Daily Papers

Manga, or comics, which are a type of multimodal artwork, have been left behind in the recent trend of deep learning applications because of the lack of a proper dataset. Hence, we built Manga109, a dataset consisting of a variety of 109 Japanese comic books (94 authors and 21,142 pages) and made it publicly available by obtaining author permissions for academic use. We carefully annotated the frames, speech texts, character faces, and character bodies; the total number of annotations exceeds 500k. This dataset provides numerous manga images and annotations, which will be beneficial for use in machine learning algorithms and their evaluation. In addition to academic use, we obtained further permission for a subset of the dataset for industrial use. In this article, we describe the details of the dataset and present a few examples of multimedia processing applications (detection, retrieval, and generation) that apply existing deep learning methods and are made possible by the dataset.

Analyzing digitized artworks presents unique challenges, requiring not only visual interpretation but also a deep understanding of rich artistic, contextual, and historical knowledge. We introduce ArtSeek, a multimodal framework for art analysis that combines multimodal large language models with retrieval-augmented generation. Unlike prior work, our pipeline relies only on image input, enabling applicability to artworks without links to Wikidata or Wikipedia-common in most digitized collections. ArtSeek integrates three key components: an intelligent multimodal retrieval module based on late interaction retrieval, a contrastive multitask classification network for predicting artist, genre, style, media, and tags, and an agentic reasoning strategy enabled through in-context examples for complex visual question answering and artwork explanation via Qwen2.5-VL. Central to this approach is WikiFragments, a Wikipedia-scale dataset of image-text fragments curated to support knowledge-grounded multimodal reasoning. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple benchmarks, including a +8.4% F1 improvement in style classification over GraphCLIP and a +7.1 BLEU@1 gain in captioning on ArtPedia. Qualitative analyses show that ArtSeek can interpret visual motifs, infer historical context, and retrieve relevant knowledge, even for obscure works. Though focused on visual arts, our approach generalizes to other domains requiring external knowledge, supporting scalable multimodal AI research. Both the dataset and the source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/cilabuniba/artseek.

We present the first study on how Multimodal LLMs' (MLLMs) reasoning ability shall be elicited to evaluate the aesthetics of artworks. To facilitate this investigation, we construct MM-StyleBench, a novel high-quality dataset for benchmarking artistic stylization. We then develop a principled method for human preference modeling and perform a systematic correlation analysis between MLLMs' responses and human preference. Our experiments reveal an inherent hallucination issue of MLLMs in art evaluation, associated with response subjectivity. ArtCoT is proposed, demonstrating that art-specific task decomposition and the use of concrete language boost MLLMs' reasoning ability for aesthetics. Our findings offer valuable insights into MLLMs for art and can benefit a wide range of downstream applications, such as style transfer and artistic image generation. Code available at https://github.com/songrise/MLLM4Art.

Artwork analysis is important and fundamental skill for art appreciation, which could enrich personal aesthetic sensibility and facilitate the critical thinking ability. Understanding artworks is challenging due to its subjective nature, diverse interpretations, and complex visual elements, requiring expertise in art history, cultural background, and aesthetic theory. However, limited by the data collection and model ability, previous works for automatically analyzing artworks mainly focus on classification, retrieval, and other simple tasks, which is far from the goal of AI. To facilitate the research progress, in this paper, we step further to compose comprehensive analysis inspired by the remarkable perception and generation ability of large multimodal models. Specifically, we first propose a task of composing paragraph analysis for artworks, i.e., painting in this paper, only focusing on visual characteristics to formulate more comprehensive understanding of artworks. To support the research on formal analysis, we collect a large dataset PaintingForm, with about 19k painting images and 50k analysis paragraphs. We further introduce a superior large multimodal model for painting analysis composing, dubbed GalleryGPT, which is slightly modified and fine-tuned based on LLaVA architecture leveraging our collected data. We conduct formal analysis generation and zero-shot experiments across several datasets to assess the capacity of our model. The results show remarkable performance improvements comparing with powerful baseline LMMs, demonstrating its superb ability of art analysis and generalization. blue{The codes and model are available at: https://github.com/steven640pixel/GalleryGPT.

In the field of graphic design, automating the integration of design elements into a cohesive multi-layered artwork not only boosts productivity but also paves the way for the democratization of graphic design. One existing practice is Graphic Layout Generation (GLG), which aims to layout sequential design elements. It has been constrained by the necessity for a predefined correct sequence of layers, thus limiting creative potential and increasing user workload. In this paper, we present Hierarchical Layout Generation (HLG) as a more flexible and pragmatic setup, which creates graphic composition from unordered sets of design elements. To tackle the HLG task, we introduce Graphist, the first layout generation model based on large multimodal models. Graphist efficiently reframes the HLG as a sequence generation problem, utilizing RGB-A images as input, outputs a JSON draft protocol, indicating the coordinates, size, and order of each element. We develop new evaluation metrics for HLG. Graphist outperforms prior arts and establishes a strong baseline for this field. Project homepage: https://github.com/graphic-design-ai/graphist

Large-scale text-to-image generative models have made impressive strides, showcasing their ability to synthesize a vast array of high-quality images. However, adapting these models for artistic image editing presents two significant challenges. Firstly, users struggle to craft textual prompts that meticulously detail visual elements of the input image. Secondly, prevalent models, when effecting modifications in specific zones, frequently disrupt the overall artistic style, complicating the attainment of cohesive and aesthetically unified artworks. To surmount these obstacles, we build the innovative unified framework CreativeSynth, which is based on a diffusion model with the ability to coordinate multimodal inputs and multitask in the field of artistic image generation. By integrating multimodal features with customized attention mechanisms, CreativeSynth facilitates the importation of real-world semantic content into the domain of art through inversion and real-time style transfer. This allows for the precise manipulation of image style and content while maintaining the integrity of the original model parameters. Rigorous qualitative and quantitative evaluations underscore that CreativeSynth excels in enhancing artistic images' fidelity and preserves their innate aesthetic essence. By bridging the gap between generative models and artistic finesse, CreativeSynth becomes a custom digital palette.

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) represent deeds of ownership, based on blockchain technologies and smart contracts, of unique crypto assets on digital art forms (e.g., artworks or collectibles). In the spotlight after skyrocketing in 2021, NFTs have attracted the attention of crypto enthusiasts and investors intent on placing promising investments in this profitable market. However, the NFT financial performance prediction has not been widely explored to date. In this work, we address the above problem based on the hypothesis that NFT images and their textual descriptions are essential proxies to predict the NFT selling prices. To this purpose, we propose MERLIN, a novel multimodal deep learning framework designed to train Transformer-based language and visual models, along with graph neural network models, on collections of NFTs' images and texts. A key aspect in MERLIN is its independence on financial features, as it exploits only the primary data a user interested in NFT trading would like to deal with, i.e., NFT images and textual descriptions. By learning dense representations of such data, a price-category classification task is performed by MERLIN models, which can also be tuned according to user preferences in the inference phase to mimic different risk-return investment profiles. Experimental evaluation on a publicly available dataset has shown that MERLIN models achieve significant performances according to several financial assessment criteria, fostering profitable investments, and also beating baseline machine-learning classifiers based on financial features.

This book is the result of a seminar in which we reviewed multimodal approaches and attempted to create a solid overview of the field, starting with the current state-of-the-art approaches in the two subfields of Deep Learning individually. Further, modeling frameworks are discussed where one modality is transformed into the other, as well as models in which one modality is utilized to enhance representation learning for the other. To conclude the second part, architectures with a focus on handling both modalities simultaneously are introduced. Finally, we also cover other modalities as well as general-purpose multi-modal models, which are able to handle different tasks on different modalities within one unified architecture. One interesting application (Generative Art) eventually caps off this booklet.

Visual text design plays a critical role in conveying themes, emotions, and atmospheres in multimodal formats such as film posters and album covers. Translating these visual and textual elements across languages extends the concept of translation beyond mere text, requiring the adaptation of aesthetic and stylistic features. To address this, we introduce a novel task of Multimodal Style Translation (MuST-Bench), a benchmark designed to evaluate the ability of visual text generation models to perform translation across different writing systems while preserving design intent. Our initial experiments on MuST-Bench reveal that existing visual text generation models struggle with the proposed task due to the inadequacy of textual descriptions in conveying visual design. In response, we introduce SIGIL, a framework for multimodal style translation that eliminates the need for style descriptions. SIGIL enhances image generation models through three innovations: glyph latent for multilingual settings, pretrained VAEs for stable style guidance, and an OCR model with reinforcement learning feedback for optimizing readable character generation. SIGIL outperforms existing baselines by achieving superior style consistency and legibility while maintaining visual fidelity, setting itself apart from traditional description-based approaches. We release MuST-Bench publicly for broader use and exploration https://huggingface.co/datasets/yejinc/MuST-Bench.

Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion models (DM) have garnered widespread adoption due to their capability in generating high-fidelity outputs and accessibility to anyone able to put imagination into words. However, DMs are often predisposed to generate unappealing outputs, much like the random images on the internet they were trained on. Existing approaches to address this are founded on the implicit premise that visual aesthetics is universal, which is limiting. Aesthetics in the T2I context should be about personalization and we propose the novel task of aesthetics alignment which seeks to align user-specified aesthetics with the T2I generation output. Inspired by how artworks provide an invaluable perspective to approach aesthetics, we codify visual aesthetics using the compositional framework artists employ, known as the Principles of Art (PoA). To facilitate this study, we introduce CompArt, a large-scale compositional art dataset building on top of WikiArt with PoA analysis annotated by a capable Multimodal LLM. Leveraging the expressive power of LLMs and training a lightweight and transferrable adapter, we demonstrate that T2I DMs can effectively offer 10 compositional controls through user-specified PoA conditions. Additionally, we design an appropriate evaluation framework to assess the efficacy of our approach.

Understanding a painting is never a single act. Art historians may analyze the same work through concepts of style, iconography, or historical context, dimensions that are not interchangeable, and each carries distinct semantic relationships between the visual and the textual. Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP, which learn a single shared embedding space, collapse this richness into a single homogeneous alignment, thereby losing the multi-relational structure that defines art-historical reasoning. We introduce CANVAS (Contrastive Art-aware Network for Vision-Language Alignment with Sheaves), a framework for learning relation-aware multimodal representations inspired by sheaf theory. Each artwork is projected into multiple embeddings conditioned on the type of relation (i.e., the context), and a novel contrastive loss encodes contextual information during training, with no dependency on external data at inference. We evaluate on three newly introduced benchmarks of artworks for multi-relational art understanding: WikiArt+, derived from WikiArt and Wikipedia, HertzianaDP, from the Bibliotheca Hertziana collection, and SemArt+, refined from the SemArt dataset. In multimodal retrieval and art understanding, CANVAS outperforms the baselines, supporting the view that multi-relational alignment is not just theoretically motivated but also practically essential.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have achieved remarkable progress in generating photorealistic and prompt-aligned images, but they often produce outputs that contradict verifiable knowledge, especially when prompts involve fine-grained attributes or time-sensitive events. Conventional retrieval-augmented approaches attempt to address this issue by introducing external information, yet they are fundamentally incapable of grounding generation in accurate and evolving knowledge due to their reliance on static sources and shallow evidence integration. To bridge this gap, we introduce ORIG, an agentic open multimodal retrieval-augmented framework for Factual Image Generation (FIG), a new task that requires both visual realism and factual grounding. ORIG iteratively retrieves and filters multimodal evidence from the web and incrementally integrates the refined knowledge into enriched prompts to guide generation. To support systematic evaluation, we build FIG-Eval, a benchmark spanning ten categories across perceptual, compositional, and temporal dimensions. Experiments demonstrate that ORIG substantially improves factual consistency and overall image quality over strong baselines, highlighting the potential of open multimodal retrieval for factual image generation.

Perceiving visual semantics embedded within consecutive characters is a crucial yet under-explored capability for both Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs). In this work, we select ASCII art as a representative artifact. It depicts concepts through careful arrangement of characters, which can be formulated in both text and image modalities. We frame the problem as a recognition task, and construct a novel benchmark, ASCIIEval. It covers over 3K samples with an elaborate categorization tree, along with a training set for further enhancement. Encompassing a comprehensive analysis of tens of models through different input modalities, our benchmark demonstrate its multi-faceted diagnostic power. Given textual input, language models shows their visual perception ability on ASCII art concepts. Proprietary models achieve over 70% accuracy on certain categories, with GPT-5 topping the rank. For image inputs, we reveal that open-source MLLMs suffer from a trade-off between fine-grained text recognition and collective visual perception. They exhibit limited generalization ability to this special kind of arts, leading to the dramatic gap of over 20.01% accuracy compared with their proprietary counterparts. Another critical finding is that model performance is sensitive to the length of the ASCII art, with this sensitivity varying across input modalities. Unfortunately, none of the models could successfully benefit from the simultaneous provision of both modalities, highlighting the need for more flexible modality-fusion approaches. Besides, we also introduce approaches for further enhancement and discuss future directions. Resources are available at https://github.com/JiaQiSJTU/VisionInText.

Artificial intelligence can classify artistic styles and synthesize images, but it still lacks a model of the visual language that gives art meaning. Abstract painting minimizes object semantics and foregrounds structural cues, making it an ideal testbed for computational perception. We introduce Abstract4D, the largest dataset of abstract paintings to date: more than 120,000 images paired with rich metadata and multi-dimensional prompts that capture each work's perceptual attributes---form, color, texture, and composition. Annotations are produced by a hybrid human--VLM pipeline for quality and consistency. Using Abstract4D, we (i) analyze the semantic structure of abstract art through large-scale embedding visualization, uncovering how perceptual relationships organize artistic meaning, and (ii) establish benchmark tasks for classification, cross-modal retrieval, and text-to-image generation to evaluate how AI models perceive and reproduce abstract visual language. Together, these analyses demonstrate how Abstract4D enables both exploration and quantitative assessment of AI's ability to represent and interpret abstract art.

