UniWorld: High-Resolution Semantic Encoders for Unified Visual
  Understanding and Generation
Authors: name: Bin Lin; name: Zongjian Li; name: Xinhua Cheng; name: Yuwei Niu; name: Yang Ye; name: Xianyi He; name: Shenghai Yuan; name: Wangbo Yu; name: Shaodong Wang; name: Yunyang Ge; name: Yatian Pang; name: Li Yuan
Published: 2025-06-03 17:59:33

Abstract: Although existing unified models deliver strong performance on
vision-language understanding and text-to-image generation, their models are
limited in exploring image perception and manipulation tasks, which are
urgently desired by users for wide applications. Recently, OpenAI released
their powerful GPT-4o-Image model for comprehensive image perception and
manipulation, achieving expressive capability and attracting community
interests. By observing the performance of GPT-4o-Image in our carefully
constructed experiments, we infer that GPT-4o-Image leverages features
extracted by semantic encoders instead of VAE, while VAEs are considered
essential components in many image manipulation models. Motivated by such
inspiring observations, we present a unified generative framework named
UniWorld based on semantic features provided by powerful visual-language models
and contrastive semantic encoders. As a result, we build a strong unified model
using only 1% amount of BAGEL's data, which consistently outperforms BAGEL on
image editing benchmarks. UniWorld also maintains competitive image
understanding and generation capabilities, achieving strong performance across
multiple image perception tasks. We fully open-source our models, including
model weights, training and evaluation scripts, and datasets.