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Main Authors: Xiao, Teng, Li, Zuchao, Zhang, Lefei
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19018
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author Xiao, Teng
Li, Zuchao
Zhang, Lefei
author_facet Xiao, Teng
Li, Zuchao
Zhang, Lefei
contents Recent advances in multimodal large language models (LLMs) have led to significant progress in understanding, generation, and retrieval tasks. However, current solutions often treat these tasks in isolation or require training LLMs from scratch, resulting in high computational costs and limited generalization across modalities. In this work, we present OmniBridge, a unified and modular multimodal framework that supports vision-language understanding, generation, and retrieval within a unified architecture. OmniBridge adopts a language-centric design that reuses pretrained LLMs and introduces a lightweight bidirectional latent alignment module. To address the challenge of task interference, we propose a two-stage decoupled training strategy: supervised fine-tuning and latent space alignment for aligning LLM behavior with multimodal reasoning, and semantic-guided diffusion training to align cross-modal latent spaces via learnable query embeddings. Extensive experiments across a wide range of benchmarks demonstrate that OmniBridge achieves competitive or state-of-the-art performance in all three tasks. Moreover, our results highlight the effectiveness of latent space alignment for unifying multimodal modeling under a shared representation space. Code and models are released at https://github.com/xiao-xt/OmniBridge.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_19018
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publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle OmniBridge: Unified Multimodal Understanding, Generation, and Retrieval via Latent Space Alignment
Xiao, Teng
Li, Zuchao
Zhang, Lefei
Machine Learning
Recent advances in multimodal large language models (LLMs) have led to significant progress in understanding, generation, and retrieval tasks. However, current solutions often treat these tasks in isolation or require training LLMs from scratch, resulting in high computational costs and limited generalization across modalities. In this work, we present OmniBridge, a unified and modular multimodal framework that supports vision-language understanding, generation, and retrieval within a unified architecture. OmniBridge adopts a language-centric design that reuses pretrained LLMs and introduces a lightweight bidirectional latent alignment module. To address the challenge of task interference, we propose a two-stage decoupled training strategy: supervised fine-tuning and latent space alignment for aligning LLM behavior with multimodal reasoning, and semantic-guided diffusion training to align cross-modal latent spaces via learnable query embeddings. Extensive experiments across a wide range of benchmarks demonstrate that OmniBridge achieves competitive or state-of-the-art performance in all three tasks. Moreover, our results highlight the effectiveness of latent space alignment for unifying multimodal modeling under a shared representation space. Code and models are released at https://github.com/xiao-xt/OmniBridge.
title OmniBridge: Unified Multimodal Understanding, Generation, and Retrieval via Latent Space Alignment
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19018