In this work, we study the problem of generating novel images from complex multimodal prompt sequences. While existing methods achieve promising results for text-to-image generation, they often struggle to capture fine-grained details from lengthy prompts and maintain contextual coherence within prompt sequences. Moreover, they often result in misaligned image generation for prompt sequences featuring multiple objects. To address this, we propose a Multi-modal Generation via Cross-Modal In-Context Learning (MGCC) method that generates novel images from complex multimodal prompt sequences by leveraging the combined capabilities of large language models (LLMs) and diffusion models. Our MGCC comprises a novel Cross-Modal Refinement module to explicitly learn cross-modal dependencies between the text and image in the LLM embedding space, and a contextual object grounding module to generate object bounding boxes specifically targeting scenes with multiple objects. Our MGCC demonstrates a diverse range of multimodal capabilities, like novel image generation, the facilitation of multimodal dialogue, and generation of texts. Experimental evaluations on two benchmark datasets, demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. On Visual Story Generation (VIST) dataset with multimodal inputs, our MGCC achieves a CLIP Similarity score of 0.652 compared to SOTA GILL 0.641. Similarly, on Visual Dialogue Context (VisDial) having lengthy dialogue sequences, our MGCC achieves an impressive CLIP score of 0.660, largely outperforming existing SOTA method scoring 0.645. Code: https://github.com/VIROBO-15/MGCC

Recent multimodal image generation models can take multiple images and textual instructions as input, enabling reference-based generation guided not only by text but also by visual instructions such as layouts, arrows, and pose cues. However, existing benchmarks do not evaluate the joint setting in which multiple references must be composed under multiple and heterogeneous visual-instruction images. To address this gap, we introduce VIF-Bench, a benchmark of 1,241 tasks designed to assess the edge of model capabilities in this joint setting by covering: (i) multi-reference generation (up to 7) under multiple heterogeneous visual instructions (up to 6), (ii) cases where reference images can potentially compete with visual instructions (e.g., a strongly posed subject vs. a target pose), and (iii) controlled comparison of visual instructions with text descriptions at different levels of specificity. Using these capabilities, we uncover three findings: (1) models face an adherence-artifact trade-off: once models reach stronger visual instruction adherence, stronger adherence tends to coincide with more instruction artifacts in generated images, (2) visual instruction adherence tends to be lower on tasks whose reference images carry a salient state of the controlled attribute (e.g., a neon-lit subject under a light-direction instruction), most consistently for light and wind, and (3) for models that can understand visual instructions, it is often better to provide visual constraints directly rather than describe them in text; when using text, a moderate level of detail works better than an exhaustive description. VIF-Bench is released as an open benchmark to establish a basis for fair comparison in controllable multi-reference image generation.

Multimodal learning is a recent challenge that extends unimodal learning by generalizing its domain to diverse modalities, such as texts, images, or speech. This extension requires models to process and relate information from multiple modalities. In Information Retrieval, traditional retrieval tasks focus on the similarity between unimodal documents and queries, while image-text retrieval hypothesizes that most texts contain the scene context from images. This separation has ignored that real-world queries may involve text content, image captions, or both. To address this, we introduce Multimodal Retrieval on Representation of ImaGe witH Text (Mr. Right), a novel and comprehensive dataset for multimodal retrieval. We utilize the Wikipedia dataset with rich text-image examples and generate three types of text-based queries with different modality information: text-related, image-related, and mixed. To validate the effectiveness of our dataset, we provide a multimodal training paradigm and evaluate previous text retrieval and image retrieval frameworks. The results show that proposed multimodal retrieval can improve retrieval performance, but creating a well-unified document representation with texts and images is still a challenge. We hope Mr. Right allows us to broaden current retrieval systems better and contributes to accelerating the advancement of multimodal learning in the Information Retrieval.

Our experience of the world is multimodal - we see objects, hear sounds, feel texture, smell odors, and taste flavors. Modality refers to the way in which something happens or is experienced and a research problem is characterized as multimodal when it includes multiple such modalities. In order for Artificial Intelligence to make progress in understanding the world around us, it needs to be able to interpret such multimodal signals together. Multimodal machine learning aims to build models that can process and relate information from multiple modalities. It is a vibrant multi-disciplinary field of increasing importance and with extraordinary potential. Instead of focusing on specific multimodal applications, this paper surveys the recent advances in multimodal machine learning itself and presents them in a common taxonomy. We go beyond the typical early and late fusion categorization and identify broader challenges that are faced by multimodal machine learning, namely: representation, translation, alignment, fusion, and co-learning. This new taxonomy will enable researchers to better understand the state of the field and identify directions for future research.

Audiovisual arts encompass diverse creative disciplines, including cinema, visual arts, stage performance, and game design, where artistic meaning arises from deliberate combinations of visual, auditory, and narrative elements (e.g., fear amplified through claustrophobic framing, or grief conveyed through silence and lingering close-ups). True artistic understanding extends beyond recognizing what is depicted to reasoning about why it is expressed through particular creative choices. Despite the strong progress of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), this critical aspect of artistic understanding remains underexplored, as existing benchmarks largely measure perceptual recognition while overlooking reasoning about creative intent. To address this gap, we introduce Musebench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate MLLMs on nuanced artistic understanding. It comprises 4,016 questions spanning cinematic arts, static visual arts, stage performing arts, and game arts, distilled from over 10K candidate video essays that pair professional commentary with visual demonstration. To capture the open-ended nature of artistic analysis at scale, the benchmark combines single-select and variable-option multi-select questions. All questions are generated and refined through a four-phase iterative pipeline combining shortcut filtering, adversarial distractors, and expert validation. Comprehensive zero-shot evaluation of 28 state-of-the-art MLLMs reveals that even the best-performing model achieves only 48.29% accuracy, substantially below human expert performance of 87.18%, exposing a significant gap in current models' creative domain expertise.

We propose ArtSAGENet, a novel multimodal architecture that integrates Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), to jointly learn visual and semantic-based artistic representations. First, we illustrate the significant advantages of multi-task learning for fine art analysis and argue that it is conceptually a much more appropriate setting in the fine art domain than the single-task alternatives. We further demonstrate that several GNN architectures can outperform strong CNN baselines in a range of fine art analysis tasks, such as style classification, artist attribution, creation period estimation, and tag prediction, while training them requires an order of magnitude less computational time and only a small amount of labeled data. Finally, through extensive experimentation we show that our proposed ArtSAGENet captures and encodes valuable relational dependencies between the artists and the artworks, surpassing the performance of traditional methods that rely solely on the analysis of visual content. Our findings underline a great potential of integrating visual content and semantics for fine art analysis and curation.

Current multimodal and multitask foundation models like 4M or UnifiedIO show promising results, but in practice their out-of-the-box abilities to accept diverse inputs and perform diverse tasks are limited by the (usually rather small) number of modalities and tasks they are trained on. In this paper, we expand upon the capabilities of them by training a single model on tens of highly diverse modalities and by performing co-training on large-scale multimodal datasets and text corpora. This includes training on several semantic and geometric modalities, feature maps from recent state of the art models like DINOv2 and ImageBind, pseudo labels of specialist models like SAM and 4DHumans, and a range of new modalities that allow for novel ways to interact with the model and steer the generation, for example image metadata or color palettes. A crucial step in this process is performing discrete tokenization on various modalities, whether they are image-like, neural network feature maps, vectors, structured data like instance segmentation or human poses, or data that can be represented as text. Through this, we expand on the out-of-the-box capabilities of multimodal models and specifically show the possibility of training one model to solve at least 3x more tasks/modalities than existing ones and doing so without a loss in performance. This enables more fine-grained and controllable multimodal generation capabilities and allows us to study the distillation of models trained on diverse data and objectives into a unified model. We successfully scale the training to a three billion parameter model using tens of modalities and different datasets. The resulting models and training code are open sourced at 4m.epfl.ch.

This paper presents multimodal markup document models (MarkupDM) that can generate both markup language and images within interleaved multimodal documents. Unlike existing vision-and-language multimodal models, our MarkupDM tackles unique challenges critical to graphic design tasks: generating partial images that contribute to the overall appearance, often involving transparency and varying sizes, and understanding the syntax and semantics of markup languages, which play a fundamental role as a representational format of graphic designs. To address these challenges, we design an image quantizer to tokenize images of diverse sizes with transparency and modify a code language model to process markup languages and incorporate image modalities. We provide in-depth evaluations of our approach on three graphic design completion tasks: generating missing attribute values, images, and texts in graphic design templates. Results corroborate the effectiveness of our MarkupDM for graphic design tasks. We also discuss the strengths and weaknesses in detail, providing insights for future research on multimodal document generation.

In this paper, we propose a multimodal search engine that combines visual and textual cues to retrieve items from a multimedia database aesthetically similar to the query. The goal of our engine is to enable intuitive retrieval of fashion merchandise such as clothes or furniture. Existing search engines treat textual input only as an additional source of information about the query image and do not correspond to the real-life scenario where the user looks for 'the same shirt but of denim'. Our novel method, dubbed DeepStyle, mitigates those shortcomings by using a joint neural network architecture to model contextual dependencies between features of different modalities. We prove the robustness of this approach on two different challenging datasets of fashion items and furniture where our DeepStyle engine outperforms baseline methods by 18-21% on the tested datasets. Our search engine is commercially deployed and available through a Web-based application.

We present OmniBooth, an image generation framework that enables spatial control with instance-level multi-modal customization. For all instances, the multimodal instruction can be described through text prompts or image references. Given a set of user-defined masks and associated text or image guidance, our objective is to generate an image, where multiple objects are positioned at specified coordinates and their attributes are precisely aligned with the corresponding guidance. This approach significantly expands the scope of text-to-image generation, and elevates it to a more versatile and practical dimension in controllability. In this paper, our core contribution lies in the proposed latent control signals, a high-dimensional spatial feature that provides a unified representation to integrate the spatial, textual, and image conditions seamlessly. The text condition extends ControlNet to provide instance-level open-vocabulary generation. The image condition further enables fine-grained control with personalized identity. In practice, our method empowers users with more flexibility in controllable generation, as users can choose multi-modal conditions from text or images as needed. Furthermore, thorough experiments demonstrate our enhanced performance in image synthesis fidelity and alignment across different tasks and datasets. Project page: https://len-li.github.io/omnibooth-web/

As information exists in various modalities in real world, effective interaction and fusion among multimodal information plays a key role for the creation and perception of multimodal data in computer vision and deep learning research. With superb power in modeling the interaction among multimodal information, multimodal image synthesis and editing has become a hot research topic in recent years. Instead of providing explicit guidance for network training, multimodal guidance offers intuitive and flexible means for image synthesis and editing. On the other hand, this field is also facing several challenges in alignment of multimodal features, synthesis of high-resolution images, faithful evaluation metrics, etc. In this survey, we comprehensively contextualize the advance of the recent multimodal image synthesis and editing and formulate taxonomies according to data modalities and model types. We start with an introduction to different guidance modalities in image synthesis and editing, and then describe multimodal image synthesis and editing approaches extensively according to their model types. After that, we describe benchmark datasets and evaluation metrics as well as corresponding experimental results. Finally, we provide insights about the current research challenges and possible directions for future research. A project associated with this survey is available at https://github.com/fnzhan/Generative-AI.

Visual designers naturally draw inspiration from multiple visual references, combining diverse elements and aesthetic principles to create artwork. However, current image generative frameworks predominantly rely on single-source inputs -- either text prompts or individual reference images. In this paper, we focus on the task of controllable image generation using multiple visual references. We introduce MultiRef-bench, a rigorous evaluation framework comprising 990 synthetic and 1,000 real-world samples that require incorporating visual content from multiple reference images. The synthetic samples are synthetically generated through our data engine RefBlend, with 10 reference types and 33 reference combinations. Based on RefBlend, we further construct a dataset MultiRef containing 38k high-quality images to facilitate further research. Our experiments across three interleaved image-text models (i.e., OmniGen, ACE, and Show-o) and six agentic frameworks (e.g., ChatDiT and LLM + SD) reveal that even state-of-the-art systems struggle with multi-reference conditioning, with the best model OmniGen achieving only 66.6% in synthetic samples and 79.0% in real-world cases on average compared to the golden answer. These findings provide valuable directions for developing more flexible and human-like creative tools that can effectively integrate multiple sources of visual inspiration. The dataset is publicly available at: https://multiref.github.io/.

Graphic design plays a vital role in visual communication across advertising, marketing, and multimedia entertainment. Prior work has explored automated graphic design generation using diffusion models, aiming to streamline creative workflows and democratize design capabilities. However, complex graphic design scenarios require accurately adhering to design intent specified by multiple heterogeneous user-provided elements (\eg images, layouts, and texts), which pose multi-condition control challenges for existing methods. Specifically, previous single-condition control models demonstrate effectiveness only within their specialized domains but fail to generalize to other conditions, while existing multi-condition methods often lack fine-grained control over each sub-condition and compromise overall compositional harmony. To address these limitations, we introduce CreatiDesign, a systematic solution for automated graphic design covering both model architecture and dataset construction. First, we design a unified multi-condition driven architecture that enables flexible and precise integration of heterogeneous design elements with minimal architectural modifications to the base diffusion model. Furthermore, to ensure that each condition precisely controls its designated image region and to avoid interference between conditions, we propose a multimodal attention mask mechanism. Additionally, we develop a fully automated pipeline for constructing graphic design datasets, and introduce a new dataset with 400K samples featuring multi-condition annotations, along with a comprehensive benchmark. Experimental results show that CreatiDesign outperforms existing models by a clear margin in faithfully adhering to user intent.

The recent popularity of text-to-image diffusion models (DM) can largely be attributed to the intuitive interface they provide to users. The intended generation can be expressed in natural language, with the model producing faithful interpretations of text prompts. However, expressing complex or nuanced ideas in text alone can be difficult. To ease image generation, we propose MultiFusion that allows one to express complex and nuanced concepts with arbitrarily interleaved inputs of multiple modalities and languages. MutliFusion leverages pre-trained models and aligns them for integration into a cohesive system, thereby avoiding the need for extensive training from scratch. Our experimental results demonstrate the efficient transfer of capabilities from individual modules to the downstream model. Specifically, the fusion of all independent components allows the image generation module to utilize multilingual, interleaved multimodal inputs despite being trained solely on monomodal data in a single language.

