Fréchet Distance optimized as FD-loss in representation space by decoupling population size from batch size improves generator quality, enables one-step generation from multi-step models, and motivates a multi-representation metric FDr^k.
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BLIP3-o: A Family of Fully Open Unified Multimodal Models-Architecture, Training and Dataset
Canonical reference. 71% of citing Pith papers cite this work as background.
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abstract
Unifying image understanding and generation has gained growing attention in recent research on multimodal models. Although design choices for image understanding have been extensively studied, the optimal model architecture and training recipe for a unified framework with image generation remain underexplored. Motivated by the strong potential of autoregressive and diffusion models for high-quality generation and scalability, we conduct a comprehensive study of their use in unified multimodal settings, with emphasis on image representations, modeling objectives, and training strategies. Grounded in these investigations, we introduce a novel approach that employs a diffusion transformer to generate semantically rich CLIP image features, in contrast to conventional VAE-based representations. This design yields both higher training efficiency and improved generative quality. Furthermore, we demonstrate that a sequential pretraining strategy for unified models-first training on image understanding and subsequently on image generation-offers practical advantages by preserving image understanding capability while developing strong image generation ability. Finally, we carefully curate a high-quality instruction-tuning dataset BLIP3o-60k for image generation by prompting GPT-4o with a diverse set of captions covering various scenes, objects, human gestures, and more. Building on our innovative model design, training recipe, and datasets, we develop BLIP3-o, a suite of state-of-the-art unified multimodal models. BLIP3-o achieves superior performance across most of the popular benchmarks spanning both image understanding and generation tasks. To facilitate future research, we fully open-source our models, including code, model weights, training scripts, and pretraining and instruction tuning datasets.
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- abstract Unifying image understanding and generation has gained growing attention in recent research on multimodal models. Although design choices for image understanding have been extensively studied, the optimal model architecture and training recipe for a unified framework with image generation remain underexplored. Motivated by the strong potential of autoregressive and diffusion models for high-quality generation and scalability, we conduct a comprehensive study of their use in unified multimodal settings, with emphasis on image representations, modeling objectives, and training strategies. Ground
co-cited works
representative citing papers
RankE co-evolves AR policy and decoder via alternating ranking optimization, improving both FID and CLIP scores on LlamaGen-XL and Janus-Pro where policy-only RL degrades FID.
VLM-to-DiT alignment in video editing models acts as a semantic bottleneck that degrades fine-grained structural semantics, demonstrated via a new diagnostic dataset and protocol on relation-based edits.
INSET embeds images as native tokens in interleaved instructions, outperforming prior methods on multi-image consistency and text alignment as complexity grows.
UniPath adaptively models coordination-path diversity in unified multimodal models by training a path-conditioned executor and using a lightweight planner for input-dependent selection, improving performance over fixed strategies.
Do-Undo Bench is a new evaluation task and dataset that forces models to simulate forward action effects and then undo them to measure genuine action understanding in image generation.
AIA loss teaches unified multimodal models task-specific cross-modal attention patterns to reduce conflicts between image understanding and generation without architecture decoupling.
Text-to-image models show significant limitations in integrating world knowledge, as measured by the new WISE benchmark and WiScore metric across 20 models.
XTC-Bench reveals that strong performance on generation or understanding tasks in unified multimodal models does not guarantee cross-task semantic consistency, which instead depends on how tightly coupled the learning objectives are across modalities.
Fine-tuning multimodal models on a new synthetic spatial benchmark improves generative spatial compliance on real and synthetic tasks and transfers to better spatial understanding.
Unified multimodal models exhibit pseudo-unification due to modality-asymmetric entropy encoding and pattern-split responses between text and image generation.
Lance presents a dual-stream mixture-of-experts model with modality-aware positional encoding and staged multi-task training that outperforms prior open-source unified models on image and video generation while keeping strong understanding performance.
RAE v2 reaches gFID 1.06 on ImageNet-256 in 80 epochs by combining multi-layer encoder sums, complementary REPA targets, and free guidance via output reparameterization.
LatentUMM proposes dual latent alignment at modality and capacity levels plus latent dynamics stabilization to reduce semantic drift and improve consistency in unified multimodal models.
RaPD enables resolution-agnostic image generation by diffusing in a semantics-enriched continuous Neural Image Field latent space using semantic guidance and a coordinate-queried attention renderer.
A unified visual conditioning approach fuses semantic and appearance features before VLM processing, with two-stage training and slot-wise regularization, to improve consistency in multi-reference image generation.
A pixel-space Diffusion Transformer with Unified Transformer architecture unifies image generation, editing, and personalization in an end-to-end model that maps all inputs to a shared token space and scales from 8B to over 200B parameters.
