Automatically evaluating multimodal generation presents a significant challenge, as automated metrics often struggle to align reliably with human evaluation, especially for complex tasks that involve multiple modalities. To address this, we present MMMG, a comprehensive and human-aligned benchmark for multimodal generation across 4 modality combinations (image, audio, interleaved text and image, interleaved text and audio), with a focus on tasks that present significant challenges for generation models, while still enabling reliable automatic evaluation through a combination of models and programs. MMMG encompasses 49 tasks (including 29 newly developed ones), each with a carefully designed evaluation pipeline, and 937 instructions to systematically assess reasoning, controllability, and other key capabilities of multimodal generation models. Extensive validation demonstrates that MMMG is highly aligned with human evaluation, achieving an average agreement of 94.3%. Benchmarking results on 24 multimodal generation models reveal that even though the state-of-the-art model, GPT Image, achieves 78.3% accuracy for image generation, it falls short on multimodal reasoning and interleaved generation. Furthermore, results suggest considerable headroom for improvement in audio generation, highlighting an important direction for future research.
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled breakthroughs in many multimodal generation tasks, but a significant performance gap still exists in text-to-motion generation, where LLM-based methods lag far behind non-LLM methods. We identify the granularity of motion tokenization as a critical bottleneck: fine-grained tokenization induces local dependency issues, where LLMs overemphasize short-term coherence at the expense of global semantic alignment, while coarse-grained tokenization sacrifices motion details. To resolve this issue, we propose PlanMoGPT, an LLM-based framework integrating progressive planning and flow-enhanced fine-grained motion tokenization. First, our progressive planning mechanism leverages LLMs' autoregressive capabilities to hierarchically generate motion tokens by starting from sparse global plans and iteratively refining them into full sequences. Second, our flow-enhanced tokenizer doubles the downsampling resolution and expands the codebook size by eight times, minimizing detail loss during discretization, while a flow-enhanced decoder recovers motion nuances. Extensive experiments on text-to-motion benchmarks demonstrate that it achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving FID scores by 63.8% (from 0.380 to 0.141) on long-sequence generation while enhancing motion diversity by 49.9% compared to existing methods. The proposed framework successfully resolves the diversity-quality trade-off that plagues current non-LLM approaches, establishing new standards for text-to-motion generation.
In this work, we introduce OmniGen2, a versatile and open-source generative model designed to provide a unified solution for diverse generation tasks, including text-to-image, image editing, and in-context generation. Unlike OmniGen v1, OmniGen2 features two distinct decoding pathways for text and image modalities, utilizing unshared parameters and a decoupled image tokenizer. This design enables OmniGen2 to build upon existing multimodal understanding models without the need to re-adapt VAE inputs, thereby preserving the original text generation capabilities. To facilitate the training of OmniGen2, we developed comprehensive data construction pipelines, encompassing image editing and in-context generation data. Additionally, we introduce a reflection mechanism tailored for image generation tasks and curate a dedicated reflection dataset based on OmniGen2. Despite its relatively modest parameter size, OmniGen2 achieves competitive results on multiple task benchmarks, including text-to-image and image editing. To further evaluate in-context generation, also referred to as subject-driven tasks, we introduce a new benchmark named OmniContext. OmniGen2 achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source models in terms of consistency. We will release our models, training code, datasets, and data construction pipeline to support future research in this field. Project Page: https://vectorspacelab.github.io/OmniGen2; GitHub Link: https://github.com/VectorSpaceLab/OmniGen2
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled multimodal foundation models to tackle both image understanding and generation within a unified framework. Despite these gains, unified models often underperform compared to specialized models in either task. A key challenge in developing unified models lies in the inherent differences between the visual features needed for image understanding versus generation, as well as the distinct training processes required for each modality. In this work, we introduce Pisces, an auto-regressive multimodal foundation model that addresses this challenge through a novel decoupled visual encoding architecture and tailored training techniques optimized for multimodal generation. Combined with meticulous data curation, pretraining, and finetuning, Pisces achieves competitive performance in both image understanding and image generation. We evaluate Pisces on over 20 public benchmarks for image understanding, where it demonstrates strong performance across a wide range of tasks. Additionally, on GenEval, a widely adopted benchmark for image generation, Pisces exhibits robust generative capabilities. Our extensive analysis reveals the synergistic relationship between image understanding and generation, and the benefits of using separate visual encoders, advancing the field of unified multimodal models.