We train a model to generate images from multimodal prompts of interleaved text and images such as "a <picture of a man> man and his <picture of a dog> dog in an <picture of a cartoon> animated style." We bootstrap a multimodal dataset by extracting semantically meaningful image crops corresponding to words in the image captions of synthetically generated and publicly available text-image data. Our model, MUMU, is composed of a vision-language model encoder with a diffusion decoder and is trained on a single 8xH100 GPU node. Despite being only trained on crops from the same image, MUMU learns to compose inputs from different images into a coherent output. For example, an input of a realistic person and a cartoon will output the same person in the cartoon style, and an input of a standing subject and a scooter will output the subject riding the scooter. As a result, our model generalizes to tasks such as style transfer and character consistency. Our results show the promise of using multimodal models as general purpose controllers for image generation.

In this paper, we propose a multi-modal search engine for interior design that combines visual and textual queries. The goal of our engine is to retrieve interior objects, e.g. furniture or wall clocks, that share visual and aesthetic similarities with the query. Our search engine allows the user to take a photo of a room and retrieve with a high recall a list of items identical or visually similar to those present in the photo. Additionally, it allows to return other items that aesthetically and stylistically fit well together. To achieve this goal, our system blends the results obtained using textual and visual modalities. Thanks to this blending strategy, we increase the average style similarity score of the retrieved items by 11%. Our work is implemented as a Web-based application and it is planned to be opened to the public.

Manga is a popular medium that combines stylized drawings and text to convey stories. As manga panels differ from natural images, computational systems traditionally had to be designed specifically for manga. Recently, the adaptive nature of modern large multimodal models (LMMs) shows possibilities for more general approaches. To provide an analysis of the current capability of LMMs for manga understanding tasks and identifying areas for their improvement, we design and evaluate MangaUB, a novel manga understanding benchmark for LMMs. MangaUB is designed to assess the recognition and understanding of content shown in a single panel as well as conveyed across multiple panels, allowing for a fine-grained analysis of a model's various capabilities required for manga understanding. Our results show strong performance on the recognition of image content, while understanding the emotion and information conveyed across multiple panels is still challenging, highlighting future work towards LMMs for manga understanding.

The rapid advancement of educational applications, artistic creation, and AI-generated content (AIGC) technologies has substantially increased practical requirements for comprehensive Image Aesthetics Assessment (IAA), particularly demanding methods capable of delivering both quantitative scoring and professional understanding. Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM)-based IAA methods demonstrate stronger perceptual and generalization capabilities compared to traditional approaches, yet they suffer from modality bias (score-only or text-only) and lack fine-grained attribute decomposition, thereby failing to support further aesthetic assessment. In this paper, we present:(1) ArtiMuse, an innovative MLLM-based IAA model with Joint Scoring and Expert-Level Understanding capabilities; (2) ArtiMuse-10K, the first expert-curated image aesthetic dataset comprising 10,000 images spanning 5 main categories and 15 subcategories, each annotated by professional experts with 8-dimensional attributes analysis and a holistic score. Both the model and dataset will be made public to advance the field.

Poster design is a critical medium for visual communication. Prior work has explored automatic poster design using deep learning techniques, but these approaches lack text accuracy, user customization, and aesthetic appeal, limiting their applicability in artistic domains such as movies and exhibitions, where both clear content delivery and visual impact are essential. To address these limitations, we present POSTA: a modular framework powered by diffusion models and multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for customized artistic poster generation. The framework consists of three modules. Background Diffusion creates a themed background based on user input. Design MLLM then generates layout and typography elements that align with and complement the background style. Finally, to enhance the poster's aesthetic appeal, ArtText Diffusion applies additional stylization to key text elements. The final result is a visually cohesive and appealing poster, with a fully modular process that allows for complete customization. To train our models, we develop the PosterArt dataset, comprising high-quality artistic posters annotated with layout, typography, and pixel-level stylized text segmentation. Our comprehensive experimental analysis demonstrates POSTA's exceptional controllability and design diversity, outperforming existing models in both text accuracy and aesthetic quality.

Image matching for both cross-view and cross-modality plays a critical role in multimodal perception. In practice, the modality gap caused by different imaging systems/styles poses great challenges to the matching task. Existing works try to extract invariant features for specific modalities and train on limited datasets, showing poor generalization. In this paper, we present MINIMA, a unified image matching framework for multiple cross-modal cases. Without pursuing fancy modules, our MINIMA aims to enhance universal performance from the perspective of data scaling up. For such purpose, we propose a simple yet effective data engine that can freely produce a large dataset containing multiple modalities, rich scenarios, and accurate matching labels. Specifically, we scale up the modalities from cheap but rich RGB-only matching data, by means of generative models. Under this setting, the matching labels and rich diversity of the RGB dataset are well inherited by the generated multimodal data. Benefiting from this, we construct MD-syn, a new comprehensive dataset that fills the data gap for general multimodal image matching. With MD-syn, we can directly train any advanced matching pipeline on randomly selected modality pairs to obtain cross-modal ability. Extensive experiments on in-domain and zero-shot matching tasks, including 19 cross-modal cases, demonstrate that our MINIMA can significantly outperform the baselines and even surpass modality-specific methods. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/LSXI7/MINIMA .

Visual communication, dating back to prehistoric cave paintings, is the use of visual elements to convey ideas and information. In today's visually saturated world, effective design demands an understanding of graphic design principles, visual storytelling, human psychology, and the ability to distill complex information into clear visuals. This dissertation explores how recent advancements in vision-language models (VLMs) can be leveraged to automate the creation of effective visual communication designs. Although generative models have made great progress in generating images from text, they still struggle to simplify complex ideas into clear, abstract visuals and are constrained by pixel-based outputs, which lack flexibility for many design tasks. To address these challenges, we constrain the models' operational space and introduce task-specific regularizations. We explore various aspects of visual communication, namely, sketches and visual abstraction, typography, animation, and visual inspiration.

Recent multimodal image generators such as GPT-4o, Gemini 2.0 Flash, and Gemini 2.5 Pro excel at following complex instructions, editing images and maintaining concept consistency. However, they are still evaluated by disjoint toolkits: text-to-image (T2I) benchmarks that lacks multi-modal conditioning, and customized image generation benchmarks that overlook compositional semantics and common knowledge. We propose MMIG-Bench, a comprehensive Multi-Modal Image Generation Benchmark that unifies these tasks by pairing 4,850 richly annotated text prompts with 1,750 multi-view reference images across 380 subjects, spanning humans, animals, objects, and artistic styles. MMIG-Bench is equipped with a three-level evaluation framework: (1) low-level metrics for visual artifacts and identity preservation of objects; (2) novel Aspect Matching Score (AMS): a VQA-based mid-level metric that delivers fine-grained prompt-image alignment and shows strong correlation with human judgments; and (3) high-level metrics for aesthetics and human preference. Using MMIG-Bench, we benchmark 17 state-of-the-art models, including Gemini 2.5 Pro, FLUX, DreamBooth, and IP-Adapter, and validate our metrics with 32k human ratings, yielding in-depth insights into architecture and data design. We will release the dataset and evaluation code to foster rigorous, unified evaluation and accelerate future innovations in multi-modal image generation.

Current multimodal models aim to transcend the limitations of single-modality representations by unifying understanding and generation, often using text-to-image (T2I) tasks to calibrate semantic consistency. However, their reliance on static, single-image generation in training and evaluation leads to overfitting to static pattern matching and semantic fusion, while fundamentally hindering their ability to model dynamic processes that unfold over time. To address these constraints, we propose Envision-a causal event progression benchmark for chained text-to-multi-image generation. Grounded in world knowledge and structured by spatiotemporal causality, it reorganizes existing evaluation dimensions and includes 1,000 four-stage prompts spanning six scientific and humanities domains. To transition evaluation from single images to sequential frames and assess whether models truly internalize world knowledge while adhering to causal-temporal constraints, we introduce Envision-Score, a holistic metric integrating multi-dimensional consistency, physicality, and aesthetics. Comprehensive evaluation of 15 models (10 specialized T2I models, 5 unified models) uncovers: specialized T2I models demonstrate proficiency in aesthetic rendering yet lack intrinsic world knowledge. Unified multimodal models bridge this gap, consistently outperforming specialized counterparts in causal narrative coherence. However, even these unified architectures remain subordinate to closed-source models and struggle to overcome the core challenge of spatiotemporal consistency. This demonstrates that a focus on causally-isolated single images impedes multi-frame reasoning and generation, promoting static pattern matching over dynamic world modeling-ultimately limiting world knowledge internalization, generation.

Fashion illustration is a crucial medium for designers to convey their creative vision and transform design concepts into tangible representations that showcase the interplay between clothing and the human body. In the context of fashion design, computer vision techniques have the potential to enhance and streamline the design process. Departing from prior research primarily focused on virtual try-on, this paper tackles the task of multimodal-conditioned fashion image editing. Our approach aims to generate human-centric fashion images guided by multimodal prompts, including text, human body poses, garment sketches, and fabric textures. To address this problem, we propose extending latent diffusion models to incorporate these multiple modalities and modifying the structure of the denoising network, taking multimodal prompts as input. To condition the proposed architecture on fabric textures, we employ textual inversion techniques and let diverse cross-attention layers of the denoising network attend to textual and texture information, thus incorporating different granularity conditioning details. Given the lack of datasets for the task, we extend two existing fashion datasets, Dress Code and VITON-HD, with multimodal annotations. Experimental evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach in terms of realism and coherence concerning the provided multimodal inputs.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are now routinely deployed for visual understanding, generation, and curation. A substantial fraction of these applications require an explicit aesthetic judgment. Most existing solutions reduce this judgment to predicting a scalar score for a single image. We first ask whether such scores faithfully capture comparative preference: in a controlled study with eight expert annotators, score-derived rankings align poorly with the same annotators' direct comparisons, while direct ranking yields substantially higher inter-annotator agreement on best- and worst-image labels. Motivated by this finding, we introduce the Visual Aesthetic Benchmark (VAB), which casts aesthetic evaluation as comparative selection over candidate sets with matched subject matter. VAB contains 400 tasks and 1,195 images across fine art, photography, and illustration, with labels derived from the consensus of 10 independent expert judges per task. Evaluating 20 frontier MLLMs and six dedicated visual-quality reward models, we find that the strongest system identifies both the best and the worst image correctly across three random permutations of the candidate order in only 26.5% of tasks, far below the 68.9% achieved by human experts. Fine-tuning a 35B-parameter model on 2,000 expert examples brings its accuracy close to that of a 397B-parameter open-weight model, suggesting that the comparative signal in VAB is transferable. Together, these results expose a clear and measurable gap between current multimodal models and expert aesthetic judgment, and VAB provides the first set-based, expert-grounded testbed on which that gap can be tracked and closed.

Creating multi-view wire art (MVWA), a static 3D sculpture with diverse interpretations from different viewpoints, is a complex task even for skilled artists. In response, we present DreamWire, an AI system enabling everyone to craft MVWA easily. Users express their vision through text prompts or scribbles, freeing them from intricate 3D wire organisation. Our approach synergises 3D B\'ezier curves, Prim's algorithm, and knowledge distillation from diffusion models or their variants (e.g., ControlNet). This blend enables the system to represent 3D wire art, ensuring spatial continuity and overcoming data scarcity. Extensive evaluation and analysis are conducted to shed insight on the inner workings of the proposed system, including the trade-off between connectivity and visual aesthetics.

While existing large vision-language multimodal models focus on whole image understanding, there is a prominent gap in achieving region-specific comprehension. Current approaches that use textual coordinates or spatial encodings often fail to provide a user-friendly interface for visual prompting. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel multimodal model capable of decoding arbitrary visual prompts. This allows users to intuitively mark images and interact with the model using natural cues like a "red bounding box" or "pointed arrow". Our simple design directly overlays visual markers onto the RGB image, eliminating the need for complex region encodings, yet achieves state-of-the-art performance on region-understanding tasks like Visual7W, PointQA, and Visual Commonsense Reasoning benchmark. Furthermore, we present ViP-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark to assess the capability of models in understanding visual prompts across multiple dimensions, enabling future research in this domain. Code, data, and model are publicly available.

For an artist or a graphic designer, the spatial layout of a scene is a critical design choice. However, existing text-to-image diffusion models provide limited support for incorporating spatial information. This paper introduces Composite Diffusion as a means for artists to generate high-quality images by composing from the sub-scenes. The artists can specify the arrangement of these sub-scenes through a flexible free-form segment layout. They can describe the content of each sub-scene primarily using natural text and additionally by utilizing reference images or control inputs such as line art, scribbles, human pose, canny edges, and more. We provide a comprehensive and modular method for Composite Diffusion that enables alternative ways of generating, composing, and harmonizing sub-scenes. Further, we wish to evaluate the composite image for effectiveness in both image quality and achieving the artist's intent. We argue that existing image quality metrics lack a holistic evaluation of image composites. To address this, we propose novel quality criteria especially relevant to composite generation. We believe that our approach provides an intuitive method of art creation. Through extensive user surveys, quantitative and qualitative analysis, we show how it achieves greater spatial, semantic, and creative control over image generation. In addition, our methods do not need to retrain or modify the architecture of the base diffusion models and can work in a plug-and-play manner with the fine-tuned models.

In this work, we present TextHarmony, a unified and versatile multimodal generative model proficient in comprehending and generating visual text. Simultaneously generating images and texts typically results in performance degradation due to the inherent inconsistency between vision and language modalities. To overcome this challenge, existing approaches resort to modality-specific data for supervised fine-tuning, necessitating distinct model instances. We propose Slide-LoRA, which dynamically aggregates modality-specific and modality-agnostic LoRA experts, partially decoupling the multimodal generation space. Slide-LoRA harmonizes the generation of vision and language within a singular model instance, thereby facilitating a more unified generative process. Additionally, we develop a high-quality image caption dataset, DetailedTextCaps-100K, synthesized with a sophisticated closed-source MLLM to enhance visual text generation capabilities further. Comprehensive experiments across various benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Empowered by Slide-LoRA, TextHarmony achieves comparable performance to modality-specific fine-tuning results with only a 2% increase in parameters and shows an average improvement of 2.5% in visual text comprehension tasks and 4.0% in visual text generation tasks. Our work delineates the viability of an integrated approach to multimodal generation within the visual text domain, setting a foundation for subsequent inquiries.