Auto-Rubric as Reward externalizes VLM preferences into structured rubrics and applies Rubric Policy Optimization to create more reliable binary rewards for multimodal generation, outperforming pairwise models on text-to-image and editing benchmarks.
Refinement via Regeneration (RvR) reformulates image refinement in unified multimodal models as conditional regeneration using prompt and semantic tokens from the initial image, yielding higher alignment scores than editing-based methods.
Tuna-2 shows that direct pixel embeddings can replace vision encoders in unified multimodal models, achieving competitive generation and stronger understanding at scale.
TorchUMM is the first unified codebase and benchmark suite for multimodal understanding, generation, and editing across varied UMM models and datasets.
PixelGen augments pixel diffusion with gated perceptual supervision to reach FID 5.11 on ImageNet-256 and GenEval 0.79 in text-to-image, narrowing the gap to latent methods without VAEs.
InfoTok uses mutual information constraints to regularize shared visual tokenization in unified MLLMs, improving both understanding and generation performance without extra training data.
Mull-Tokens are modality-agnostic latent tokens that enable free-form multimodal thinking and deliver up to 16% gains on spatial reasoning benchmarks.
citing papers explorer
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Representation Fr\'echet Loss for Visual Generation
Fréchet Distance optimized as FD-loss in representation space by decoupling population size from batch size improves generator quality, enables one-step generation from multi-step models, and motivates a multi-representation metric FDr^k.
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RankE: End-to-End Post-Training for Discrete Text-to-Image Generation with Decoder Co-Evolution
RankE co-evolves AR policy and decoder via alternating ranking optimization, improving both FID and CLIP scores on LlamaGen-XL and Janus-Pro where policy-only RL degrades FID.
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What Semantics Survive the Connector? Diagnosing VLM-to-DiT Alignment in Video Editing
VLM-to-DiT alignment in video editing models acts as a semantic bottleneck that degrades fine-grained structural semantics, demonstrated via a new diagnostic dataset and protocol on relation-based edits.
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Images in Sentences: Scaling Interleaved Instructions for Unified Visual Generation
INSET embeds images as native tokens in interleaved instructions, outperforming prior methods on multi-image consistency and text alignment as complexity grows.
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UniPath: Adaptive Coordination of Understanding and Generation for Unified Multimodal Reasoning
UniPath adaptively models coordination-path diversity in unified multimodal models by training a path-conditioned executor and using a lightweight planner for input-dependent selection, improving performance over fixed strategies.
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Do-Undo Bench: Reversibility for Action Understanding in Image Generation
Do-Undo Bench is a new evaluation task and dataset that forces models to simulate forward action effects and then undo them to measure genuine action understanding in image generation.
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AIA: Rethinking Architecture Decoupling Strategy In Unified Multimodal Model
AIA loss teaches unified multimodal models task-specific cross-modal attention patterns to reduce conflicts between image understanding and generation without architecture decoupling.
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WISE: A World Knowledge-Informed Semantic Evaluation for Text-to-Image Generation
Text-to-image models show significant limitations in integrating world knowledge, as measured by the new WISE benchmark and WiScore metric across 20 models.
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Beyond Accuracy: Benchmarking Cross-Task Consistency in Unified Multimodal Models
XTC-Bench reveals that strong performance on generation or understanding tasks in unified multimodal models does not guarantee cross-task semantic consistency, which instead depends on how tightly coupled the learning objectives are across modalities.
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Exploring Spatial Intelligence from a Generative Perspective
Fine-tuning multimodal models on a new synthetic spatial benchmark improves generative spatial compliance on real and synthetic tasks and transfers to better spatial understanding.
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Pseudo-Unification: Entropy Probing Reveals Divergent Information Patterns in Unified Multimodal Models
Unified multimodal models exhibit pseudo-unification due to modality-asymmetric entropy encoding and pattern-split responses between text and image generation.
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Lance: Unified Multimodal Modeling by Multi-Task Synergy
Lance presents a dual-stream mixture-of-experts model with modality-aware positional encoding and staged multi-task training that outperforms prior open-source unified models on image and video generation while keeping strong understanding performance.
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Improved Baselines with Representation Autoencoders
RAE v2 reaches gFID 1.06 on ImageNet-256 in 80 epochs by combining multi-layer encoder sums, complementary REPA targets, and free guidance via output reparameterization.
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LatentUMM: Dual Latent Alignment for Unified Multimodal Models
LatentUMM proposes dual latent alignment at modality and capacity levels plus latent dynamics stabilization to reduce semantic drift and improve consistency in unified multimodal models.
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RaPD: Resolution-Agnostic Pixel Diffusion via Semantics-Enriched Implicit Representations
RaPD enables resolution-agnostic image generation by diffusing in a semantics-enriched continuous Neural Image Field latent space using semantic guidance and a coordinate-queried attention renderer.