Recent progress in multimodal generation has increasingly combined autoregressive (AR) and diffusion-based approaches, leveraging their complementary strengths: AR models capture long-range dependencies and produce fluent, context-aware outputs, while diffusion models operate in continuous latent spaces to refine high-fidelity visual details. However, existing hybrids often lack systematic guidance on how and why to allocate model capacity between these paradigms. In this work, we introduce MADFormer, a Mixed Autoregressive and Diffusion Transformer that serves as a testbed for analyzing AR-diffusion trade-offs. MADFormer partitions image generation into spatial blocks, using AR layers for one-pass global conditioning across blocks and diffusion layers for iterative local refinement within each block. Through controlled experiments on FFHQ-1024 and ImageNet, we identify two key insights: (1) block-wise partitioning significantly improves performance on high-resolution images, and (2) vertically mixing AR and diffusion layers yields better quality-efficiency balances--improving FID by up to 75% under constrained inference compute. Our findings offer practical design principles for future hybrid generative models.
Unified generation models aim to handle diverse tasks across modalities -- such as text generation, image generation, and vision-language reasoning -- within a single architecture and decoding paradigm. Autoregressive unified models suffer from slow inference due to sequential decoding, and non-autoregressive unified models suffer from weak generalization due to limited pretrained backbones. We introduce Muddit, a unified discrete diffusion transformer that enables fast and parallel generation across both text and image modalities. Unlike prior unified diffusion models trained from scratch, Muddit integrates strong visual priors from a pretrained text-to-image backbone with a lightweight text decoder, enabling flexible and high-quality multimodal generation under a unified architecture. Empirical results show that Muddit achieves competitive or superior performance compared to significantly larger autoregressive models in both quality and efficiency. The work highlights the potential of purely discrete diffusion, when equipped with strong visual priors, as a scalable and effective backbone for unified generation.
Recent breakthroughs in large multimodal models (LMMs), such as the impressive GPT-4o-Native, have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in following general-purpose instructions for image generation. However, current benchmarks often lack the necessary breadth and depth to fully evaluate the diverse capabilities of these models. To overcome this limitation, we introduce OmniGenBench, a novel and comprehensive benchmark meticulously designed to assess the instruction-following abilities of state-of-the-art LMMs across both perception-centric and cognition-centric dimensions. Our OmniGenBench includes 57 diverse sub-tasks grounded in real-world scenarios, systematically categorized according to the specific model capabilities they demand. For rigorous evaluation, we further employ a dual-mode protocol. This protocol utilizes off-the-shelf visual parsing tools for perception-centric tasks and a powerful LLM-based judger for cognition-centric tasks to assess the alignment between generated images and user instructions. Using OmniGenBench, we evaluate mainstream generative models, including prevalent models like GPT-4o, Gemini-2.0-Flash, and Seedream, and provide in-depth comparisons and analyses of their performance.Code and data are available at https://github.com/emilia113/OmniGenBench.
Additive manufacturing enables the fabrication of complex designs while minimizing waste, but faces challenges related to defects and process anomalies. This study presents a novel multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation-based framework that automates anomaly detection across various Additive Manufacturing processes leveraging retrieved information from literature, including images and descriptive text, rather than training datasets. This framework integrates text and image retrieval from scientific literature and multimodal generation models to perform zero-shot anomaly identification, classification, and explanation generation in a Laser Powder Bed Fusion setting. The proposed framework is evaluated on four L-PBF manufacturing datasets from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, featuring various printer makes, models, and materials. This evaluation demonstrates the framework's adaptability and generalizability across diverse images without requiring additional training. Comparative analysis using Qwen2-VL-2B and GPT-4o-mini as MLLM within the proposed framework highlights that GPT-4o-mini outperforms Qwen2-VL-2B and proportional random baseline in manufacturing anomalies classification. Additionally, the evaluation of the RAG system confirms that incorporating retrieval mechanisms improves average accuracy by 12% by reducing the risk of hallucination and providing additional information. The proposed framework can be continuously updated by integrating emerging research, allowing seamless adaptation to the evolving landscape of AM technologies. This scalable, automated, and zero-shot-capable framework streamlines AM anomaly analysis, enhancing efficiency and accuracy.