Is aesthetic impact different from beauty? Is visual salience a reflection of its capacity for effective communication? We present Impressions, a novel dataset through which to investigate the semiotics of images, and how specific visual features and design choices can elicit specific emotions, thoughts and beliefs. We posit that the impactfulness of an image extends beyond formal definitions of aesthetics, to its success as a communicative act, where style contributes as much to meaning formation as the subject matter. However, prior image captioning datasets are not designed to empower state-of-the-art architectures to model potential human impressions or interpretations of images. To fill this gap, we design an annotation task heavily inspired by image analysis techniques in the Visual Arts to collect 1,440 image-caption pairs and 4,320 unique annotations exploring impact, pragmatic image description, impressions, and aesthetic design choices. We show that existing multimodal image captioning and conditional generation models struggle to simulate plausible human responses to images. However, this dataset significantly improves their ability to model impressions and aesthetic evaluations of images through fine-tuning and few-shot adaptation.

This study explores artificial visual creativity, focusing on ChatGPT's ability to generate new images intentionally pastiching original artworks such as paintings, drawings, sculptures and installations. The process involved twelve artists from Romania, Bulgaria, France, Austria, and the United Kingdom, each invited to contribute with three of their artworks and to grade and comment on the AI-generated versions. The analysis combines human evaluation with computational methods aimed at detecting visual and stylistic similarities or divergences between the original works and their AI-produced renditions. The results point to a significant gap between color and texture-based similarity and compositional, conceptual, and perceptual one. Consequently, we advocate for the use of a "style transfer dashboard" of complementary metrics to evaluate the similarity between pastiches and originals, rather than using a single style metric. The artists' comments revealed limitations of ChatGPT's pastiches after contemporary artworks, which were perceived by the authors of the originals as lacking dimensionality, context, and intentional sense, and seeming more of a paraphrase or an approximate quotation rather than as a valuable, emotion-evoking artwork.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) improves the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) and has been extended to Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). More recent work further moves from text-based multimodal reasoning toward interleaved-modal reasoning, where intermediate steps can incorporate both textual rationales and visual evidence. In this work, we propose a bolder and more ambitious idea: could images alone serve as the reasoning medium for both language and multimodal tasks? To explore this, we propose optical reasoning, which treats images as a standalone reasoning medium. We instantiate this concept with two variants: typographic-based optical reasoning, which optimizes visual layouts for compact rationale rendering, and graphical-based optical reasoning, which composes text and graphical elements into structured visual rationales. Across mathematical, scientific, and interleaved-modal reasoning benchmarks, optical reasoning can match or even exceed traditional text reasoning while reducing reasoning tokens by an average of 28.57% on language tasks and 16% on multimodal tasks, achieving 1.96 times the token efficiency of text reasoning. These results show that images can effectively and efficiently encode rationales while providing a unified visual canvas for reasoning.

Predicting multiple real-world tasks in a single model often requires a particularly diverse feature space. Multimodal (MM) models aim to extract the synergistic predictive potential of multiple data types to create a shared feature space with aligned semantic meaning across inputs of drastically varying sizes (i.e. images, text, sound). Most current MM architectures fuse these representations in parallel, which not only limits their interpretability but also creates a dependency on modality availability. We present MultiModN, a multimodal, modular network that fuses latent representations in a sequence of any number, combination, or type of modality while providing granular real-time predictive feedback on any number or combination of predictive tasks. MultiModN's composable pipeline is interpretable-by-design, as well as innately multi-task and robust to the fundamental issue of biased missingness. We perform four experiments on several benchmark MM datasets across 10 real-world tasks (predicting medical diagnoses, academic performance, and weather), and show that MultiModN's sequential MM fusion does not compromise performance compared with a baseline of parallel fusion. By simulating the challenging bias of missing not-at-random (MNAR), this work shows that, contrary to MultiModN, parallel fusion baselines erroneously learn MNAR and suffer catastrophic failure when faced with different patterns of MNAR at inference. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first inherently MNAR-resistant approach to MM modeling. In conclusion, MultiModN provides granular insights, robustness, and flexibility without compromising performance.

We use images of cars of a wide range of varieties to compose an image of an animal such as a bird or a lion for the theme of environmental protection to maximize the information about cars in a single composed image and to raise the awareness about environmental challenges. We present a novel way of image interaction with an artistically-composed photomosaic image, in which a simple operation of "click and display" is used to demonstrate the interactive switch between a tile image in a photomosaic image and the corresponding original car image, which will be automatically saved on the Desktop. We build a multimodal custom GPT named TalkMosaic by incorporating car images information and the related knowledge to ChatGPT. By uploading the original car image to TalkMosaic, we can ask questions about the given car image and get the corresponding answers efficiently and effectively such as where to buy the tire in the car image that satisfies high environmental standards. We give an in-depth analysis on how to speed up the inference of multimodal LLM using sparse attention and quantization techniques with presented probabilistic FlashAttention (PrFlashAttention) and Staircase Adaptive Quantization (SAQ) methods. The implemented prototype demonstrates the feasibility and effectiveness of the presented approach.

Fashion illustration is used by designers to communicate their vision and to bring the design idea from conceptualization to realization, showing how clothes interact with the human body. In this context, computer vision can thus be used to improve the fashion design process. Differently from previous works that mainly focused on the virtual try-on of garments, we propose the task of multimodal-conditioned fashion image editing, guiding the generation of human-centric fashion images by following multimodal prompts, such as text, human body poses, and garment sketches. We tackle this problem by proposing a new architecture based on latent diffusion models, an approach that has not been used before in the fashion domain. Given the lack of existing datasets suitable for the task, we also extend two existing fashion datasets, namely Dress Code and VITON-HD, with multimodal annotations collected in a semi-automatic manner. Experimental results on these new datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal, both in terms of realism and coherence with the given multimodal inputs. Source code and collected multimodal annotations are publicly available at: https://github.com/aimagelab/multimodal-garment-designer.

Multimodal learning is a rapidly growing research field that has revolutionized multitasking and generative modeling in AI. While much of the research has focused on dealing with unstructured data (e.g., language, images, audio, or video), structured data (e.g., tabular data, time series, or signals) has received less attention. However, many industry-relevant use cases involve or can be benefited from both types of data. In this work, we propose a modular, end-to-end multimodal learning method called MAGNUM, which can natively handle both structured and unstructured data. MAGNUM is flexible enough to employ any specialized unimodal module to extract, compress, and fuse information from all available modalities.

Connecting text and visual modalities plays an essential role in generative intelligence. For this reason, inspired by the success of large language models, significant research efforts are being devoted to the development of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). These models can seamlessly integrate visual and textual modalities, both as input and output, while providing a dialogue-based interface and instruction-following capabilities. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of recent visual-based MLLMs, analyzing their architectural choices, multimodal alignment strategies, and training techniques. We also conduct a detailed analysis of these models across a wide range of tasks, including visual grounding, image generation and editing, visual understanding, and domain-specific applications. Additionally, we compile and describe training datasets and evaluation benchmarks, conducting comparisons among existing models in terms of performance and computational requirements. Overall, this survey offers a comprehensive overview of the current state of the art, laying the groundwork for future MLLMs.

Humans have long been recorded in a variety of forms since antiquity. For example, sculptures and paintings were the primary media for depicting human beings before the invention of cameras. However, most current human-centric computer vision tasks like human pose estimation and human image generation focus exclusively on natural images in the real world. Artificial humans, such as those in sculptures, paintings, and cartoons, are commonly neglected, making existing models fail in these scenarios. As an abstraction of life, art incorporates humans in both natural and artificial scenes. We take advantage of it and introduce the Human-Art dataset to bridge related tasks in natural and artificial scenarios. Specifically, Human-Art contains 50k high-quality images with over 123k person instances from 5 natural and 15 artificial scenarios, which are annotated with bounding boxes, keypoints, self-contact points, and text information for humans represented in both 2D and 3D. It is, therefore, comprehensive and versatile for various downstream tasks. We also provide a rich set of baseline results and detailed analyses for related tasks, including human detection, 2D and 3D human pose estimation, image generation, and motion transfer. As a challenging dataset, we hope Human-Art can provide insights for relevant research and open up new research questions.

Creation of images using generative adversarial networks has been widely adapted into multi-modal regime with the advent of multi-modal representation models pre-trained on large corpus. Various modalities sharing a common representation space could be utilized to guide the generative models to create images from text or even from audio source. Departing from the previous methods that solely rely on either text or audio, we exploit the expressiveness of both modality. Based on the fusion of text and audio, we create video whose content is consistent with the distinct modalities that are provided. A simple approach to automatically segment the video into variable length intervals and maintain time consistency in generated video is part of our method. Our proposed framework for generating music video shows promising results in application level where users can interactively feed in music source and text source to create artistic music videos. Our code is available at https://github.com/joeljang/music2video.

Multipanel images, commonly seen as web screenshots, posters, etc., pervade our daily lives. These images, characterized by their composition of multiple subfigures in distinct layouts, effectively convey information to people. Toward building advanced multimodal AI applications, such as agents that understand complex scenes and navigate through webpages, the skill of multipanel visual reasoning is essential, and a comprehensive evaluation of models in this regard is important. Therefore, our paper introduces Multipanel Visual Question Answering (MultipanelVQA), a novel benchmark that specifically challenges models in comprehending multipanel images. The benchmark comprises 6,600 questions and answers related to multipanel images. While these questions are straightforward for average humans, achieving nearly perfect correctness, they pose significant challenges to the state-of-the-art Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) we tested. In our study, we utilized synthetically curated multipanel images specifically designed to isolate and evaluate the impact of diverse factors on model performance, revealing the sensitivity of LVLMs to various interferences in multipanel images, such as adjacent subfigures and layout complexity. As a result, MultipanelVQA highlights the need and direction for improving LVLMs' ability to understand complex visual-language contexts. Code and data are released at https://sites.google.com/view/multipanelvqa/home.

The recent progress in diffusion-based text-to-image generation models has significantly expanded generative capabilities via conditioning the text descriptions. However, since relying solely on text prompts is still restrictive for fine-grained customization, we aim to extend the boundaries of conditional generation to incorporate diverse types of modalities, e.g., sketch, box, and style embedding, simultaneously. We thus design a multimodal text-to-image diffusion model, coined as DiffBlender, that achieves the aforementioned goal in a single model by training only a few small hypernetworks. DiffBlender facilitates a convenient scaling of input modalities, without altering the parameters of an existing large-scale generative model to retain its well-established knowledge. Furthermore, our study sets new standards for multimodal generation by conducting quantitative and qualitative comparisons with existing approaches. By diversifying the channels of conditioning modalities, DiffBlender faithfully reflects the provided information or, in its absence, creates imaginative generation.

Unified multimodal models (UMMs) have shown impressive capabilities in generating natural images and supporting multimodal reasoning. However, their potential in supporting computer-use planning tasks, which are closely related to our lives, remain underexplored. Image generation and editing in computer-use tasks require capabilities like spatial reasoning and procedural understanding, and it is still unknown whether UMMs have these capabilities to finish these tasks or not. Therefore, we propose PlanViz, a new benchmark designed to evaluate image generation and editing for computer-use tasks. To achieve the goal of our evaluation, we focus on sub-tasks which frequently involve in daily life and require planning steps. Specifically, three new sub-tasks are designed: route planning, work diagramming, and web&UI displaying. We address challenges in data quality ensuring by curating human-annotated questions and reference images, and a quality control process. For challenges of comprehensive and exact evaluation, a task-adaptive score, PlanScore, is proposed. The score helps understanding the correctness, visual quality and efficiency of generated images. Through experiments, we highlight key limitations and opportunities for future research on this topic.

Large multimodal language models (MLLMs) are increasingly deployed as web agents, yet many multimodal browsing benchmarks can be solved by shallow, fixed workflows that lean on high-recall image search and nearby text-masking the genuinely multimodal challenges of fine-grained visual reasoning, provenance verification, and long-horizon tool use. We introduce MMSearch-Plus, a benchmark of 311 tasks that highly demand multimodal understanding while preserving the difficulty profile of strong text-only browsing suites. Each item is constructed to contain multiple weak, localized visual signals that must be extracted, propagated through iterative text-image search, and cross-validated under retrieval noise before answering. Our curation procedure, Spatial-Temporal Extrapolation, seeds questions whose answers require extrapolating from spatial cues (micro-text, part-level appearance, layouts, signage) and temporal traces (broadcast overlays, seasonal context) to out-of-image facts such as events, dates, and venues. We provide a model-agnostic agent framework with browsing tools and evaluate a range of closed and open MLLMs. The strongest agent (o3) attains 15.1% without search and 36.0% accuracy with rollout under our framework, while a strong open-source model (Qwen-2.5-VL-72B-Instruct) achieves 0.0% without search and 6.9% after 20 rounds of search. Beyond answer accuracy, we assess bounding-box production and cropped-image search, and conduct an error analysis that surfaces failures in source verification, part-based reasoning, and long-horizon planning.

While recent advancements in multimodal language models have enabled image generation from expressive multi-image instructions, existing methods struggle to maintain performance under complex interleaved instructions. This limitation stems from the structural separation of images and text in current paradigms, which forces models to bridge difficult long-range dependencies to match descriptions with visual targets. To address these challenges, we propose Images iN SEnTences (a.k.a, INSET), a unified generation model that seamlessly embeds images as native vocabulary within textual instructions. By positioning visual features directly at their corresponding semantic slots, INSET leverages the contextual locality of transformers for precise object binding, effectively treating images as dense, expressive language tokens. Furthermore, we introduce a scalable data engine that synthesizes 15M high-quality interleaved samples from standard image and video datasets, utilizing VLMs and LLMs to construct rich, long-horizon sequences. Evaluation results on InterleaveBench demonstrate that INSET significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in multi-image consistency and text alignment, with performance gaps widening as input complexity increases. Beyond standard generation, our approach inherently extends to multimodal image editing, integrating visual content as part of the instruction to facilitate highly expressive and creative visual manipulations.

