Uncovering Understanding-Generation Synergy in Native Unified Multimodal Models: From Representation, Task to System
While unified multimodal models (UMMs) jointly perform visual understanding and generation within a single model, functional unification does not guarantee learning synergy: the two objectives may reinforce each other, compete for capacity, or merely coexist. We investigate their relationship at the representation, task, and system levels in a controlled, structurally native setting without pretrained vision priors. At the representation level, we find that each objective provides useful signal to the other: generation enriches the visual features learned for understanding, while understanding strengthens vision--language alignment for generation. However, when both objectives are forced ...
| Authors | Penghao Wu, Haiwen Diao, Weichen Fan et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 1 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 1 September 2026 |
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