Unifying multimodal understanding and generation has shown impressive capabilities in cutting-edge proprietary systems. In this work, we introduce BAGEL, an open0source foundational model that natively supports multimodal understanding and generation. BAGEL is a unified, decoder0only model pretrained on trillions of tokens curated from large0scale interleaved text, image, video, and web data. When scaled with such diverse multimodal interleaved data, BAGEL exhibits emerging capabilities in complex multimodal reasoning. As a result, it significantly outperforms open-source unified models in both multimodal generation and understanding across standard benchmarks, while exhibiting advanced multimodal reasoning abilities such as free-form image manipulation, future frame prediction, 3D manipulation, and world navigation. In the hope of facilitating further opportunities for multimodal research, we share the key findings, pretraining details, data creation protocal, and release our code and checkpoints to the community. The project page is at https://bagel-ai.org/
Consistency models (CMs) have shown promise in the efficient generation of both image and text. This raises the natural question of whether we can learn a unified CM for efficient multimodal generation (e.g., text-to-image) and understanding (e.g., image-to-text). Intuitively, such a model could be acquired by applying the consistency distillation (CD) to existing unified multimodal models. However, the key challenge is establishing a unified denoising perspective for both image and text generation, which is essential for establishing the consistency mapping. To tackle this, at the representation level, we advocate for discrete tokens for both modalities to best preserve language modeling capabilities. Critically, instead of defining the text denoising trajectory via recent discrete diffusion language modeling principles, we specify it using the parallel decoding trace of an autoregressive language model, benefiting from the latter's superior performance in general text generation tasks. The denoising trajectory of image tokens adheres to standard discrete diffusion. We train our unified consistency models (UniCMs) on these combined multimodal trajectories simultaneously with a unified objective. We introduce a trajectory segmentation strategy to further improve the training convergence. Empirically, in text-to-image generation, UniCMs outperform SD3 on GenEval, Image Reward, and CLIP Score metrics, while requiring only approximately ${1}/{8}$ of the sampling time. Meanwhile, in image-to-text generation, UniCMs surpass Show-o on the MMMU benchmark while being $1.5 \times$ faster at long-sequence generating speed. The code is available at https://github.com/zhijie-group/UniCMs.
Recently, the visual generation ability by GPT-4o(mni) has been unlocked by OpenAI. It demonstrates a very remarkable generation capability with excellent multimodal condition understanding and varied task instructions. In this paper, we aim to explore the capabilities of GPT-4o across various tasks. Inspired by previous study, we constructed a task taxonomy along with a carefully curated set of test samples to conduct a comprehensive qualitative test. Benefiting from GPT-4o's powerful multimodal comprehension, its image-generation process demonstrates abilities surpassing those of traditional image-generation tasks. Thus, regarding the dimensions of model capabilities, we evaluate its performance across six task categories: traditional image generation tasks, discriminative tasks, knowledge-based generation, commonsense-based generation, spatially-aware image generation, and temporally-aware image generation. These tasks not only assess the quality and conditional alignment of the model's outputs but also probe deeper into GPT-4o's understanding of real-world concepts. Our results reveal that GPT-4o performs impressively well in general-purpose synthesis tasks, showing strong capabilities in text-to-image generation, visual stylization, and low-level image processing. However, significant limitations remain in its ability to perform precise spatial reasoning, instruction-grounded generation, and consistent temporal prediction. Furthermore, when faced with knowledge-intensive or domain-specific scenarios, such as scientific illustrations or mathematical plots, the model often exhibits hallucinations, factual errors, or structural inconsistencies. These findings suggest that while GPT-4o marks a substantial advancement in unified multimodal generation, there is still a long way to go before it can be reliably applied to professional or safety-critical domains.
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology is revolutionizing the computing industry. Not only its applications have broadened to various sectors but also poses new system design and optimization opportunities. The technology is capable of understanding and responding in multiple modalities. However, the advanced capability currently comes with significant system resource demands. To sustainably scale generative AI capabilities to billions of users in the world, inference must be fast and efficient. This paper pinpoints key system design and optimization opportunities by characterizing a family of emerging multi-modal generation models on real systems. Auto-regressive token generation is a critical latency performance bottleneck, typically dominated by GPU idle time. In addition to memory-intensive attention across the generative AI models, linear operations constitute significant inference latency due to the feed forward networks in Transformer-based models. We demonstrate that state-of-the-art optimization levers, spanning from applications to system software and hardware, set a 3.88x better baseline.
