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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.
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.
The paper introduces DARTS, a method for tuning decoder representations during model merging. It addresses representation bias in autoregressive decoders by using an entropy‑weighted L1 loss and a per‑position additive bias to correct errors that accumulate across token positions. Experiments on code generation, mathematical reasoning, and instruction following with Llama‑2‑7B show that DARTS improves performance over standard surgery while adding only 0.1% extra parameters.
arXiv:2607. 13188v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human cognition does not separate understanding and generation.
arXiv:2506. 01850v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable success in instruction-following tasks by integrating pretrained visual encoders with large language models (LLMs).
arXiv:2605. 25820v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion-based multimodal large language models (dMLLMs) decode by iteratively predicting tokens at multiple masked positions in parallel.