UniFork: Exploring Modality Alignment for Unified Multimodal
  Understanding and Generation
Authors: name: Teng Li; name: Quanfeng Lu; name: Lirui Zhao; name: Hao Li; name: Xizhou Zhu; name: Yu Qiao; name: Jun Zhang; name: Wenqi Shao
Published: 2025-06-20 17:52:31

Abstract: Unified image understanding and generation has emerged as a promising
paradigm in multimodal artificial intelligence. Despite recent progress, the
optimal architectural design for such unified models remains an open challenge.
In this work, we start by analyzing the modality alignment behaviors of
task-specific expert models for understanding and generation, as well as
current unified models. Our analysis reveals a crucial observation:
understanding tasks benefit from a progressively increasing modality alignment
across network depth, which helps build up semantic information for better
comprehension; In contrast, generation tasks follow a different trend: modality
alignment increases in the early layers but decreases in the deep layers to
recover spatial details. These divergent alignment patterns create a
fundamental conflict in fully shared Transformer backbones, where a uniform
representational flow often leads to performance compromises across two tasks.
Motivated by this finding, we introduce UniFork, a novel Y-shaped architecture
that shares the shallow layers for cross-task representation learning, while
employing task-specific branches in deeper layers to avoid task interference.
This design effectively balances shared learning and task specialization.
Through extensive ablation experiments, we demonstrate that Unifork
consistently outperforms conventional fully shared Transformer architectures,
and achieves performance on par with or better than task-specific models.