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UniCustom: Unified Visual Conditioning for Multi-Reference Image Generation
A unified visual conditioning approach fuses semantic and appearance features before VLM processing, with two-stage training and slot-wise regularization, to improve consistency in multi-reference image generation.
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HiDream-O1-Image: A Natively Unified Image Generative Foundation Model with Pixel-level Unified Transformer
A pixel-space Diffusion Transformer with Unified Transformer architecture unifies image generation, editing, and personalization in an end-to-end model that maps all inputs to a shared token space and scales from 8B to over 200B parameters.
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Auto-Rubric as Reward: From Implicit Preferences to Explicit Multimodal Generative Criteria
Auto-Rubric as Reward externalizes VLM preferences into structured rubrics and applies Rubric Policy Optimization to create more reliable binary rewards for multimodal generation, outperforming pairwise models on text-to-image and editing benchmarks.
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Refinement via Regeneration: Enlarging Modification Space Boosts Image Refinement in Unified Multimodal Models
Refinement via Regeneration (RvR) reformulates image refinement in unified multimodal models as conditional regeneration using prompt and semantic tokens from the initial image, yielding higher alignment scores than editing-based methods.
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Tuna-2: Pixel Embeddings Beat Vision Encoders for Multimodal Understanding and Generation
Tuna-2 shows that direct pixel embeddings can replace vision encoders in unified multimodal models, achieving competitive generation and stronger understanding at scale.
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TorchUMM: A Unified Multimodal Model Codebase for Evaluation, Analysis, and Post-training
TorchUMM is the first unified codebase and benchmark suite for multimodal understanding, generation, and editing across varied UMM models and datasets.
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PixelGen: Improving Pixel Diffusion with Perceptual Supervision
PixelGen augments pixel diffusion with gated perceptual supervision to reach FID 5.11 on ImageNet-256 and GenEval 0.79 in text-to-image, narrowing the gap to latent methods without VAEs.
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InfoTok: Information-Theoretic Regularization for Capacity-Constrained Shared Visual Tokenization in Unified MLLMs
InfoTok uses mutual information constraints to regularize shared visual tokenization in unified MLLMs, improving both understanding and generation performance without extra training data.
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Mull-Tokens: Modality-Agnostic Latent Thinking
Mull-Tokens are modality-agnostic latent tokens that enable free-form multimodal thinking and deliver up to 16% gains on spatial reasoning benchmarks.
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DeCo: Frequency-Decoupled Pixel Diffusion for End-to-End Image Generation
DeCo decouples high- and low-frequency generation in pixel diffusion via a DiT plus lightweight decoder and a frequency-aware flow-matching loss, reaching FID 1.62 at 256x256 and 2.22 at 512x512 on ImageNet while closing the gap to latent diffusion methods.
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Emu3.5: Native Multimodal Models are World Learners
Emu3.5 is a native multimodal world model pre-trained on over 10 trillion vision-language tokens with next-token prediction, post-trained via reinforcement learning, and accelerated by Discrete Diffusion Adaptation for efficient interleaved generation and world exploration.
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VFM-VAE: Vision Foundation Models Can Be Good Tokenizers for Latent Diffusion Models
VFM-VAE uses a frozen VFM directly as LDM tokenizer via a custom decoder, reaching gFID 2.22 in 80 epochs and 1.62 after 640 epochs.
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EditVerse: Unifying Image and Video Editing and Generation with In-Context Learning
EditVerse unifies image and video editing and generation in one transformer model via unified token sequences and in-context learning, trained jointly on curated video editing data plus image/video corpora and evaluated on a new instruction-based benchmark.
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F1: A Vision-Language-Action Model Bridging Understanding and Generation to Actions
F1 integrates next-scale visual foresight prediction into a Mixture-of-Transformer VLA architecture to reformulate action generation as foresight-guided inverse dynamics, achieving higher success rates on 136 tasks.
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Semantic-guided Gaussian Splatting for High-Fidelity Underwater Scene Reconstruction
SWAGSplatting augments 3D Gaussian Splatting with CLIP-derived semantic features, a semantic consistency loss, and adaptive primitive reallocation to achieve higher-fidelity reconstruction in low-visibility underwater scenes.
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Muddit: Liberating Generation Beyond Text-to-Image with a Unified Discrete Diffusion Model
Muddit is a unified discrete diffusion transformer that integrates strong visual priors from a pretrained text-to-image model with a lightweight text decoder to enable fast parallel generation across text and image modalities.
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STARFlow2: Bridging Language Models and Normalizing Flows for Unified Multimodal Generation
STARFlow2 presents an autoregressive flow-based architecture for unified multimodal text-image generation by interleaving a VLM stream with a TarFlow stream via residual skips and a unified latent space.
