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OpenUni: A Simple Baseline for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation

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arxiv 2505.23661 v3 pith:5ZIQXABM submitted 2025-05-29 cs.CV

OpenUni: A Simple Baseline for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation

classification cs.CV
keywords openunitrainingmultimodalbaselinegenerationmodelmodelssimple
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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In this report, we present OpenUni, a simple, lightweight, and fully open-source baseline for unifying multimodal understanding and generation. Inspired by prevailing practices in unified model learning, we adopt an efficient training strategy that minimizes the training complexity and overhead by bridging the off-the-shelf multimodal large language models (LLMs) and diffusion models through a set of learnable queries and a light-weight transformer-based connector. With a minimalist choice of architecture, we demonstrate that OpenUni can: 1) generate high-quality and instruction-aligned images, and 2) achieve exceptional performance on standard benchmarks such as GenEval, DPG- Bench, and WISE, with only 1.1B and 3.1B activated parameters. To support open research and community advancement, we release all model weights, training code, and our curated training datasets (including 23M image-text pairs) at https://github.com/wusize/OpenUni.

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Cited by 25 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

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    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 fixe...

  2. WISE: A World Knowledge-Informed Semantic Evaluation for Text-to-Image Generation

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  3. IB-Flow: Information Bottleneck-Guided CFG Distillation for Few-Step Text-to-Image Generation

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    Information-Bottleneck closed forms for adaptive CFG supervisor timestep and strength yield SOTA 2-NFE text-to-image fidelity across FLUX, OpenUni, and Qwen-Image.

  4. IV-CoT: Implicit Visual Chain-of-Thought for Structure-Aware Text-to-Image Generation

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    SPAR introduces semantic-pixel self-alignment via asymmetric tokenizer and adaptive routing for unified MLLMs that achieve SOTA generation and reconstruction while retaining understanding.

  6. HYDRA-X: Native Unified Multimodal Models with Holistic Visual Tokenizers

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  8. LatentUMM: Dual Latent Alignment for Unified Multimodal Models

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  10. Tuna-2: Pixel Embeddings Beat Vision Encoders for Multimodal Understanding and Generation

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  11. Camera Control for Text-to-Image Generation via Learning Viewpoint Tokens

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  12. Extending One-Step Image Generation from Class Labels to Text via Discriminative Text Representation

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  13. TorchUMM: A Unified Multimodal Model Codebase for Evaluation, Analysis, and Post-training

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  14. Learning Preference-Based Objectives from Clinical Narratives for Dynamic Sepsis Treatment

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  16. InfoTok: Information-Theoretic Regularization for Capacity-Constrained Shared Visual Tokenization in Unified MLLMs

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  17. Generation Enhances Understanding in Unified Multimodal Models via Multi-Representation Generation

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    Adding depth- and segmentation-generation objectives to UMM post-training improved spatial understanding and reduced hallucinations on Harmon and OpenUni while preserving generation quality.

  18. Reconstruction Alignment Improves Unified Multimodal Models

    cs.CV 2025-09 conditional novelty 6.0

    RECA, a self-supervised post-training objective that conditions unified multimodal models on their own visual understanding embeddings to reconstruct input images, improves text-to-image and editing benchmarks across ...

  19. IB-Flow: Information Bottleneck-Guided CFG Distillation for Few-Step Text-to-Image Generation

    cs.CV 2026-07 conditional novelty 5.0

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  20. SPAR: Semantic-Pixel Self-Alignment and Adaptive Routing for Unified Multimodal Models

    cs.CV 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    SPAR introduces a semantic-pixel self-alignment tokenizer and dynamic token routing to create a unified multimodal model that performs both understanding and generation at claimed state-of-the-art levels.

  21. Semantic Generative Tuning for Unified Multimodal Models

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    Semantic Generative Tuning applies segmentation-based generative proxies during post-training to align and improve both understanding and generation in unified multimodal models.

  22. Steering Visual Generation in Unified Multimodal Models with Understanding Supervision

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Using understanding tasks as direct supervision during post-training improves image generation and editing in unified multimodal models.

  23. Tuna-2: Pixel Embeddings Beat Vision Encoders for Multimodal Understanding and Generation

    cs.CV 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Tuna-2 shows pixel embeddings can replace vision encoders in unified multimodal models, achieving competitive or superior results on understanding and generation benchmarks.

  24. Draw-In-Mind: Rebalancing Designer-Painter Roles in Unified Multimodal Models Benefits Image Editing

    cs.CV 2025-09 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    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.

  25. TorchUMM: A Unified Multimodal Model Codebase for Evaluation, Analysis, and Post-training

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