Does Gradient Conflict Predict the Understanding--Generation Trade-off? A Controlled Audit of Conflict-Metric Validity in Unified Multimodal Models
Unified multimodal models (UMMs) are increasingly designed around gradient conflict between understanding and generation objectives. The premise that reducing these metrics improves the downstream understanding-generation trade-off has never been tested directly. We audit it in a controlled testbed, GRIDUMM, which mirrors key structural ingredients of UMM training while making the ground-truth trade-off exactly computable. Across 63 configurations and 372 measured checkpoints, no directional conflict metric reaches an absolute Spearman correlation of 0.3 with a confidence interval excluding zero for conflict measured during training against the eventual trade-off. A dose-response interven...
| Authors | Shuyang Jiang, Fucheng Deng, Yuchuan Luo et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 29 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 September 2026 |
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