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: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.
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.
arXiv:2605. 18714v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unified multimodal models (UMMs) strive to consolidate visual understanding and visual generation within a single architecture.
The study investigates how unified vision‑language models (VLMs) can simultaneously support visual understanding and generation. Using controlled benchmarks (SmartWatch and modified CelebA) that pair VQA, captioning, and text‑to‑image tasks, the authors evaluate several LLM‑based architectures built on SigLIP and VQ‑VAE visual spaces. Results show that mixed training can improve both understanding and generation, but the gains depend on how well the visual input and output spaces are aligned; misaligned or distorted visual spaces can weaken or reverse these benefits. The paper also demonstrates that balancing data across tasks and controlling attribute frequencies can help recover underrepresented visual concepts, and that the transfer is driven more by the base language model’s learned relationships than by visual adapters.
The paper introduces a post‑training approach that enables a single inference process to transition from text reasoning to image synthesis, eliminating the need for explicit modality switching. Using the 14B BAGEL model, the authors demonstrate that targeted post‑training data and reward‑weighted training improve multimodal image generation across four independent T2I benchmarks. The study highlights the benefits of joint text‑image generation and strategic data selection for enhancing T2I performance.
arXiv:2604. 07753v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Empowering Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) with image generation often leads to catastrophic forgetting in understanding tasks due to severe gradient conflicts.
arXiv:2608. 05000v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision offers a critical axis for advancing foundation models, driving a shift towards natively unified multimodal pretraining.
arXiv:2608. 11907v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As Large Vision-Language Models increasingly aim to integrate visual generation and understanding within a single parameter space, evaluating such structural unification in a cohesive manner remains a critical challenge.
The paper introduces a capability‑centric data infrastructure for generalist image generation, integrating task‑specific supervision with a curriculum that aligns with the dependencies among generative capabilities. It employs three interoperable data engines—text‑image grounding, inter‑image transformation, and image‑knowledge association—alongside caption experts to harmonize text‑to‑image and editing supervision. The system curates massive corpora (440M T2I images, 120M editing pairs, 27M image‑entity pairs) and trains multimodal diffusion models (3B and 6B parameters) from scratch, achieving broad visual coverage and versatile rendering as shown by CPI‑Bench and qualitative tests.
As Large Vision-Language Models increasingly aim to integrate visual generation and understanding within a single parameter space, evaluating such structural unification in a cohesive manner remains a critical challenge. Current evaluation protocols predominantly treat generative and discriminative capabilities as separate tasks, leaving a gap in system-level evaluation for unified multimodal models (UMMs).
The paper investigates image tokenizers as the visual language of unified multimodal models by creating a controlled autoregressive testbed that tracks task‑specific validation losses during multimodal continual pretraining across text, image, text‑to‑image, and image‑to‑text predictions. It shows that losses must be analyzed by task, that the loss–performance relationship varies with the token space, and that better reconstruction does not always lead to stronger downstream performance. The study also demonstrates how tokenizer design choices—such as discriminator use, semantic supervision, and vocabulary size—affect joint modeling and downstream results.
The paper investigates how new concepts can be integrated into unified multimodal models (UMMs) by separating generation and understanding objectives through a novel visual entity bound to a single task direction. Experiments show that the effectiveness of cross‑task usability depends on where the concept is injected into the shared computation, with a mid‑stack alignment objective achieving high concept acquisition with minimal loss to overall performance. The study highlights that unified weights alone are insufficient; the two directions must share a semantic format at the entry point for efficient concept integration.