The landscape of image generation has rapidly evolved, from early GAN-based approaches to diffusion models and, most recently, to unified generative architectures that seek to bridge understanding and generation tasks. Recent advances, especially the GPT-4o, have demonstrated the feasibility of high-fidelity multimodal generation, their architectural design remains mysterious and unpublished. This prompts the question of whether image and text generation have already been successfully integrated into a unified framework for those methods. In this work, we conduct an empirical study of GPT-4o's image generation capabilities, benchmarking it against leading open-source and commercial models. Our evaluation covers four main categories, including text-to-image, image-to-image, image-to-3D, and image-to-X generation, with more than 20 tasks. Our analysis highlights the strengths and limitations of GPT-4o under various settings, and situates it within the broader evolution of generative modeling. Through this investigation, we identify promising directions for future unified generative models, emphasizing the role of architectural design and data scaling. For a high-definition version of the PDF, please refer to the link on GitHub: \href{https://github.com/Ephemeral182/Empirical-Study-of-GPT-4o-Image-Gen}{https://github.com/Ephemeral182/Empirical-Study-of-GPT-4o-Image-Gen}.
OpenAI's multimodal GPT-4o has demonstrated remarkable capabilities in image generation and editing, yet its ability to achieve world knowledge-informed semantic synthesis--seamlessly integrating domain knowledge, contextual reasoning, and instruction adherence--remains unproven. In this study, we systematically evaluate these capabilities across three critical dimensions: (1) Global Instruction Adherence, (2) Fine-Grained Editing Precision, and (3) Post-Generation Reasoning. While existing benchmarks highlight GPT-4o's strong capabilities in image generation and editing, our evaluation reveals GPT-4o's persistent limitations: the model frequently defaults to literal interpretations of instructions, inconsistently applies knowledge constraints, and struggles with conditional reasoning tasks. These findings challenge prevailing assumptions about GPT-4o's unified understanding and generation capabilities, exposing significant gaps in its dynamic knowledge integration. Our study calls for the development of more robust benchmarks and training strategies that go beyond surface-level alignment, emphasizing context-aware and reasoning-grounded multimodal generation.
Formulating statements that support diverse or controversial stances on specific topics is vital for platforms that enable user expression, reshape political discourse, and drive social critique and information dissemination. With the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs), controllable text generation towards specific stances has become a promising research area with applications in shaping public opinion and commercial marketing. However, current datasets often focus solely on pure texts, lacking multimodal content and effective context, particularly in the context of stance detection. In this paper, we formally define and study the new problem of stance-driven controllable content generation for tweets with text and images, where given a multimodal post (text and image/video), a model generates a stance-controlled response. To this end, we create the Multimodal Stance Generation Dataset (StanceGen2024), the first resource explicitly designed for multimodal stance-controllable text generation in political discourse. It includes posts and user comments from the 2024 U.S. presidential election, featuring text, images, videos, and stance annotations to explore how multimodal political content shapes stance expression. Furthermore, we propose a Stance-Driven Multimodal Generation (SDMG) framework that integrates weighted fusion of multimodal features and stance guidance to improve semantic consistency and stance control. We release the dataset and code (https://anonymous.4open.science/r/StanceGen-BE9D) for public use and further research.
Reinforcement fine-tuning has instrumental enhanced the instruction-following and reasoning abilities of large language models. In this work, we explore the applications of reinforcement fine-tuning to the autoregressive transformer-based materials generative model CrystalFormer (arXiv:2403.15734) using discriminative machine learning models such as interatomic potentials and property prediction models. By optimizing reward signals-such as energy above the convex hull and material property figures of merit-reinforcement fine-tuning infuses knowledge from discriminative models into generative models. The resulting model, CrystalFormer-RL, shows enhanced stability in generated crystals and successfully discovers crystals with desirable yet conflicting material properties, such as substantial dielectric constant and band gap simultaneously. Notably, we observe that reinforcement fine-tuning enables not only the property-guided novel material design ability of generative pre-trained model but also unlocks property-driven material retrieval from the unsupervised pre-training dataset. Leveraging rewards from discriminative models to fine-tune materials generative models opens an exciting gateway to the synergies of the machine learning ecosystem for materials.
