UniHetero: Could Generation Enhance Understanding for Vision-Language-Model at Large Data Scale?

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Chen, Fengjiao, Jing, Minhao, Lu, Weitao, Feng, Yan, Li, Xiaoyu, Cao, Xuezhi
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Chen, Fengjiao
Jing, Minhao
Lu, Weitao
Feng, Yan
Li, Xiaoyu
Cao, Xuezhi
author_facet Chen, Fengjiao
Jing, Minhao
Lu, Weitao
Feng, Yan
Li, Xiaoyu
Cao, Xuezhi
contents Vision-language large models are moving toward the unification of visual understanding and visual generation tasks. However, whether generation can enhance understanding is still under-explored on large data scale. In this work, we analysis the unified structure with a concise model, UniHetero, under large-scale pretraining (>200M samples). Our key observations are: (1) Generation can improve understanding, but Only if you generate Semantics, Not Pixels. A common assumption in unified vision-language models is that adding generation will naturally strengthen understanding. However, this is not always true at scale. At 200M+ pretraining samples, generation helps understanding only when it operates at the semantic level, i.e. when the model learns to autoregress high-level visual representations inside the LLM. Once pixel-level objectives (e.g., diffusion losses) directly interfere with the LLM, understanding performance often degrades. (2) Generation reveals a superior Data Scaling trend and higher Data Utilization. Unified generation-understanding demonstrates a superior scaling trend compared to understanding alone, revealing a more effective way to learn vision-only knowledge directive from vision modality rather than captioning to text. (3) Autoregression on Input Embedding is effective to capture visual details. Compared to the commonly-used vision encoder, make visual autoregression on input embedding shows less cumulative error and is modality independent, which can be extend to all modalities. The learned semantic representations capture visual information such as objects, locations, shapes, and colors; further enable pixel-level image generation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_23512
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle UniHetero: Could Generation Enhance Understanding for Vision-Language-Model at Large Data Scale?
Chen, Fengjiao
Jing, Minhao
Lu, Weitao
Feng, Yan
Li, Xiaoyu
Cao, Xuezhi
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
I.2.7
Vision-language large models are moving toward the unification of visual understanding and visual generation tasks. However, whether generation can enhance understanding is still under-explored on large data scale. In this work, we analysis the unified structure with a concise model, UniHetero, under large-scale pretraining (>200M samples). Our key observations are: (1) Generation can improve understanding, but Only if you generate Semantics, Not Pixels. A common assumption in unified vision-language models is that adding generation will naturally strengthen understanding. However, this is not always true at scale. At 200M+ pretraining samples, generation helps understanding only when it operates at the semantic level, i.e. when the model learns to autoregress high-level visual representations inside the LLM. Once pixel-level objectives (e.g., diffusion losses) directly interfere with the LLM, understanding performance often degrades. (2) Generation reveals a superior Data Scaling trend and higher Data Utilization. Unified generation-understanding demonstrates a superior scaling trend compared to understanding alone, revealing a more effective way to learn vision-only knowledge directive from vision modality rather than captioning to text. (3) Autoregression on Input Embedding is effective to capture visual details. Compared to the commonly-used vision encoder, make visual autoregression on input embedding shows less cumulative error and is modality independent, which can be extend to all modalities. The learned semantic representations capture visual information such as objects, locations, shapes, and colors; further enable pixel-level image generation.
title UniHetero: Could Generation Enhance Understanding for Vision-Language-Model at Large Data Scale?
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
I.2.7
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.23512