AIA: Rethinking Architecture Decoupling Strategy In Unified Multimodal Model

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Hauptverfasser: Zheng, Dian, Zhang, Manyuan, Li, Hongyu, Zou, Kai, Liu, Hongbo, Guo, Ziyu, Feng, Kaituo, Liu, Yexin, Luo, Ying, Li, Hongsheng
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Zheng, Dian
Zhang, Manyuan
Li, Hongyu
Zou, Kai
Liu, Hongbo
Guo, Ziyu
Feng, Kaituo
Liu, Yexin
Luo, Ying
Li, Hongsheng
author_facet Zheng, Dian
Zhang, Manyuan
Li, Hongyu
Zou, Kai
Liu, Hongbo
Guo, Ziyu
Feng, Kaituo
Liu, Yexin
Luo, Ying
Li, Hongsheng
contents Unified multimodal models for image generation and understanding represent a significant step toward AGI and have attracted widespread attention from researchers. The main challenge of this task lies in the difficulty in establishing an optimal training paradigm due to inherent conflicting targets in understanding and generation tasks. To alleviate these conflicts and pursue higher performance, many researchers adopt varying degrees of architecture decoupling (e.g., Double image encoders, MOE/MOT architecture, or frozen MLLM). However, excessive model decoupling can lead to the loss of interleave generation ability, undermining the original intent of unified models. In this work, we aim to explore how to mitigate task conflicts without resorting to model decoupling. Firstly, we analyze why decoupling boosts performance by studying the cross-modal attention behavior of models. We observe that architecture decoupling does not solve task conflicts, but essentially drives models toward cross-modal interaction patterns of task-specific models, as seen in Qwen3-VL and HunyuanImage-3.0, and that the more thorough the decoupling, the more consistent the behavior becomes. Motivated by this observation, we propose Attention Interaction Alignment (AIA) loss, which explicitly learns task-specific multimodal interaction patterns during training. To demonstrate the generalizability of our AIA loss, we apply it to Emu3 and Janus-Pro during SFT and post-training stage respectively. Without bells and whistles, AIA not only refines cross-modal attention patterns, but also boosts both generation and understanding performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_22663
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AIA: Rethinking Architecture Decoupling Strategy In Unified Multimodal Model
Zheng, Dian
Zhang, Manyuan
Li, Hongyu
Zou, Kai
Liu, Hongbo
Guo, Ziyu
Feng, Kaituo
Liu, Yexin
Luo, Ying
Li, Hongsheng
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Unified multimodal models for image generation and understanding represent a significant step toward AGI and have attracted widespread attention from researchers. The main challenge of this task lies in the difficulty in establishing an optimal training paradigm due to inherent conflicting targets in understanding and generation tasks. To alleviate these conflicts and pursue higher performance, many researchers adopt varying degrees of architecture decoupling (e.g., Double image encoders, MOE/MOT architecture, or frozen MLLM). However, excessive model decoupling can lead to the loss of interleave generation ability, undermining the original intent of unified models. In this work, we aim to explore how to mitigate task conflicts without resorting to model decoupling. Firstly, we analyze why decoupling boosts performance by studying the cross-modal attention behavior of models. We observe that architecture decoupling does not solve task conflicts, but essentially drives models toward cross-modal interaction patterns of task-specific models, as seen in Qwen3-VL and HunyuanImage-3.0, and that the more thorough the decoupling, the more consistent the behavior becomes. Motivated by this observation, we propose Attention Interaction Alignment (AIA) loss, which explicitly learns task-specific multimodal interaction patterns during training. To demonstrate the generalizability of our AIA loss, we apply it to Emu3 and Janus-Pro during SFT and post-training stage respectively. Without bells and whistles, AIA not only refines cross-modal attention patterns, but also boosts both generation and understanding performance.
title AIA: Rethinking Architecture Decoupling Strategy In Unified Multimodal Model
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22663