FLAT (Flexible‑Length Aligned Transmodal representations) is a joint multimodal pre‑training framework that learns a shared encoder for images and text, producing 1‑D continuous embeddings that can be directly used by downstream generative decoders. By combining contrastive alignment with bidirectional cross‑modal generative objectives, FLAT yields representations that are both discriminative and generative, enabling cross‑modal retrieval and generation with a single pre‑training stage. The model achieves strong performance on T2I generation (GenEval 71.1), image captioning (BLEU‑4 40.5, CIDEr 138.6), and retrieval tasks (Recall@5 86.8/75.8 on MS‑COCO, 98.3/93.6 on Flickr30K), and supports linear interpolation, latent space arithmetic, and zero‑shot composed retrieval.
By Guangyu Sun, Shlok Kumar Mishra, Wentao Bao, Robert Zhenheng Yang, Xiao Wang, Xiyuan Wang, Yujunrong Ma, Chen Yuan, Max Xiangjun Fan, Jun Xiao, Jianpeng Cheng
TokenSwap introduces a method to benchmark and reduce the modality gap in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) by interleaving semantically aligned images with text tokens. By transforming text-only benchmarks like MMLU into image‑interleaved versions (TokenSwap‑Bench), the authors reveal a pervasive performance drop—averaging 19.6%—across 42 MLLMs, with reasoning models showing smaller gaps. Training with TokenSwap mitigates this gap while maintaining strong text‑only and vision‑language performance.
By Andong Hua, Colton Bishop, Igor Mordatch, Arian Hosseini, Jindong Gu, Aleksandra Faust, Rebecca Roelofs, Yao Qin
arXiv:2603. 22282v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present UniMotion, to our knowledge the first unified framework for simultaneous understanding and generation of human motion, natural language, and RGB images within a single architecture.
By Ziyi Wang, Xinshun Wang, Shuang Chen, Yang Cong, Mengyuan Liu
arXiv:2608. 12987v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative information retrieval (GIR) has emerged as a compelling alternative to the conventional index-retrieve-then-rank retrieval pipeline by training a generator to produce the identifiers of relevant items directly.
By Kaipeng Li, Haitao Yu, Xuanchen Zhou
arXiv:2508. 12466v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Traditional multimodal learning approaches rely on alignment pre-training to bridge vision and language modalities, typically by projecting visual features into discrete text token spaces using large-scale image--text data.
By Xuhui Zhan, Tyler Derr
JUICE (Joint Unified multimodal modeling In Continuous Encoder spaces) is a single flow‑matching Transformer that jointly models images and text in pretrained continuous encoder spaces, allowing each modality to be generated by the same process with its own noise level. The model can perform tasks such as image generation, captioning, visual question answering, and joint generation by deciding which modalities are clean and which are generated. Experiments show that joint and conditional denoising together outperform either alone, and that JUICE achieves strong performance on GenEval, VQAv2, and visual spatial planning tasks, even enabling coupled sampling where both modalities are generated simultaneously.
By Jiahan Li, Huangyuan Su, Shengbang Tong, Shusheng Yang, Ruihan Guo, Suozhi Huang, Hexu Zhao, Pratyusha Sharma, Sherry Yang, Jiatao Gu, Rob Fergus, Kyunghyun Cho
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:2609.37225v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong potential for universal multimodal representation learning. However, existing methods eith...
By Zijing Cai, Yuzhe Wang, Jingxian Zhu, Fengbin Zhu, Richang Hong
arXiv:2506. 08774v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Different machine learning models can represent the same underlying concept in different ways.
By Fan Xu, Luis A. Leiva
arXiv:2609.40362v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We present Multimodal Flow, a fully continuous generative model of language and vision. Most unified multimodal models either model both language and q...
By Hongyuan Tao, Xinggang Wang, Lianghui Zhu, Yongkang Li, Yunchao Wei, Bin Feng, Shaoyu Chen, Qian Zhang, Chang Huang, Kai Yu
The paper introduces Modality Self-Play (MSP), a training framework that enables multimodal large language models to learn cross‑modal interactions without requiring paired non‑text data. MSP uses proxy‑mediated textual descriptions of unseen modalities as semantic bridges, allowing a model to generate and align these proxies with observed modalities. Experiments show that MSP achieves state‑of‑the‑art or competitive performance on several multimodal benchmarks and demonstrates effective zero‑shot modality composition through learned bridges and anchor‑supporting proxy descriptions.
By Robert Moseley, Md Kaykobad Reza, Ameya Patil, Edward Ayrapetian, Salman Asif
UniFGVC introduces a training‑free framework for few‑shot fine‑grained visual classification that reframes the task as a multimodal retrieval problem. It uses a Category‑Discriminative Visual Captioner to generate attribute‑aware textual descriptions, then matches image‑description pairs with category templates via pre‑trained encoders. Experiments on 12 datasets show that UniFGVC consistently outperforms existing CLIP‑based and fully‑supervised MLLM methods, demonstrating the effectiveness of the retrieval paradigm.
By Haiyun Guo, Hongyu Guo, Xiangzhao Hao, Jiarui Guo, Jinqiao Wang, Tat-Seng Chua