Multimodal models integrating natural language and visual information have substantially improved generalization of representation models. However, their effectiveness significantly declines in real-world situations where certain modalities are missing or unavailable. This degradation primarily stems from inconsistent representation learning between complete multimodal data and incomplete modality scenarios. Existing approaches typically address missing modalities through relatively simplistic generation methods, yet these approaches fail to adequately preserve cross-modal consistency, leading to suboptimal performance. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel multimodal framework named PROMISE, a PROMpting-Attentive HIerarchical ContraStive LEarning approach designed explicitly for robust cross-modal representation under conditions of missing modalities. Specifically, PROMISE innovatively incorporates multimodal prompt learning into a hierarchical contrastive learning framework, equipped with a specially designed prompt-attention mechanism. This mechanism dynamically generates robust and consistent representations for scenarios where particular modalities are absent, thereby effectively bridging the representational gap between complete and incomplete data. Extensive experiments conducted on benchmark datasets, along with comprehensive ablation studies, clearly demonstrate the superior performance of PROMISE compared to current state-of-the-art multimodal methods.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have achieved remarkable progress in aligning and generating content across text and image modalities. However, the potential of using non-visual, continuous sequential, as a conditioning signal for high-fidelity image generation remains largely unexplored. Furthermore, existing methods that convert series into "pseudo-images" for temporal forecasting fail to establish semantic-level alignment. In this paper, we propose TimeArtist, a temporal-visual conversion framework that pioneers semantic-level alignment between time series fluctuations and visual concepts. It pioneers a "warmup-align" paradigm: first, a dual-autoencoder and shared quantizer are self-supervised trained on large-scale datasets to learn modality-shared representations. Then, the encoders and quantizer are frozen, and a projection is introduced to align temporal and visual samples at the representation level. TimeArtist establishes a versatile cross-modal framework, enabling high-quality, diverse image generation directly from time series, while capturing temporal fluctuation patterns to render images as styles transfer. Extensive experiments show that TimeArtist achieves satisfactory performance in image generation metrics, while also attaining superior results in zero-shot temporal tasks. Our work establishes a new paradigm for cross-modal generation, bridging the gap between temporal dynamics and visual semantics.

Recent years have seen remarkable progress in unified vision-language models handling both multimodal understanding and generation within a single architecture. While autoregressive VLMs can reason across modalities, they fail to generate high-quality images. In contrast, diffusion models produce photorealistic visuals yet struggle to generate coherent text, making it challenging to develop a single unified model that can seamlessly handle both visual and text generation. Recent advances suggest that language can be effectively embedded within visual representations, allowing models to reason about textual semantics directly from images. To this end, we propose UniCanvas, a first attempt that unifies diffusion models to generate interleaved multimodal contents through text-in-image generation. Diffusion models naturally capture transformations on a shared pixel canvas, which can be viewed as world models of visual change. Instead of producing discrete text tokens, the model learns to represent language as visual patterns inside images, leveraging its inherent multimodal embedding space. This design allows the model to "draw" text naturally within a single pixel canvas during image synthesis, achieving seamless multimodal generation. Experiments demonstrate that UniCanvas improves performance over previous unified models, positioning text-in-image generation with diffusion models as a promising unified multimodal generation paradigm.

This paper presents a multimodal framework that attempts to unify visual understanding and generation within a shared discrete semantic representation. At its core is the Text-Aligned Tokenizer (TA-Tok), which converts images into discrete tokens using a text-aligned codebook projected from a large language model's (LLM) vocabulary. By integrating vision and text into a unified space with an expanded vocabulary, our multimodal LLM, Tar, enables cross-modal input and output through a shared interface, without the need for modality-specific designs. Additionally, we propose scale-adaptive encoding and decoding to balance efficiency and visual detail, along with a generative de-tokenizer to produce high-fidelity visual outputs. To address diverse decoding needs, we utilize two complementary de-tokenizers: a fast autoregressive model and a diffusion-based model. To enhance modality fusion, we investigate advanced pre-training tasks, demonstrating improvements in both visual understanding and generation. Experiments across benchmarks show that Tar matches or surpasses existing multimodal LLM methods, achieving faster convergence and greater training efficiency. Code, models, and data are available at https://tar.csuhan.com

Humans paint images incrementally: they plan a global layout, sketch a coarse draft, inspect, and refine details, and most importantly, each step is grounded in the evolving visual states. However, can unified multimodal models trained on text-image interleaved datasets also imagine the chain of intermediate states? In this paper, we introduce process-driven image generation, a multi-step paradigm that decomposes synthesis into an interleaved reasoning trajectory of thoughts and actions. Rather than generating images in a single step, our approach unfolds across multiple iterations, each consisting of 4 stages: textual planning, visual drafting, textual reflection, and visual refinement. The textual reasoning explicitly conditions how the visual state should evolve, while the generated visual intermediate in turn constrains and grounds the next round of textual reasoning. A core challenge of process-driven generation stems from the ambiguity of intermediate states: how can models evaluate each partially-complete image? We address this through dense, step-wise supervision that maintains two complementary constraints: for the visual intermediate states, we enforce the spatial and semantic consistency; for the textual intermediate states, we preserve the prior visual knowledge while enabling the model to identify and correct prompt-violating elements. This makes the generation process explicit, interpretable, and directly supervisable. To validate proposed method, we conduct experiments under various text-to-image generation benchmarks.

With the rapid advancement of diffusion models, text-to-image generation has achieved significant progress in image resolution, detail fidelity, and semantic alignment, particularly with models like Stable Diffusion 3.5, Stable Diffusion XL, and FLUX 1. However, generating emotionally expressive and abstract artistic images remains a major challenge, largely due to the lack of large-scale, fine-grained emotional datasets. To address this gap, we present the EmoArt Dataset -- one of the most comprehensive emotion-annotated art datasets to date. It contains 132,664 artworks across 56 painting styles (e.g., Impressionism, Expressionism, Abstract Art), offering rich stylistic and cultural diversity. Each image includes structured annotations: objective scene descriptions, five key visual attributes (brushwork, composition, color, line, light), binary arousal-valence labels, twelve emotion categories, and potential art therapy effects. Using EmoArt, we systematically evaluate popular text-to-image diffusion models for their ability to generate emotionally aligned images from text. Our work provides essential data and benchmarks for emotion-driven image synthesis and aims to advance fields such as affective computing, multimodal learning, and computational art, enabling applications in art therapy and creative design. The dataset and more details can be accessed via our project website.

Multimodal LLMs are the natural evolution of LLMs, and enlarge their capabilities so as to work beyond the pure textual modality. As research is being carried out to design novel architectures and vision-and-language adapters, in this paper we concentrate on endowing such models with the capability of answering questions that require external knowledge. Our approach, termed Wiki-LLaVA, aims at integrating an external knowledge source of multimodal documents, which is accessed through a hierarchical retrieval pipeline. Relevant passages, using this approach, are retrieved from the external knowledge source and employed as additional context for the LLM, augmenting the effectiveness and precision of generated dialogues. We conduct extensive experiments on datasets tailored for visual question answering with external data and demonstrate the appropriateness of our approach.

People with visual impairments often struggle to create content that relies heavily on visual elements, particularly when conveying spatial and structural information. Existing accessible drawing tools, which construct images line by line, are suitable for simple tasks like math but not for more expressive artwork. On the other hand, emerging generative AI-based text-to-image tools can produce expressive illustrations from descriptions in natural language, but they lack precise control over image composition and properties. To address this gap, our work integrates generative AI with a constructive approach that provides users with enhanced control and editing capabilities. Our system, AltCanvas, features a tile-based interface enabling users to construct visual scenes incrementally, with each tile representing an object within the scene. Users can add, edit, move, and arrange objects while receiving speech and audio feedback. Once completed, the scene can be rendered as a color illustration or as a vector for tactile graphic generation. Involving 14 blind or low-vision users in design and evaluation, we found that participants effectively used the AltCanvas workflow to create illustrations.

While modern visual generation models excel at creating aesthetically pleasing natural images, they struggle with producing or editing structured visuals like charts, diagrams, and mathematical figures, which demand composition planning, text rendering, and multimodal reasoning for factual fidelity. To address this, we present the first comprehensive, systematic investigation of this domain, encompassing data construction, model training, and an evaluation benchmark. First, we construct a large-scale dataset of 1.3 million high-quality structured image pairs derived from executable drawing programs and augmented with chain-of-thought reasoning annotations. Building on it, we train a unified model that integrates a VLM with FLUX.1 Kontext via a lightweight connector for enhanced multimodal understanding. A three-stage training curriculum enables progressive feature alignment, knowledge infusion, and reasoning-augmented generation, further boosted by an external reasoner at inference time. Finally, we introduce StructBench, a novel benchmark for generation and editing with over 1,700 challenging instances, and an accompanying evaluation metric, StructScore, which employs a multi-round Q\&A protocol to assess fine-grained factual accuracy. Evaluations of 15 models reveal that even leading closed-source systems remain far from satisfactory. Our model attains strong editing performance, and inference-time reasoning yields consistent gains across diverse architectures. By releasing the dataset, model, and benchmark, we aim to advance unified multimodal foundations for structured visuals.

Recent advancements in text-to-image models, such as Stable Diffusion, have demonstrated their ability to synthesize visual images through natural language prompts. One approach of personalizing text-to-image models, exemplified by DreamBooth, fine-tunes the pre-trained model by binding unique text identifiers with a few images of a specific subject. Although existing fine-tuning methods have demonstrated competence in rendering images according to the styles of famous painters, it is still challenging to learn to produce images encapsulating distinct art styles due to abstract and broad visual perceptions of stylistic attributes such as lines, shapes, textures, and colors. In this paper, we introduce a new method, Single-StyleForge, for personalization. It fine-tunes pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models to generate diverse images in specified styles from text prompts. By using around 15-20 images of the target style, the approach establishes a foundational binding of a unique token identifier with a broad range of the target style. It also utilizes auxiliary images to strengthen this binding, resulting in offering specific guidance on representing elements such as persons in a target style-consistent manner. In addition, we present ways to improve the quality of style and text-image alignment through a method called Multi-StyleForge, which inherits the strategy used in StyleForge and learns tokens in multiple. Experimental evaluation conducted on six distinct artistic styles demonstrates substantial improvements in both the quality of generated images and the perceptual fidelity metrics, such as FID, KID, and CLIP scores.

We introduce Artistic Cinemagraph, a fully automated method for creating cinemagraphs from text descriptions - an especially challenging task when prompts feature imaginary elements and artistic styles, given the complexity of interpreting the semantics and motions of these images. Existing single-image animation methods fall short on artistic inputs, and recent text-based video methods frequently introduce temporal inconsistencies, struggling to keep certain regions static. To address these challenges, we propose an idea of synthesizing image twins from a single text prompt - a pair of an artistic image and its pixel-aligned corresponding natural-looking twin. While the artistic image depicts the style and appearance detailed in our text prompt, the realistic counterpart greatly simplifies layout and motion analysis. Leveraging existing natural image and video datasets, we can accurately segment the realistic image and predict plausible motion given the semantic information. The predicted motion can then be transferred to the artistic image to create the final cinemagraph. Our method outperforms existing approaches in creating cinemagraphs for natural landscapes as well as artistic and other-worldly scenes, as validated by automated metrics and user studies. Finally, we demonstrate two extensions: animating existing paintings and controlling motion directions using text.

Recent progresses in large-scale text-to-image models have yielded remarkable accomplishments, finding various applications in art domain. However, expressing unique characteristics of an artwork (e.g. brushwork, colortone, or composition) with text prompts alone may encounter limitations due to the inherent constraints of verbal description. To this end, we introduce DreamStyler, a novel framework designed for artistic image synthesis, proficient in both text-to-image synthesis and style transfer. DreamStyler optimizes a multi-stage textual embedding with a context-aware text prompt, resulting in prominent image quality. In addition, with content and style guidance, DreamStyler exhibits flexibility to accommodate a range of style references. Experimental results demonstrate its superior performance across multiple scenarios, suggesting its promising potential in artistic product creation.

Recent multimodal face generation models address the spatial control limitations of text-to-image diffusion models by augmenting text-based conditioning with spatial priors such as segmentation masks, sketches, or edge maps. This multimodal fusion enables controllable synthesis aligned with both high-level semantic intent and low-level structural layout. However, most existing approaches typically extend pre-trained text-to-image pipelines by appending auxiliary control modules or stitching together separate uni-modal networks. These ad hoc designs inherit architectural constraints, duplicate parameters, and often fail under conflicting modalities or mismatched latent spaces, limiting their ability to perform synergistic fusion across semantic and spatial domains. We introduce MMFace-DiT, a unified dual-stream diffusion transformer engineered for synergistic multimodal face synthesis. Its core novelty lies in a dual-stream transformer block that processes spatial (mask/sketch) and semantic (text) tokens in parallel, deeply fusing them through a shared Rotary Position-Embedded (RoPE) Attention mechanism. This design prevents modal dominance and ensures strong adherence to both text and structural priors to achieve unprecedented spatial-semantic consistency for controllable face generation. Furthermore, a novel Modality Embedder enables a single cohesive model to dynamically adapt to varying spatial conditions without retraining. MMFace-DiT achieves a 40% improvement in visual fidelity and prompt alignment over six state-of-the-art multimodal face generation models, establishing a flexible new paradigm for end-to-end controllable generative modeling. The code and dataset are available on our project page: https://vcbsl.github.io/MMFace-DiT/

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional text understanding. Existing works explore their application in text embedding tasks. However, there are few works utilizing LLMs to assist multimodal representation tasks. In this work, we investigate the potential of LLMs to enhance multimodal representation in multimodal item-to-item (I2I) recommendations. One feasible method is the transfer of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for representation tasks. However, pre-training MLLMs usually requires collecting high-quality, web-scale multimodal data, resulting in complex training procedures and high costs. This leads the community to rely heavily on open-source MLLMs, hindering customized training for representation scenarios. Therefore, we aim to design an end-to-end training method that customizes the integration of any existing LLMs and vision encoders to construct efficient multimodal representation models. Preliminary experiments show that fine-tuned LLMs in this end-to-end method tend to overlook image content. To overcome this challenge, we propose a novel training framework, NoteLLM-2, specifically designed for multimodal representation. We propose two ways to enhance the focus on visual information. The first method is based on the prompt viewpoint, which separates multimodal content into visual content and textual content. NoteLLM-2 adopts the multimodal In-Content Learning method to teach LLMs to focus on both modalities and aggregate key information. The second method is from the model architecture, utilizing a late fusion mechanism to directly fuse visual information into textual information. Extensive experiments have been conducted to validate the effectiveness of our method.

