approach demonstrates that high‑quality retrieval and a simple turns layer can provide a universal performance boost across diverse multimodal tasks.
By Bingchen Huang, Zhiling Wang, Yifu Chen, Yuanchao Du
arXiv:2609.00756v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The Mutual Reinforcement Effect (MRE) asks whether a fine, span-level and a coarse, document-level task help each other when one model handles both. We...
By Chengguang Gan, Yunhao Liang, Hanjun Wei, Qinghao Zhang, Shiwen Ni
Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) integrate image understanding and generation within a single architecture, yet how the two tasks interact remains understudied. We investigate $\boldsymbol{\mathsf{transferability}}$ in UMMs: whether training a capability on one task improves the same capability on the other without explicit supervision.
arXiv:2503. 06211v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Text-pretrained language models (LMs) encode rich world knowledge, but adapting them to process and generate perceptual modalities such as audio and images while effectively leveraging that knowledge remains challenging.
By Santiago Cuervo, Adel Moumen, Yanis Labrak, Sameer Khurana, Antoine Laurent, Mickael Rouvier, Phil Woodland, Ricard Marxer
The paper proposes a method to distill world‑model representations into compact Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) policies. By adding a single feature‑alignment term during VLA training, a frozen world model’s internal features are cached and the student policy learns to match them, eliminating the need for a generative future‑rolling component. The resulting lightweight policy runs in 32 ms on an RTX 5090, achieving high performance on LIBERO and RoboCasa‑GR1, and transfers effectively to real robotic hardware.
By Trung Dao, Sankalp Yamsani, Jaden Park, Joohyung Kim, Yong Jae Lee
arXiv:2509. 07295v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unified multimodal models (UMMs) unify visual understanding and generation within a single architecture.
By Ji Xie, Trevor Darrell, Luke Zettlemoyer, XuDong Wang
arXiv:2607. 13188v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human cognition does not separate understanding and generation.
By Minh-Quan Le, Armand Comas, Alexandros Lattas, Stylianos Moschoglou, Pedro V\'elez, Amit Raj, Aaron Germuth, Thabo Beeler, Dimitris Samaras, Di Qiu
arXiv:2605. 18324v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Representation Autoencoders (RAE) replace traditional VAE with pretrained vision encoders.
By Jaskirat Singh, Boyang Zheng, Zongze Wu, Richard Zhang, Eli Shechtman, Saining Xie