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Uncovering Understanding-Generation Synergy in Native Unified Multimodal Models: From Representation, Task to System

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 1, 2026 · UTC

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

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First collected: 2026-09-21T06:01:56.170Z. This is not the publication date.