Multimodal embedding models have gained significant attention for their ability to map data from different modalities, such as text and images, into a unified representation space. However, the limited labeled multimodal data often hinders embedding performance. Recent approaches have leveraged data synthesis to address this problem, yet the quality of synthetic data remains a critical bottleneck. In this work, we identify three criteria for high-quality synthetic multimodal data. First, broad scope ensures that the generated data covers diverse tasks and modalities, making it applicable to various downstream scenarios. Second, robust cross-modal alignment makes different modalities semantically consistent. Third, high fidelity ensures that the synthetic data maintains realistic details to enhance its reliability. Guided by these principles, we synthesize datasets that: (1) cover a wide range of tasks, modality combinations, and languages, (2) are generated via a deep thinking process within a single pass of a multimodal large language model, and (3) incorporate real-world images with accurate and relevant texts, ensuring fidelity through self-evaluation and refinement. Leveraging these high-quality synthetic and labeled datasets, we train a multimodal multilingual E5 model mmE5. Extensive experiments demonstrate that mmE5 achieves state-of-the-art performance on the MMEB Benchmark and superior multilingual performance on the XTD benchmark. Our codes, datasets and models are released in https://github.com/haon-chen/mmE5.

Multimodal generation has long been dominated by text-driven pipelines where language dictates vision but cannot reason or create within it. We challenge this paradigm by asking whether all modalities, including textual descriptions, spatial layouts, and editing instructions, can be unified into a single visual representation. We present FlowInOne, a framework that reformulates multimodal generation as a purely visual flow, converting all inputs into visual prompts and enabling a clean image-in, image-out pipeline governed by a single flow matching model. This vision-centric formulation naturally eliminates cross-modal alignment bottlenecks, noise scheduling, and task-specific architectural branches, unifying text-to-image generation, layout-guided editing, and visual instruction following under one coherent paradigm. To support this, we introduce VisPrompt-5M, a large-scale dataset of 5 million visual prompt pairs spanning diverse tasks including physics-aware force dynamics and trajectory prediction, alongside VP-Bench, a rigorously curated benchmark assessing instruction faithfulness, spatial precision, visual realism, and content consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FlowInOne achieves state-of-the-art performance across all unified generation tasks, surpassing both open-source models and competitive commercial systems, establishing a new foundation for fully vision-centric generative modeling where perception and creation coexist within a single continuous visual space.

Multimodal search has become increasingly important in providing users with a natural and effective way to ex-press their search intentions. Images offer fine-grained details of the desired products, while text allows for easily incorporating search modifications. However, some existing multimodal search systems are unreliable and fail to address simple queries. The problem becomes harder with the large variability of natural language text queries, which may contain ambiguous, implicit, and irrelevant in-formation. Addressing these issues may require systems with enhanced matching capabilities, reasoning abilities, and context-aware query parsing and rewriting. This paper introduces a novel multimodal search model that achieves a new performance milestone on the Fashion200K dataset. Additionally, we propose a novel search interface integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) to facilitate natural language interaction. This interface routes queries to search systems while conversationally engaging with users and considering previous searches. When coupled with our multimodal search model, it heralds a new era of shopping assistants capable of offering human-like interaction and enhancing the overall search experience.

Visual embedding models excel at zero-shot tasks like visual retrieval and classification. However, these models cannot be used for tasks that contain ambiguity or require user instruction. These tasks necessitate a multimodal embedding model, which outputs embeddings that combine visual and natural language input. Existing CLIP-based approaches embed images and text independently, and fuse the result. We find that this results in weak interactions between modalities, and poor user control over the representation. We introduce ABC, an open-source multimodal embedding model that uses a vision-language model backbone to deeply integrate image features with natural language instructions. ABC achieves bestfor-size performance on MSCOCO image-to-text retrieval and is the top performing model on classification and VQA tasks in the Massive Multimodal Embedding Benchmark. With a strongly unified vision-language representation, ABC can use natural language to solve subtle and potentially ambiguous visual retrieval problems. To evaluate this capability, we design CtrlBench, a benchmark that requires interleaving textual instructions with image content for correct retrieval. ABC advances the state of multimodal embeddings by offering high-quality representations and flexible natural language control. Our model and datasets are available at our project page.

Traditionally, style has been primarily considered in terms of artistic elements such as colors, brushstrokes, and lighting. However, identical semantic subjects, like people, boats, and houses, can vary significantly across different artistic traditions, indicating that style also encompasses the underlying semantics. Therefore, in this study, we propose a zero-shot scheme for image variation with coordinated semantics. Specifically, our scheme transforms the image-to-image problem into an image-to-text-to-image problem. The image-to-text operation employs vision-language models e.g., BLIP) to generate text describing the content of the input image, including the objects and their positions. Subsequently, the input style keyword is elaborated into a detailed description of this style and then merged with the content text using the reasoning capabilities of ChatGPT. Finally, the text-to-image operation utilizes a Diffusion model to generate images based on the text prompt. To enable the Diffusion model to accommodate more styles, we propose a fine-tuning strategy that injects text and style constraints into cross-attention. This ensures that the output image exhibits similar semantics in the desired style. To validate the performance of the proposed scheme, we constructed a benchmark comprising images of various styles and scenes and introduced two novel metrics. Despite its simplicity, our scheme yields highly plausible results in a zero-shot manner, particularly for generating stylized images with high-fidelity semantics.

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in natural language processing (NLP), with models like ChatGPT and GPT-4 achieving impressive capabilities in various linguistic tasks. However, training models on such a large scale is challenging, and finding datasets that match the model's scale is often difficult. Fine-tuning and training models with fewer parameters using novel methods have emerged as promising approaches to overcome these challenges. One such model is MiniGPT-4, which achieves comparable vision-language understanding to GPT-4 by leveraging novel pre-training models and innovative training strategies. However, the model still faces some challenges in image understanding, particularly in artistic pictures. A novel multimodal model called ArtGPT-4 has been proposed to address these limitations. ArtGPT-4 was trained on image-text pairs using a Tesla A100 device in just 2 hours, using only about 200 GB of data. The model can depict images with an artistic flair and generate visual code, including aesthetically pleasing HTML/CSS web pages. Furthermore, the article proposes novel benchmarks for evaluating the performance of vision-language models. In the subsequent evaluation methods, ArtGPT-4 scored more than 1 point higher than the current state-of-the-art model and was only 0.25 points lower than artists on a 6-point scale. Our code and pre-trained model are available at https://huggingface.co/Tyrannosaurus/ArtGPT-4.

In this work, we investigate automatic design composition from multimodal graphic elements. Although recent studies have developed various generative models for graphic design, they usually face the following limitations: they only focus on certain subtasks and are far from achieving the design composition task; they do not consider the hierarchical information of graphic designs during the generation process. To tackle these issues, we introduce the layered design principle into Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) and propose a novel approach, called LaDeCo, to accomplish this challenging task. Specifically, LaDeCo first performs layer planning for a given element set, dividing the input elements into different semantic layers according to their contents. Based on the planning results, it subsequently predicts element attributes that control the design composition in a layer-wise manner, and includes the rendered image of previously generated layers into the context. With this insightful design, LaDeCo decomposes the difficult task into smaller manageable steps, making the generation process smoother and clearer. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of LaDeCo in design composition. Furthermore, we show that LaDeCo enables some interesting applications in graphic design, such as resolution adjustment, element filling, design variation, etc. In addition, it even outperforms the specialized models in some design subtasks without any task-specific training.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in multimodal understanding and generation, pushing forward advancements in text-to-image generation. However, achieving accurate text-image alignment for LMMs, particularly in compositional scenarios, remains challenging. Existing approaches, such as layout planning for multi-step generation and learning from human feedback or AI feedback, depend heavily on prompt engineering, costly human annotations, and continual upgrading, limiting flexibility and scalability. In this work, we introduce a model-agnostic iterative self-improvement framework (SILMM) that can enable LMMs to provide helpful and scalable self-feedback and optimize text-image alignment via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). DPO can readily applied to LMMs that use discrete visual tokens as intermediate image representations; while it is less suitable for LMMs with continuous visual features, as obtaining generation probabilities is challenging. To adapt SILMM to LMMs with continuous features, we propose a diversity mechanism to obtain diverse representations and a kernel-based continuous DPO for alignment. Extensive experiments on three compositional text-to-image generation benchmarks validate the effectiveness and superiority of SILMM, showing improvements exceeding 30% on T2I-CompBench++ and around 20% on DPG-Bench.

The dataset spans diverse artistic styles, including regionally grounded aesthetics from the Middle East, Northern Europe, East Asia, and South Asia, alongside general categories such as sketch and oil painting. All images are generated using the Moonworks Lunara model and intentionally crafted to embody distinct, high-quality aesthetic styles, yielding a first-of-its-kind dataset with substantially higher aesthetic scores, exceeding even aesthetics-focused datasets, and general-purpose datasets by a larger margin. Each image is accompanied by a human-refined prompt and structured annotations that jointly describe salient objects, attributes, relationships, and stylistic cues. Unlike large-scale web-derived datasets that emphasize breadth over precision, the Lunara Aesthetic Dataset prioritizes aesthetic quality, stylistic diversity, and licensing transparency, and is released under the Apache 2.0 license to support research and unrestricted academic and commercial use.

Multimodal music generation aims to produce music from diverse input modalities, including text, videos, and images. Existing methods use a common embedding space for multimodal fusion. Despite their effectiveness in other modalities, their application in multimodal music generation faces challenges of data scarcity, weak cross-modal alignment, and limited controllability. This paper addresses these issues by using explicit bridges of text and music for multimodal alignment. We introduce a novel method named Visuals Music Bridge (VMB). Specifically, a Multimodal Music Description Model converts visual inputs into detailed textual descriptions to provide the text bridge; a Dual-track Music Retrieval module that combines broad and targeted retrieval strategies to provide the music bridge and enable user control. Finally, we design an Explicitly Conditioned Music Generation framework to generate music based on the two bridges. We conduct experiments on video-to-music, image-to-music, text-to-music, and controllable music generation tasks, along with experiments on controllability. The results demonstrate that VMB significantly enhances music quality, modality, and customization alignment compared to previous methods. VMB sets a new standard for interpretable and expressive multimodal music generation with applications in various multimedia fields. Demos and code are available at https://github.com/wbs2788/VMB.

In recent years, unified multimodal models (UMMs) have emerged to support both understanding and generation within a single framework. Mastering dynamic, multi-turn interleaved image-text dialogues is a crucial task for UMMs in real-world applications. However, existing benchmarks fail to evaluate this important task, as they are often limited to single-turn or static settings, and typically overlook exposure bias in multi-turn interactions. To bridge this gap, we propose IMUG-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for multi-turn interleaved image-text dialogue of UMMs that jointly evaluates their understanding and generation capabilities. Our IMUG-Bench comprises three classes: Static Spatial, Temporal Causal, and Hybrid, covering 3,113 samples and 12,034 interaction turns. It also includes dynamic understanding questions, thereby supporting evaluation that better reflects real-world multi-turn interaction scenarios. Large-scale experiments on IMUG-Bench systematically evaluate mainstream open-source and closed-source UMMs, revealing their capability boundaries and failure modes, and uncovering pronounced exposure bias on the generation side in multi-turn interactions. We further explore several test-time scaling strategies, including Chain-of-Thought, Self-Verification, and Best-of-N Sampling, which effectively improve generation accuracy and mitigate exposure bias in generation tasks. These findings provide insights into enhancing the robustness and multi-turn interaction capability of future UMMs.

We introduce a training-free framework specifically designed to bring real-world static paintings to life through image-to-video (I2V) synthesis, addressing the persistent challenge of aligning these motions with textual guidance while preserving fidelity to the original artworks. Existing I2V methods, primarily trained on natural video datasets, often struggle to generate dynamic outputs from static paintings. It remains challenging to generate motion while maintaining visual consistency with real-world paintings. This results in two distinct failure modes: either static outputs due to limited text-based motion interpretation or distorted dynamics caused by inadequate alignment with real-world artistic styles. We leverage the advanced text-image alignment capabilities of pre-trained image models to guide the animation process. Our approach introduces synthetic proxy images through two key innovations: (1) Dual-path score distillation: We employ a dual-path architecture to distill motion priors from both real and synthetic data, preserving static details from the original painting while learning dynamic characteristics from synthetic frames. (2) Hybrid latent fusion: We integrate hybrid features extracted from real paintings and synthetic proxy images via spherical linear interpolation in the latent space, ensuring smooth transitions and enhancing temporal consistency. Experimental evaluations confirm that our approach significantly improves semantic alignment with text prompts while faithfully preserving the unique characteristics and integrity of the original paintings. Crucially, by achieving enhanced dynamic effects without requiring any model training or learnable parameters, our framework enables plug-and-play integration with existing I2V methods, making it an ideal solution for animating real-world paintings. More animated examples can be found on our project website.

Recently, unified multimodal models (UMMs) have made remarkable progress in integrating visual understanding and generation, demonstrating strong potential for complex text-to-image (T2I) tasks. Despite their theoretical promise, a persistent capability gap exists: UMMs typically exhibit superior visual understanding but comparatively weaker generative capabilities. This discrepancy arises largely from the intrinsic decoupling between the understanding and generation processes. While a UMM can accurately interpret fine-grained visual details, it often struggles to produce semantically coherent images from complex textual prompts. To address this challenge, we explore UMMs' internal understanding capability to enhance generation quality. We propose a token-level intrinsic text-image alignment reward mechanism, GvU, enabling the UMM to act simultaneously as teacher and student: it evaluates its own outputs using the understanding branch to guide the generations accordingly. Building upon this, we design a self-supervised reinforcement learning framework, allowing UMMs to iteratively improve their generation quality through understanding-based intrinsic reward signals--without reliance on external supervision. Experimental results show that our method substantially boosts UMMs' generation, which in turn strengthens their fine-grained visual understanding, narrowing the capability gap between UMMs' visual understanding and generation.

