TBAC-UniImage: Unified Understanding and Generation by Ladder-Side Diffusion Tuning

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08098v2
• Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2025 17:38:47 GMT
• Title: TBAC-UniImage: Unified Understanding and Generation by Ladder-Side Diffusion Tuning
• Abstract summary: This paper introduces TBAC-UniImage, a novel unified model for multimodal understanding and generation.<n>We achieve this by deeply integrating a pre-trained Diffusion Model, acting as a generative ladder, with a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM)
• Score: 4.055271388591777
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: This paper introduces TBAC-UniImage, a novel unified model for multimodal understanding and generation. We achieve this by deeply integrating a pre-trained Diffusion Model, acting as a generative ladder, with a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM). Previous diffusion-based unified models face two primary limitations. One approach uses only the MLLM's final hidden state as the generative condition. This creates a shallow connection, as the generator is isolated from the rich, hierarchical representations within the MLLM's intermediate layers. The other approach, pretraining a unified generative architecture from scratch, is computationally expensive and prohibitive for many researchers. To overcome these issues, our work explores a new paradigm. Instead of relying on a single output, we use representations from multiple, diverse layers of the MLLM as generative conditions for the diffusion model. This method treats the pre-trained generator as a ladder, receiving guidance from various depths of the MLLM's understanding process. Consequently, TBAC-UniImage achieves a much deeper and more fine-grained unification of understanding and generation.

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