Jodi: Unification of Visual Generation and Understanding via Joint
  Modeling
Authors: name: Yifeng Xu, name: Zhenliang He, name: Meina Kan, name: Shiguang Shan, name: Xilin Chen

Visual generation and understanding are two deeply interconnected aspects of
human intelligence, yet they have been traditionally treated as separate tasks
in machine learning. In this paper, we propose Jodi, a diffusion framework that
unifies visual generation and understanding by jointly modeling the image
domain and multiple label domains. Specifically, Jodi is built upon a linear
diffusion transformer along with a role switch mechanism, which enables it to
perform three particular types of tasks: (1) joint generation, where the model
simultaneously generates images and multiple labels; (2) controllable
generation, where images are generated conditioned on any combination of
labels; and (3) image perception, where multiple labels can be predicted at
once from a given image. Furthermore, we present the Joint-1.6M dataset, which
contains 200,000 high-quality images collected from public sources, automatic
labels for 7 visual domains, and LLM-generated captions. Extensive experiments
demonstrate that Jodi excels in both generation and understanding tasks and
exhibits strong extensibility to a wider range of visual domains. Code is
available at https://github.com/VIPL-GENUN/Jodi.