Image Style Transfer (IST) is an interdisciplinary topic of computer vision and art that continuously attracts researchers' interests. Different from traditional Image-guided Image Style Transfer (IIST) methods that require a style reference image as input to define the desired style, recent works start to tackle the problem in a text-guided manner, i.e., Text-guided Image Style Transfer (TIST). Compared to IIST, such approaches provide more flexibility with text-specified styles, which are useful in scenarios where the style is hard to define with reference images. Unfortunately, many TIST approaches produce undesirable artifacts in the transferred images. To address this issue, we present a novel method to achieve much improved style transfer based on text guidance. Meanwhile, to offer more flexibility than IIST and TIST, our method allows style inputs from multiple sources and modalities, enabling MultiModality-guided Image Style Transfer (MMIST). Specifically, we realize MMIST with a novel cross-modal GAN inversion method, which generates style representations consistent with specified styles. Such style representations facilitate style transfer and in principle generalize any IIST methods to MMIST. Large-scale experiments and user studies demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on TIST task. Furthermore, comprehensive qualitative results confirm the effectiveness of our method on MMIST task and cross-modal style interpolation.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are making significant progress in multimodal reasoning. Early approaches focus on pure text-based reasoning. More recent studies have incorporated multimodal information into the reasoning steps; however, they often follow a single task-specific reasoning pattern, which limits their generalizability across various multimodal tasks. In fact, there are numerous multimodal tasks requiring diverse reasoning skills, such as zooming in on a specific region or marking an object within an image. To address this, we propose unified generative multimodal reasoning, which unifies diverse multimodal reasoning skills by generating intermediate images during the reasoning process. We instantiate this paradigm with Omni-R1, a two-stage SFT+RL framework featuring perception alignment loss and perception reward, thereby enabling functional image generation. Additionally, we introduce Omni-R1-Zero, which eliminates the need for multimodal annotations by bootstrapping step-wise visualizations from text-only reasoning data. Empirical results show that Omni-R1 achieves unified generative reasoning across a wide range of multimodal tasks, and Omni-R1-Zero can match or even surpass Omni-R1 on average, suggesting a promising direction for generative multimodal reasoning.

This work uniquely identifies and characterizes four prevalent multimodal model architectural patterns in the contemporary multimodal landscape. Systematically categorizing models by architecture type facilitates monitoring of developments in the multimodal domain. Distinct from recent survey papers that present general information on multimodal architectures, this research conducts a comprehensive exploration of architectural details and identifies four specific architectural types. The types are distinguished by their respective methodologies for integrating multimodal inputs into the deep neural network model. The first two types (Type A and B) deeply fuses multimodal inputs within the internal layers of the model, whereas the following two types (Type C and D) facilitate early fusion at the input stage. Type-A employs standard cross-attention, whereas Type-B utilizes custom-designed layers for modality fusion within the internal layers. On the other hand, Type-C utilizes modality-specific encoders, while Type-D leverages tokenizers to process the modalities at the model's input stage. The identified architecture types aid the monitoring of any-to-any multimodal model development. Notably, Type-C and Type-D are currently favored in the construction of any-to-any multimodal models. Type-C, distinguished by its non-tokenizing multimodal model architecture, is emerging as a viable alternative to Type-D, which utilizes input-tokenizing techniques. To assist in model selection, this work highlights the advantages and disadvantages of each architecture type based on data and compute requirements, architecture complexity, scalability, simplification of adding modalities, training objectives, and any-to-any multimodal generation capability.

Text-to-image generation models have grown in popularity due to their ability to produce high-quality images from a text prompt. One use for this technology is to enable the creation of more accessible art creation software. In this paper, we document the development of an alternative user interface that reduces the typing effort needed to enter image prompts by providing suggestions from a large language model, developed through iterative design and testing within the project team. The results of this testing demonstrate how generative text models can support the accessibility of text-to-image models, enabling users with a range of abilities to create visual art.

In this paper, we propose Gestalt, a new paradigm of large multimodal model built around multimodal interplay. Despite rapid advances, large multimodal models are reaching a bottleneck: existing approaches focus primarily on accommodating additional modalities while overlooking the distinct characteristics of each modality and the relations among them. Motivated by the multistage property of human multisensory perception, we propose a multimodal interplay pyramid that organizes multimodal modeling as a progression from modality-specific processing, through cross-modal alignment, to deeper multimodal integration. Guided by this pyramid, Gestalt adopts a unified discrete diffusion framework and an interplay-partitioned architecture, with learnable interplay tokens mediating cross-modal exchange and integration. The pyramid also structures its data organization and training strategy. Strong performance across image generation, multimodal understanding, and text-only evaluation shows that Gestalt significantly improves cross-modal integration while preserving modality-specific information, effectively harnessing the strengths of diffusion-based multimodal models and offering a promising path toward unified multimodal intelligence.

When we look around and perform complex tasks, how we see and selectively process what we see is crucial. However, the lack of this visual search mechanism in current multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) hinders their ability to focus on important visual details, especially when handling high-resolution and visually crowded images. To address this, we introduce V*, an LLM-guided visual search mechanism that employs the world knowledge in LLMs for efficient visual querying. When combined with an MLLM, this mechanism enhances collaborative reasoning, contextual understanding, and precise targeting of specific visual elements. This integration results in a new MLLM meta-architecture, named Show, sEArch, and TelL (SEAL). We further create V*Bench, a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate MLLMs in their ability to process high-resolution images and focus on visual details. Our study highlights the necessity of incorporating visual search capabilities into multimodal systems. The code is available https://github.com/penghao-wu/vstar.

With the advancement of deep learning, artificial intelligence (AI) has made many breakthroughs in recent years and achieved superhuman performance in various tasks such as object detection, reading comprehension, and video games. Generative Modeling, such as various Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) models, has been applied to generate paintings and music. Research in Natural Language Processing (NLP) also had a leap forward in 2018 since the release of the pre-trained contextual neural language models such as BERT and recently released GPT3. Despite the exciting AI applications aforementioned, AI is still significantly lagging behind humans in creativity, which is often considered the ultimate moonshot for AI. Our work is inspired by Chinese calligraphy, which is a unique form of visual art where the character itself is an aesthetic painting. We also draw inspirations from paintings of the Abstract Expressionist movement in the 1940s and 1950s, such as the work by American painter Franz Kline. In this paper, we present a creative framework based on Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks and Contextual Neural Language Model to generate abstract artworks that have intrinsic meaning and aesthetic value, which is different from the existing work, such as image captioning and text-to-image generation, where the texts are the descriptions of the images. In addition, we have publicly released a Chinese calligraphy image dataset and demonstrate our framework using a prototype system and a user study.

While Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) demonstrate impressive visual perception, they remain epistemically constrained by their static parametric knowledge. To transcend these boundaries, multimodal search models have been adopted to actively interact with the external environment for evidence retrieval. Diverging from prevailing paradigms that merely retrofit general LMMs with search tools as modular extensions, we explore the potential of building a multimodal agentic search model from scratch. Specifically, we make the following contributions: (i) we introduce Agentic Seeding, a dedicated phase designed to weave the foundational precursors necessary for eliciting agentic behaviors; (ii) we uncover a performance bottleneck in long-horizon interactions, where the increasing volume of interaction history overwhelms the model's ability to locate ground-truth evidence. To mitigate this, we propose V-Fold, an adaptive history-aware compression scheme that preserves recent dialogue turns in high fidelity while folding historical context into the visual space via rendering; and (iii) we develop POINTS-Seeker-8B, a state-of-the-art multimodal agentic search model that consistently outperforms existing models across six diverse benchmarks, effectively resolving the challenges of long-horizon, knowledge-intensive visual reasoning.

Recent advancements in image generation have enabled the creation of high-quality images from text conditions. However, when facing multi-modal conditions, such as text combined with reference appearances, existing methods struggle to balance multiple conditions effectively, typically showing a preference for one modality over others. To address this challenge, we introduce EMMA, a novel image generation model accepting multi-modal prompts built upon the state-of-the-art text-to-image (T2I) diffusion model, ELLA. EMMA seamlessly incorporates additional modalities alongside text to guide image generation through an innovative Multi-modal Feature Connector design, which effectively integrates textual and supplementary modal information using a special attention mechanism. By freezing all parameters in the original T2I diffusion model and only adjusting some additional layers, we reveal an interesting finding that the pre-trained T2I diffusion model can secretly accept multi-modal prompts. This interesting property facilitates easy adaptation to different existing frameworks, making EMMA a flexible and effective tool for producing personalized and context-aware images and even videos. Additionally, we introduce a strategy to assemble learned EMMA modules to produce images conditioned on multiple modalities simultaneously, eliminating the need for additional training with mixed multi-modal prompts. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of EMMA in maintaining high fidelity and detail in generated images, showcasing its potential as a robust solution for advanced multi-modal conditional image generation tasks.

Multimodal deep search agents have shown great potential in solving complex tasks by iteratively collecting textual and visual evidence. However, managing the heterogeneous information and high token costs associated with multimodal inputs over long horizons remains a critical challenge, as existing methods often suffer from context explosion or the loss of crucial visual signals. To address this, we propose a novel Long-horizon MultiModal deep search framework, named LMM-Searcher, centered on a file-based visual representation mechanism. By offloading visual assets to an external file system and mapping them to lightweight textual identifiers (UIDs), our approach mitigates context overhead while preserving multimodal information for future access. We equip the agent with a tailored fetch-image tool, enabling a progressive, on-demand visual loading strategy for active perception. Furthermore, we introduce a data synthesis pipeline designed to generate queries requiring complex cross-modal multi-hop reasoning. Using this pipeline, we distill 12K high-quality trajectories to fine-tune Qwen3-VL-Thinking-30A3B into a specialized multimodal deep search agent. Extensive experiments across four benchmarks demonstrate that our method successfully scales to 100-turn search horizons, achieving state-of-the-art performance among open-source models on challenging long-horizon benchmarks like MM-BrowseComp and MMSearch-Plus, while also exhibiting strong generalizability across different base models. Our code will be released in https://github.com/RUCAIBox/LMM-Searcher.

Unified multimodal models (UMMs) strive to consolidate visual understanding and visual generation within a single architecture. However, prevailing training paradigms independently optimize understanding via sparse text signals and generation through dense pixel objectives. Such a decoupled strategy yields misaligned representation spaces, isolating visual understanding from generation and hindering their mutual reinforcement. This work presents the first systematic investigation into generative post-training, where we formulate hierarchical visual tasks as generative proxies to bridge the isolation in UMMs. Our empirical investigation reveals that high-level semantic tasks, particularly image segmentation, serve as optimal proxies. Unlike low-level tasks that distract models with texture details, segmentation provides structural semantics that significantly enhance both vision-centric perception and generative layout fidelity. Building upon these insights, we introduce Semantic Generative Tuning (SGT), a novel paradigm that leverages segmentation as a generative proxy to align and synergize multimodal capabilities. Mechanistic analyses further demonstrate that SGT fundamentally improves feature linear separability and optimizes visual-textual attention allocation pattern. Extensive evaluations show that SGT consistently improves both multimodal comprehension and generative fidelity across mainstream benchmarks. Our code is available on the https://song2yu.github.io/SGT/.

E-commerce platforms are rich in multimodal data, featuring a variety of images that depict product details. However, this raises an important question: do these images always enhance product understanding, or can they sometimes introduce redundancy or degrade performance? Existing datasets are limited in both scale and design, making it difficult to systematically examine this question. To this end, we introduce EcomMMMU, an e-commerce multimodal multitask understanding dataset with 406,190 samples and 8,989,510 images. EcomMMMU is comprised of multi-image visual-language data designed with 8 essential tasks and a specialized VSS subset to benchmark the capability of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to effectively utilize visual content. Analysis on EcomMMMU reveals that product images do not consistently improve performance and can, in some cases, degrade it. This indicates that MLLMs may struggle to effectively leverage rich visual content for e-commerce tasks. Building on these insights, we propose SUMEI, a data-driven method that strategically utilizes multiple images via predicting visual utilities before using them for downstream tasks. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of SUMEI. The data and code are available through https://anonymous.4open.science/r/submission25.

Development of multimodal interactive systems is hindered by the lack of rich, multimodal (text, images) conversational data, which is needed in large quantities for LLMs. Previous approaches augment textual dialogues with retrieved images, posing privacy, diversity, and quality constraints. In this work, we introduce Multimodal Augmented Generative Images Dialogues (MAGID), a framework to augment text-only dialogues with diverse and high-quality images. Subsequently, a diffusion model is applied to craft corresponding images, ensuring alignment with the identified text. Finally, MAGID incorporates an innovative feedback loop between an image description generation module (textual LLM) and image quality modules (addressing aesthetics, image-text matching, and safety), that work in tandem to generate high-quality and multi-modal dialogues. We compare MAGID to other SOTA baselines on three dialogue datasets, using automated and human evaluation. Our results show that MAGID is comparable to or better than baselines, with significant improvements in human evaluation, especially against retrieval baselines where the image database is small.

Figures of speech such as metaphors, similes, and idioms allow language to be expressive, invoke emotion, and communicate abstract ideas that might otherwise be difficult to visualize. These figurative forms are often conveyed through multiple modes, such as text and images, and frequently appear in advertising, news, social media, etc. Understanding multimodal figurative language is an essential component of human communication, and it plays a significant role in our daily interactions. While humans can intuitively understand multimodal figurative language, this poses a challenging task for machines that requires the cognitive ability to map between domains, abstraction, commonsense, and profound language and cultural knowledge. In this work, we propose the Image Recognition of Figurative Language dataset to examine vision and language models' understanding of figurative language. We leverage human annotation and an automatic pipeline we created to generate a multimodal dataset and introduce two novel tasks as a benchmark for multimodal figurative understanding. We experiment with several baseline models and find that all perform substantially worse than humans. We hope our dataset and benchmark will drive the development of models that will better understand figurative language.

Text-rich images, where text serves as the central visual element guiding the overall understanding, are prevalent in real-world applications, such as presentation slides, scanned documents, and webpage snapshots. Tasks involving multiple text-rich images are especially challenging, as they require not only understanding the content of individual images but reasoning about inter-relationships and logical flows across multiple visual inputs. Despite the importance of these scenarios, current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) struggle to handle such tasks due to two key challenges: (1) the scarcity of high-quality instruction tuning datasets for text-rich multi-image scenarios, and (2) the difficulty in balancing image resolution with visual feature sequence length. To address these challenges, we propose \OurMethod, a MLLM designed specifically for handling vision-language tasks involving multiple text-rich images. First, we curated about one million high-quality multimodal instruction-tuning data, tailored to text-rich, multi-image scenarios. Second, we developed an adaptive high-resolution multi-image encoding module to dynamically optimize the allocation of visual sequence length based on the original aspect ratios and resolutions of the input images. Experiments across a wide range of benchmarks demonstrate our model's superior capabilities in text-rich, multi-image evaluations and competitive performance in general domain evaluations.

