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.
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 introduces UniSandbox, a decoupled evaluation framework with controlled synthetic datasets, to study whether understanding informs generation in Unified Multimodal Models. Results show a notable understanding‑generation gap, especially in reasoning generation and knowledge transfer. Explicit Chain‑of‑Thought (CoT) in the understanding module bridges this gap, and self‑training can internalize CoT for implicit reasoning during generation; query‑based architectures also exhibit latent CoT‑like properties that aid knowledge transfer.
arXiv:2608. 11907v1 Announce Type: 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 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.
UReason is a benchmark that evaluates how well unified multimodal models (UMMs) align textual reasoning with image generation. It contains 2,000 human‑curated instances across five reasoning‑intensive tasks—Code, Arithmetic, Spatial, Attribute, and Text—and compares direct generation, reasoning‑guided generation, and decontextualized generation. The study finds that while reasoning‑guided generation improves over direct generation, decontextualized generation consistently outperforms it, indicating that the visual semantics in textual reasoning are not reliably reflected in the generated images.
arXiv:2608. 05000v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision offers a critical axis for advancing foundation models, driving a shift towards natively unified multimodal pretraining.
The paper investigates whether visual generation can extend the knowledge of unified multimodal models (UMMs). Using a new Knowledge Transfer Probing protocol, the authors show that training UMMs to generate images can transfer knowledge to text-only question answering, though the transfer is uneven across categories and models. They further demonstrate that aligning textual and interleaved image–text outputs improves knowledge accessibility, and that knowledge accurately captured in images tends to be more retrievable via text, yet gaps persist.
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:2602. 12279v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unified models can handle both multimodal understanding and generation within a single architecture, yet they typically operate in a single pass without iteratively refining their outputs.
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.
arXiv:2606. 26348v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can process diverse inputs, e.