Vision-to-music Generation, including video-to-music and image-to-music tasks, is a significant branch of multimodal artificial intelligence demonstrating vast application prospects in fields such as film scoring, short video creation, and dance music synthesis. However, compared to the rapid development of modalities like text and images, research in vision-to-music is still in its preliminary stage due to its complex internal structure and the difficulty of modeling dynamic relationships with video. Existing surveys focus on general music generation without comprehensive discussion on vision-to-music. In this paper, we systematically review the research progress in the field of vision-to-music generation. We first analyze the technical characteristics and core challenges for three input types: general videos, human movement videos, and images, as well as two output types of symbolic music and audio music. We then summarize the existing methodologies on vision-to-music generation from the architecture perspective. A detailed review of common datasets and evaluation metrics is provided. Finally, we discuss current challenges and promising directions for future research. We hope our survey can inspire further innovation in vision-to-music generation and the broader field of multimodal generation in academic research and industrial applications. To follow latest works and foster further innovation in this field, we are continuously maintaining a GitHub repository at https://github.com/wzk1015/Awesome-Vision-to-Music-Generation.
Generative models in Autonomous Driving (AD) enable diverse scene creation, yet existing methods fall short by only capturing a limited range of modalities, restricting the capability of generating controllable scenes for comprehensive evaluation of AD systems. In this paper, we introduce a multimodal generation framework that incorporates four major data modalities, including a novel addition of map modality. With tokenized modalities, our scene sequence generation framework autoregressively predicts each scene while managing computational demands through a two-stage approach. The Temporal AutoRegressive (TAR) component captures inter-frame dynamics for each modality while the Ordered AutoRegressive (OAR) component aligns modalities within each scene by sequentially predicting tokens in a fixed order. To maintain coherence between map and ego-action modalities, we introduce the Action-aware Map Alignment (AMA) module, which applies a transformation based on the ego-action to maintain coherence between these modalities. Our framework effectively generates complex, realistic driving scenes over extended sequences, ensuring multimodal consistency and offering fine-grained control over scene elements. Project page: https://yanhaowu.github.io/UMGen/
By extending the advantage of chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning in human-like step-by-step processes to multimodal contexts, multimodal CoT (MCoT) reasoning has recently garnered significant research attention, especially in the integration with multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Existing MCoT studies design various methodologies and innovative reasoning paradigms to address the unique challenges of image, video, speech, audio, 3D, and structured data across different modalities, achieving extensive success in applications such as robotics, healthcare, autonomous driving, and multimodal generation. However, MCoT still presents distinct challenges and opportunities that require further focus to ensure consistent thriving in this field, where, unfortunately, an up-to-date review of this domain is lacking. To bridge this gap, we present the first systematic survey of MCoT reasoning, elucidating the relevant foundational concepts and definitions. We offer a comprehensive taxonomy and an in-depth analysis of current methodologies from diverse perspectives across various application scenarios. Furthermore, we provide insights into existing challenges and future research directions, aiming to foster innovation toward multimodal AGI.
World models significantly enhance hierarchical understanding, improving data integration and learning efficiency. To explore the potential of the world model in the remote sensing (RS) field, this paper proposes a label-efficient remote sensing world model for multimodal data fusion (FusDreamer). The FusDreamer uses the world model as a unified representation container to abstract common and high-level knowledge, promoting interactions across different types of data, \emph{i.e.}, hyperspectral (HSI), light detection and ranging (LiDAR), and text data. Initially, a new latent diffusion fusion and multimodal generation paradigm (LaMG) is utilized for its exceptional information integration and detail retention capabilities. Subsequently, an open-world knowledge-guided consistency projection (OK-CP) module incorporates prompt representations for visually described objects and aligns language-visual features through contrastive learning. In this way, the domain gap can be bridged by fine-tuning the pre-trained world models with limited samples. Finally, an end-to-end multitask combinatorial optimization (MuCO) strategy can capture slight feature bias and constrain the diffusion process in a collaboratively learnable direction. Experiments conducted on four typical datasets indicate the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed FusDreamer. The corresponding code will be released at https://github.com/Cimy-wang/FusDreamer.