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What Matters for Diffusion-Friendly Latent Manifold? Prior-Aligned Autoencoders for Latent Diffusion
Prior-Aligned AutoEncoders shape latent manifolds with spatial coherence, local continuity, and global semantics to improve latent diffusion, achieving SOTA gFID 1.03 on ImageNet 256x256 with up to 13x faster convergence.
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MUSE: Resolving Manifold Misalignment in Visual Tokenization via Topological Orthogonality
MUSE decouples reconstruction and semantic learning in visual tokenization via topological orthogonality, yielding SOTA generation quality and improved semantic performance over its teacher model.
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Meta-CoT: Enhancing Granularity and Generalization in Image Editing
Meta-CoT uses two-level decomposition of editing operations into meta-tasks and a CoT consistency reward to improve granularity and generalization, reporting 15.8% gains across 21 tasks.
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Extending One-Step Image Generation from Class Labels to Text via Discriminative Text Representation
By requiring and using highly discriminative LLM text features, the work enables the first effective one-step text-conditioned image generation with MeanFlow.
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Self-Adversarial One Step Generation via Condition Shifting
APEX derives self-adversarial gradients from condition-shifted velocity fields in flow models to achieve high-fidelity one-step generation, outperforming much larger models and multi-step teachers.
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Nucleus-Image: Sparse MoE for Image Generation
A 17B-parameter sparse MoE diffusion transformer activates 2B parameters per pass and reaches competitive quality on image generation benchmarks without post-training.
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LMGenDrive: Bridging Multimodal Understanding and Generative World Modeling for End-to-End Driving
LMGenDrive unifies LLM-based multimodal understanding with generative world models to output both future driving videos and control signals for end-to-end closed-loop autonomous driving.
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Uni-ViGU: Towards Unified Video Generation and Understanding via A Diffusion-Based Video Generator
Uni-ViGU unifies video generation and understanding by extending a diffusion video generator with unified continuous-discrete flow matching, modality-driven MoE layers, and bidirectional training stages that repurpose generative knowledge for discriminative tasks.
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MAR-GRPO: Stabilized GRPO for AR-diffusion Hybrid Image Generation
MAR-GRPO stabilizes GRPO for AR-diffusion hybrids via multi-trajectory expectation and uncertainty-based token selection, yielding better visual quality, stability, and spatial understanding than baselines.
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GenEvolve: Self-Evolving Image Generation Agents via Tool-Orchestrated Visual Experience Distillation
GenEvolve introduces a self-evolving agent framework for image generation using tool-orchestrated trajectories and Visual Experience Distillation to achieve claimed SOTA results on benchmarks.
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WinTok: A Win-Win Hybrid Tokenizer via Decomposing Visual Understanding and Generation with Transferable Tokens
WinTok is a hybrid visual tokenizer that supplements pixel tokens with learnable semantic tokens distilled asymmetrically from foundation models to improve reconstruction, understanding, and generation.
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Reversing the Flow: Generation-to-Understanding Synergy in Large Multimodal Models
Generation-to-Understanding synergy lets multimodal models create self-generated visual edits as intermediate steps, improving performance on twelve benchmarks while revealing limits in task-aligned self-reflection.
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SenseNova-U1: Unifying Multimodal Understanding and Generation with NEO-unify Architecture
SenseNova-U1 presents native unified multimodal models that match top understanding VLMs while delivering strong performance in image generation, infographics, and interleaved tasks via the NEO-unify architecture.
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Prompt Reinjection: Alleviating Prompt Forgetting in Multimodal Diffusion Transformers
Prompt reinjection alleviates progressive forgetting of text prompt semantics in MMDiT text branches, producing consistent improvements in text-to-image instruction following on GenEval, DPG, and T2I-CompBench++.
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Draw-In-Mind: Rebalancing Designer-Painter Roles in Unified Multimodal Models Benefits Image Editing
Rebalancing designer-painter roles by assigning design to the understanding module via the new DIM dataset yields SOTA image editing performance with a 4.6B model.
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Pref-GRPO: Pairwise Preference Reward-based GRPO for Stable Text-to-Image Reinforcement Learning
Pref-GRPO stabilizes T2I RL training by using pairwise win rates from preference models as rewards instead of normalized pointwise scores, while UniGenBench enables finer-grained model evaluation across themes and criteria.
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OmniGen2: Towards Instruction-Aligned Multimodal Generation
OmniGen2 introduces a unified generative model with two distinct decoding pathways and a decoupled image tokenizer that achieves competitive results on text-to-image and editing benchmarks plus state-of-the-art consistency among open-source models on the new OmniContext benchmark.
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UniWorld-V1: High-Resolution Semantic Encoders for Unified Visual Understanding and Generation
UniWorld-V1 shows that semantic features from large multimodal models enable unified visual understanding and generation, achieving strong results on perception and manipulation tasks with only 2.7 million training samples.