NextFlow: Unified Sequential Modeling Activates Multimodal Understanding and Generation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02204v1
• Date: Mon, 05 Jan 2026 15:27:04 GMT
• Title: NextFlow: Unified Sequential Modeling Activates Multimodal Understanding and Generation
• Authors: Huichao Zhang, Liao Qu, Yiheng Liu, Hang Chen, Yangyang Song, Yongsheng Dong, Shikun Sun, Xian Li, Xu Wang, Yi Jiang, Hu Ye, Bo Chen, Yiming Gao, Peng Liu, Akide Liu, Zhipeng Yang, Qili Deng, Linjie Xing, Jiyang Liu, Zhao Wang, Yang Zhou, Mingcong Liu, Yi Zhang, Qian He, Xiwei Hu, Zhongqi Qi, Jie Shao, Zhiye Fu, Shuai Wang, Fangmin Chen, Xuezhi Chai, Zhihua Wu, Yitong Wang, Zehuan Yuan, Daniel K. Du, Xinglong Wu,
• Abstract summary: NextFlow is a unified decoder-only autoregressive transformer trained on 6 trillion interleaved text-image discrete tokens.<n>By leveraging a unified vision representation within a unified autoregressive architecture, NextFlow activates multimodal understanding and generation capabilities.<n>NextFlow achieves state-of-the-art performance among unified models and rivals specialized diffusion baselines in visual quality.
• Score: 66.92488610008519
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: We present NextFlow, a unified decoder-only autoregressive transformer trained on 6 trillion interleaved text-image discrete tokens. By leveraging a unified vision representation within a unified autoregressive architecture, NextFlow natively activates multimodal understanding and generation capabilities, unlocking abilities of image editing, interleaved content and video generation. Motivated by the distinct nature of modalities - where text is strictly sequential and images are inherently hierarchical - we retain next-token prediction for text but adopt next-scale prediction for visual generation. This departs from traditional raster-scan methods, enabling the generation of 1024x1024 images in just 5 seconds - orders of magnitude faster than comparable AR models. We address the instabilities of multi-scale generation through a robust training recipe. Furthermore, we introduce a prefix-tuning strategy for reinforcement learning. Experiments demonstrate that NextFlow achieves state-of-the-art performance among unified models and rivals specialized diffusion baselines in visual quality.

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