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:2507. 16518v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown impressive reasoning capabilities.
By Xiuwei Chen, Wentao Hu, Hanhui Li, Yongxin Wang Jun Zhou, Zisheng Chen, Meng Cao, Yihan Zeng, Kui Zhang, Yu-Jie Yuan, Jianhua Han, Hang Xu, Xiaodan Liang
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.
By Jihai Zhang, Tianle Li, Linjie Li, Zhengyuan Yang, Yu Cheng
arXiv:2606. 01503v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Unified vision-language models (VLMs) integrate visual understanding and visual generation within a single autoregressive backbone, but their joint training is computationally expensive and largely overlooked from an efficiency perspective.
By Siyi Chen, Weiming Zhuang, Jingtao Li, Lingjuan Lv
arXiv:2511. 19436v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Existing Video Detailed Captioning (VDC) methods predominantly rely on costly human annotations or distillation from powerful proprietary models, creating a dependency on external supervision.
By Qiang Wang, Xinyuan Gao, Yuhang He, Jizhou Han, Jiangyang Li, SongLin Dong, Zhiheng Ma, Yihong Gong
arXiv:2605. 18160v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In recent years, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, primarily attributed to effective paradigms for integrating visual and textual information.
By Xinpeng Dong, Min Zhang, Kairong Han, Xu Tan, Fei Wu, Kun Kuang
Co‑RL is a multi‑agent reinforcement learning framework that trains several decoupled models without shared parameters, using rewards generated by their peers. By increasing cohort diversity—through heterogeneous model families, varying sizes, and rephrased training samples—Co‑RL reduces self‑reinforcing feedback loops, preserves behavioral diversity, and prevents training collapse. Across both text‑only and multimodal benchmarks, Co‑RL outperforms base models and prior label‑free methods, achieving gains of 3.0‑8.6% on seven text benchmarks and 2.3‑7.2% on four multimodal benchmarks, while matching or surpassing supervised approaches without any ground‑truth labels.
By Yunhao Yang, Yuexin Bian, Yunjie Tian, Di Fu, Tianjin Huang, Yuanyuan Shi, Ziang Xiao, Nuno Vasconcelos, Yijiang Li
ViCo is a training framework that improves the visual quality of AI-generated academic charts by using iterative self-reflection to align chart images with reference designs. It introduces a self-supervised warm-up stage that augments Monte Carlo Tree Search with consistency-based pruning, and a multi-step reinforcement learning algorithm that employs counterfactual baselines to address sparse rewards. An automatic, multifaceted evaluation framework assesses style, layout, and semantic consistency through a hierarchical heterogeneous layout graph, and experiments on three public benchmarks show ViCo’s performance approaching that of proprietary large language models.
By Jiaxin Duan, Dian Jiao Shuai Zhao, Jiabing Leng, Yiran Zhang, Feng Huang
The paper introduces PM4Bench, a multimodal, multilingual, multi-task benchmark built on a strictly parallel 10‑language corpus, allowing fair cross‑lingual comparison of Large Vision‑Language Models (LVLMs). It also proposes a vision setting that embeds textual inputs directly into images to better mimic real deployment scenarios. Experiments show OCR performance drives cross‑lingual gaps, leading to an OCR‑centric GRPO training strategy that improves multilingual VQA and reduces disparities without costly supervision.
By Junyuan Gao, Jiahe Song, Jiang Wu, Runchuan Zhu, Guanlin Shen, Shasha Wang, Xingjian Wei, Haote Yang, Weijia Li, Bin Wang, Lijun Wu, Conghui He
arXiv:2507.00754v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: The integration of Large Language Model (LLMs) blocks with Vision Transformers (ViTs) holds immense promise for vision-only tasks by leveraging the...
By Selim Kuzucu, Muhammad Ferjad Naeem, Anna Kukleva, Federico Tombari, Bernt Schiele
arXiv:2601. 22108v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continued pretraining is optimized with fixed self-supervised tasks but selected by downstream performance, creating a coarse feedback loop in which practitioners evaluate checkpoints, change data mixtures or objectives, and restart runs, while individual updates remain blind to target capabilities.
By Shuqi Ke, Giulia Fanti
VIVAS is a new Vision‑Language Model pre‑training framework that addresses the lack of fine‑grained visual perception in existing VLMs. It introduces a unified token space and a dense‑structural‑semantic vision tokenizer that expands the textual vocabulary with visual tokens, enabling vision‑language unified autoregressive supervision over both visual details and linguistic content. Trained on 12.4 T tokens, VIVAS achieves state‑of‑the‑art results on 7 tasks and 39 multimodal benchmarks.
By Zhehan Kan, Yubo Zhu, Xinghua Jiang, Zhixiang Wei, Shifeng Liu, Wei Tong, Sheng Zhong, Qingmin Liao, Wenming Yang, Xin Li, Yinsong Liu, Deqiang Jiang, Xing Sun