arXiv AI By Yinyi Luo, Haoyue Bai, Yi Ge, Nilton Cesar Rojas Vales, Marios Savvides, Jindong Wang

FlexUMM: Flexible Representation Learning for Unified Multimodal Models

Read the original on arXiv AI →

The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 2

Uncovering Understanding-Generation Synergy in Native Unified Multimodal Models: From Representation, Task to System

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.

By Penghao Wu, Haiwen Diao, Weichen Fan, Lewei Lu, Dahua Lin, Ziwei Liu
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
arXiv AI
Sep 18

From Models to Systems: A Comprehensive Survey of Efficient Multimodal Learning

The survey "From Models to Systems: A Comprehensive Survey of Efficient Multimodal Learning" reviews over 300 works on efficient multimodal learning (EML), proposing a structured taxonomy that spans model, algorithm, and system layers. It synthesizes how cross‑layer co‑design addresses the Efficiency‑Utility‑Privacy trade‑off and illustrates this through a case study of multimodal large language models. The paper also offers optimization blueprints for various domains, discusses a shift toward self‑regulating intelligence, and outlines open challenges for future EML research.

By Pan Wang, Siwei Song, Hui Ji, Siqi Cao, Heng Yu, Zhijian Liu, Huanrui Yang, Yingyan Celine Lin, Beidi Chen, Mohit Bansal, Xiaoming Liu, Pengfei Zhou, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Tianlong Chen, Jingtong Hu
arXiv AI
Jun 12

M*: A Modular, Extensible, Serving System for Multimodal Models

arXiv:2606. 12688v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We are entering a new era of composite model architectures that integrate diverse components such as vision encoders, language backbones, diffusion and flow heads, audio codecs, action generators, and world-model predictors.

By Atindra Jha, Naomi Sagan, Keisuke Kamahori, Irmak Sivgin, Rohan Sanda, Steven Gao, Mark Horowitz, Luke Zettlemoyer, Olivia Hsu, Jure Leskovec, Baris Kasikci, Stephanie Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 10

SynIB: Informational Bottleneck for Maximizing Synergy in Multimodal Learning

arXiv:2606. 09853v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A central objective in multimodal learning is to capture synergy: task-relevant information that arises only from the joint use of multiple modalities, and is not available from any single modality alone.

By Konstantinos Kontras, Teodora Gagaleska, Thomas Strypsteen, Christos Chatzichristos, Matthew Blaschko, Maarten De Vos, Paul Pu Liang