arXiv Computation and Language

Recursive Self-Improvement in Unified Multimodal Models

arXiv AI
Sep 3

Multimodal Language Models as Text-to-Image Model Evaluators

Multimodal Language Models as Text-to-Image Model Evaluators presents MT2IE, a framework where a multimodal large language model generates evaluation prompts and scores images, achieving higher correlation with human judgment than prior metrics. MT2IE recovers official T2I model rankings using only 20 prompts—far fewer than traditional benchmarks—and adapts prompts to each model’s performance, maintaining informative scoring ranges. The approach demonstrates that dynamic, interactive evaluation can replace static benchmarks as T2I models improve.

By Jiahui Chen, Candace Ross, Reyhane Askari-Hemmat, Koustuv Sinha, Melissa Hall, Amy Zhang, Michal Drozdzal, Adriana Romero-Soriano
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Where a New Concept Must Enter: Entry Point Gates Cross-Task Usability in Unified Multimodal Models

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.

By Zongyang Qiu, Yihan Wu, Kaixuan Fan, Bo Li, Hui Xiong
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 10

Perception Before Supervision: Self-Contained Visual Distillation from Counterfactual Blind Spots

Self-improvement for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is typically driven by reward-based methods that provide only coarse scalar feedback. Distillation offers a richer alternative through dense token-level supervision, but in the visual domain it usually depends on privileged context constructed using external annotations and tools, or stronger models.

arXiv AI
Sep 1

LOCI: A Locator-Critic with Refinement Loop

LOC I (Locator‑Critic) is a training‑free framework that separates visual search from evidence verification in Vision‑Language Models. It uses a Locator agent to propose candidate visual evidence and a Critic agent to assess its relevance, engaging in an iterative refinement loop that progressively improves the evidence until it is sufficient to answer a question. The approach yields state‑of‑the‑art results on several complex visual benchmarks, boosting accuracy for both open‑weight models like Qwen3‑VL and proprietary models such as Gemini 2.5 Pro.

By Walid Bousselham, Mathilde Caron, Arsha Nagrani, Cordelia Schmid
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 12

Do You See What You Draw? A Semantic Closed-Loop Framework for Holistic Evaluation of Unified Multimodal Models

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).

arXiv AI
Sep 30

Mutually Adversarial Self-Training with Evolving Data for Unified Multimodal Models

The paper introduces MATE, a reinforcement‑learning‑based post‑training framework for unified multimodal models that lets the generation and understanding branches challenge each other instead of cooperating. In MATE, each branch proposes candidate outputs that the other must reproduce, and the solver is trained on the worst‑handled candidate, creating an evolving adversarial loop without a separate adversary. Experiments on Janus‑Pro‑1B show that MATE improves generation and understanding metrics, including GenEval (+2.4), DPG‑Bench (+1.7), and an average of nine understanding benchmarks (+0.7), while enhancing consistency across image‑text cycles.

By Wentao Zhou, Weijie Gan, Jiayun Wang
arXiv AI
Oct 1

UniEvo-VL: An On-policy Self-Distillation Training Recipe for Multimodal Model Self-improvement

UniEvo‑VL is a self‑evolving framework that lets multimodal models improve themselves by using their own critiques as privileged information. The method trains a single model to act as both teacher and student, minimizing divergence between their diffusion distributions over sampling trajectories. Experiments on Qwen‑image‑2512 show significant gains in image generation metrics, and stronger external critics further raise the improvement ceiling, though results vary across tasks.

By Fang Wu, Da Xing, Yanjie Huang, Junxi Wang, Ji Wang, Hejia Geng, Guancheng Wan, Bowen Zuo, Xiaomin Li, Shixiang Tang, Xinyu Xiang, Zehong Wang, Shiyi Du, Peng Xia, Shuangjia Zheng, Yining Hong, Li Erran Li, Jure Leskovec, Yejin Choi
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 16

SAVOR: Self-Aware Visual Grounding via Confidence-Calibrated Reinforcement Learning for Multimodal Hallucination Mitigation

SAVOR is a training framework for multimodal large language models that adds token and answer confidence to the output schema, optimises a Group Relative Policy Optimisation objective to penalise calibration error and poor abstention, and uses the learned confidence at inference to revisit visual evidence only when uncertain. Experiments on POPE, HallusionBench, AMBER, and MMHal-Bench with InternVL3-8B and Qwen3-VL-8B backbones show that SAVOR reduces hallucination while maintaining general capability on MME and MMBench, achieving lower Expected Calibration Error than DPO and decoding baselines.

By Zixiu Ding, Zilin Zhao, Yingjie He, Xinlang Kang, Guansu Wang, Wei Zhang
arXiv AI
Jul 16

Boogu-Image-0.1: Boosting Open-Source Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation

arXiv:2607. 13125v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce Boogu-Image-0.

By Guoxuan Chen, Chufeng Xiao, Haoran Yang, Siyue Xie, Binxiao Huang, Ming Zhang, Cheuk Him Chau, Xinyu Fu, Yingzhao Lian, Tom S. Y. Li, Jintao Lin, Bowen Dong, Zian Qian, Yuhao Liu, Yuxuan Hu, Weikang Shi, Bin Zou, Bowen Zheng, Haoxuan Che, Chang Chen, Yuyang He, Heyang Sun, Tianyu Huang, Chong Hou Choi, Cheng Gong, Han Shi, Haoli Bai, Xihui Liu, Hongsheng Li, Qifeng Chen, Chao Huang, Rui Liu, Chenyang Lei