Current multimodal approaches predominantly treat visual generation as an external process, relying on pixel rendering or code execution, thereby overlooking the native visual representation capabilities latent within Large Language Models (LLMs). In this work, we unlock this potential through ASCII art, a compact, efficient, and text-native visual format. We introduce SVE-ASCII, a unified framework designed to elicit and benchmark Symbolic Visual Expression directly within the pure text space. To address the scarcity of systematic resources, we construct ASCIIArt-7K, a high-quality dataset synthesized via a novel "Seed-and-Evolve" pipeline that augments human-curated anchors through in-context stylistic editing. We further implement a unified instruction-tuning strategy that jointly optimizes for both Generation (Text-to-ASCII) and Understanding (ASCII-to-Text). Crucially, our experiments reveal a critical phenomenon regarding task duality: while it is established that perception aids generation, we provide compelling evidence that generative training significantly enhances visual comprehension. This confirms a mutually reinforcing cycle in symbolic visual processing, a relationship previously hypothesized but rarely empirically demonstrated in the visual domain. We release our dataset, the ASCIIArt-Bench benchmark, and the SVE-ASCII model, establishing a robust baseline for native text-based visual intelligence.

Text-to-image (T2I) generation models have significantly advanced in recent years. However, effective interaction with these models is challenging for average users due to the need for specialized prompt engineering knowledge and the inability to perform multi-turn image generation, hindering a dynamic and iterative creation process. Recent attempts have tried to equip Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with T2I models to bring the user's natural language instructions into reality. Hence, the output modality of MLLMs is extended, and the multi-turn generation quality of T2I models is enhanced thanks to the strong multi-modal comprehension ability of MLLMs. However, many of these works face challenges in identifying correct output modalities and generating coherent images accordingly as the number of output modalities increases and the conversations go deeper. Therefore, we propose DialogGen, an effective pipeline to align off-the-shelf MLLMs and T2I models to build a Multi-modal Interactive Dialogue System (MIDS) for multi-turn Text-to-Image generation. It is composed of drawing prompt alignment, careful training data curation, and error correction. Moreover, as the field of MIDS flourishes, comprehensive benchmarks are urgently needed to evaluate MIDS fairly in terms of output modality correctness and multi-modal output coherence. To address this issue, we introduce the Multi-modal Dialogue Benchmark (DialogBen), a comprehensive bilingual benchmark designed to assess the ability of MLLMs to generate accurate and coherent multi-modal content that supports image editing. It contains two evaluation metrics to measure the model's ability to switch modalities and the coherence of the output images. Our extensive experiments on DialogBen and user study demonstrate the effectiveness of DialogGen compared with other State-of-the-Art models.

Text-rich images often contain privacy-sensitive, transactional, or decision-relevant information. As recent multimodal image generation models become increasingly capable of synthesizing realistic textual content and structured visual designs, detecting AI-generated text-rich images has become an important challenge for digital trust and content authenticity. Existing benchmarks, however, largely focus on object-centric images and provide limited coverage of scenarios where textual semantics and layout organization are central. In this paper, we introduce a multi-domain benchmark for detecting text-rich images generated by OpenAI's GPT Image 2. The benchmark contains 8,602 images across six representative categories: commercial posters, infographics, academic posters, receipts, tables, and UI screenshots. Using this benchmark, we evaluate five representative AI-generated image detectors in a zero-shot setting and analyze their overall, category-wise, and post-processing robustness. Our results show that detector performance is highly domain-dependent: methods that perform well in some categories often fail on others, and even the strongest conventional detector exhibits severe sensitivity to JPEG compression. We further conduct an exploratory evaluation with a multimodal vision-language model, revealing both its promise and its limitations on structured formats. These findings highlight the need for text- and layout-aware detection methods for modern AI-generated images. Our dataset is released at XXX.

While editing directly from life, photographers have found it too difficult to see simultaneously both the blue and the sky. Photographer and curator, Szarkowski insightfully revealed one of the notable gaps between general and aesthetic visual understanding: while the former focuses on identifying the factual element in an image (sky), the latter transcends such object identification, viewing it instead as an aesthetic component--a pure color block (blue). Such fundamental distinctions between general (detection, localization, etc.) and aesthetic (color, lighting, composition, etc.) visual understanding present a significant challenge for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Although some recent works have made initial explorations, they are often limited to general and basic aesthetic commonsense. As a result, they frequently fall short in real-world scenarios (Fig. 1), which require extensive expertise--including photographic techniques, photo pre/post-processing knowledge, and more, to provide a detailed analysis and description. To fundamentally enhance the aesthetics understanding of MLLMs, we first introduce a novel dataset, PhotoCritique, derived from extensive discussions among professional photographers and enthusiasts, and characterized by the large scale, expertise, and diversity. Then, to better learn visual aesthetics from PhotoCritique, we furthur propose a novel model, PhotoEye, featuring a languageguided multi-view vision fusion mechanism to understand image aesthetics from multiple perspectives. Finally, we present a novel benchmark, PhotoBench, a comprehensive and professional benchmark for aesthetic visual understanding. On existing benchmarks and PhotoBench, our model demonstrates clear advantages over existing models.

In this paper, we present MoMA: an open-vocabulary, training-free personalized image model that boasts flexible zero-shot capabilities. As foundational text-to-image models rapidly evolve, the demand for robust image-to-image translation grows. Addressing this need, MoMA specializes in subject-driven personalized image generation. Utilizing an open-source, Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM), we train MoMA to serve a dual role as both a feature extractor and a generator. This approach effectively synergizes reference image and text prompt information to produce valuable image features, facilitating an image diffusion model. To better leverage the generated features, we further introduce a novel self-attention shortcut method that efficiently transfers image features to an image diffusion model, improving the resemblance of the target object in generated images. Remarkably, as a tuning-free plug-and-play module, our model requires only a single reference image and outperforms existing methods in generating images with high detail fidelity, enhanced identity-preservation and prompt faithfulness. Our work is open-source, thereby providing universal access to these advancements.

Embodied agents have achieved prominent performance in following human instructions to complete tasks. However, the potential of providing instructions informed by texts and images to assist humans in completing tasks remains underexplored. To uncover this capability, we present the multimodal procedural planning (MPP) task, in which models are given a high-level goal and generate plans of paired text-image steps, providing more complementary and informative guidance than unimodal plans. The key challenges of MPP are to ensure the informativeness, temporal coherence,and accuracy of plans across modalities. To tackle this, we propose Text-Image Prompting (TIP), a dual-modality prompting method that jointly leverages zero-shot reasoning ability in large language models (LLMs) and compelling text-to-image generation ability from diffusion-based models. TIP improves the interaction in the dual modalities using Text-to-Image Bridge and Image-to-Text Bridge, allowing LLMs to guide the textual-grounded image plan generation and leveraging the descriptions of image plans to ground the textual plan reversely. To address the lack of relevant datasets, we collect WIKIPLAN and RECIPEPLAN as a testbed for MPP. Our results show compelling human preferences and automatic scores against unimodal and multimodal baselines on WIKIPLAN and RECIPEPLAN in terms of informativeness, temporal coherence, and plan accuracy. Our code and data: https://github.com/YujieLu10/MPP.

Multimodal learning has rapidly advanced visual understanding, largely via multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that use powerful LLMs as cognitive cores. In visual generation, however, these powerful core models are typically reduced to global text encoders for diffusion models, leaving most of their reasoning and planning ability unused. This creates a gap: current multimodal LLMs can parse complex layouts, attributes, and knowledge-intensive scenes, yet struggle to generate images or videos with equally precise and structured control. We propose MetaCanvas, a lightweight framework that lets MLLMs reason and plan directly in spatial and spatiotemporal latent spaces and interface tightly with diffusion generators. We empirically implement MetaCanvas on three different diffusion backbones and evaluate it across six tasks, including text-to-image generation, text/image-to-video generation, image/video editing, and in-context video generation, each requiring precise layouts, robust attribute binding, and reasoning-intensive control. MetaCanvas consistently outperforms global-conditioning baselines, suggesting that treating MLLMs as latent-space planners is a promising direction for narrowing the gap between multimodal understanding and generation.

This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the taxonomy and evolution of multimodal foundation models that demonstrate vision and vision-language capabilities, focusing on the transition from specialist models to general-purpose assistants. The research landscape encompasses five core topics, categorized into two classes. (i) We start with a survey of well-established research areas: multimodal foundation models pre-trained for specific purposes, including two topics -- methods of learning vision backbones for visual understanding and text-to-image generation. (ii) Then, we present recent advances in exploratory, open research areas: multimodal foundation models that aim to play the role of general-purpose assistants, including three topics -- unified vision models inspired by large language models (LLMs), end-to-end training of multimodal LLMs, and chaining multimodal tools with LLMs. The target audiences of the paper are researchers, graduate students, and professionals in computer vision and vision-language multimodal communities who are eager to learn the basics and recent advances in multimodal foundation models.

Recent advancements in foundation models show promising capability in graphic design generation. Several studies have started employing Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) to evaluate graphic designs, assuming that LMMs can properly assess their quality, but it is unclear if the evaluation is reliable. One way to evaluate the quality of graphic design is to assess whether the design adheres to fundamental graphic design principles, which are the designer's common practice. In this paper, we compare the behavior of GPT-based evaluation and heuristic evaluation based on design principles using human annotations collected from 60 subjects. Our experiments reveal that, while GPTs cannot distinguish small details, they have a reasonably good correlation with human annotation and exhibit a similar tendency to heuristic metrics based on design principles, suggesting that they are indeed capable of assessing the quality of graphic design. Our dataset is available at https://cyberagentailab.github.io/Graphic-design-evaluation .

Current Vision Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate a critical gap between surface-level recognition and deep narrative reasoning when processing sequential visual storytelling. Through a comprehensive investigation of manga narrative understanding, we reveal that while recent large multimodal models excel at individual panel interpretation, they systematically fail at temporal causality and cross-panel cohesion, core requirements for coherent story comprehension. We introduce a novel evaluation framework that combines fine-grained multimodal annotation, cross-modal embedding analysis, and retrieval-augmented assessment to systematically characterize these limitations. Our methodology includes (i) a rigorous annotation protocol linking visual elements to narrative structure through aligned light novel text, (ii) comprehensive evaluation across multiple reasoning paradigms, including direct inference and retrieval-augmented generation, and (iii) cross-modal similarity analysis revealing fundamental misalignments in current VLMs' joint representations. Applying this framework to Re:Zero manga across 11 chapters with 308 annotated panels, we conduct the first systematic study of long-form narrative understanding in VLMs through three core evaluation axes: generative storytelling, contextual dialogue grounding, and temporal reasoning. Our findings demonstrate that current models lack genuine story-level intelligence, struggling particularly with non-linear narratives, character consistency, and causal inference across extended sequences. This work establishes both the foundation and practical methodology for evaluating narrative intelligence, while providing actionable insights into the capability of deep sequential understanding of Discrete Visual Narratives beyond basic recognition in Multimodal Models. Project Page: https://re-verse.vercel.app

The capability to process multiple images is crucial for Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to develop a more thorough and nuanced understanding of a scene. Recent multi-image LVLMs have begun to address this need. However, their evaluation has not kept pace with their development. To fill this gap, we introduce the Multimodal Multi-image Understanding (MMIU) benchmark, a comprehensive evaluation suite designed to assess LVLMs across a wide range of multi-image tasks. MMIU encompasses 7 types of multi-image relationships, 52 tasks, 77K images, and 11K meticulously curated multiple-choice questions, making it the most extensive benchmark of its kind. Our evaluation of 24 popular LVLMs, including both open-source and proprietary models, reveals significant challenges in multi-image comprehension, particularly in tasks involving spatial understanding. Even the most advanced models, such as GPT-4o, achieve only 55.7% accuracy on MMIU. Through multi-faceted analytical experiments, we identify key performance gaps and limitations, providing valuable insights for future model and data improvements. We aim for MMIU to advance the frontier of LVLM research and development, moving us toward achieving sophisticated multimodal multi-image user interactions.

Recently, researchers have proposed powerful systems for generating and manipulating images using natural language instructions. However, it is difficult to precisely specify many common classes of image transformations with text alone. For example, a user may wish to change the location and breed of a particular dog in an image with several similar dogs. This task is quite difficult with natural language alone, and would require a user to write a laboriously complex prompt that both disambiguates the target dog and describes the destination. We propose ClickDiffusion, a system for precise image manipulation and generation that combines natural language instructions with visual feedback provided by the user through a direct manipulation interface. We demonstrate that by serializing both an image and a multi-modal instruction into a textual representation it is possible to leverage LLMs to perform precise transformations of the layout and appearance of an image. Code available at https://github.com/poloclub/ClickDiffusion.

Large models have recently played a dominant role in natural language processing and multimodal vision-language learning. It remains less explored about their efficacy in text-related visual tasks. We conducted a comprehensive study of existing publicly available multimodal models, evaluating their performance in text recognition (document text, artistic text, handwritten text, scene text), text-based visual question answering (document text, scene text, and bilingual text), key information extraction (receipts, documents, and nutrition facts) and handwritten mathematical expression recognition. Our findings reveal strengths and weaknesses in these models, which primarily rely on semantic understanding for word recognition and exhibit inferior perception of individual character shapes. They also display indifference towards text length and have limited capabilities in detecting finegrained features in images. Consequently, these results demonstrate that even the current most powerful large multimodal models cannot match domain-specific methods in traditional text tasks and face greater challenges in more complex tasks. Most importantly, the baseline results showcased in this study could provide a foundational framework for the conception and assessment of innovative strategies targeted at enhancing zero-shot multimodal techniques. Evaluation pipeline is available at https://github.com/Yuliang-Liu/MultimodalOCR.

Although most current large multimodal models (LMMs) can already understand photos of natural scenes and portraits, their understanding of abstract images, e.g., charts, maps, or layouts, and visual reasoning capabilities remains quite rudimentary. They often struggle with simple daily tasks, such as reading time from a clock, understanding a flowchart, or planning a route using a road map. In light of this, we design a multi-modal self-instruct, utilizing large language models and their code capabilities to synthesize massive abstract images and visual reasoning instructions across daily scenarios. Our strategy effortlessly creates a multimodal benchmark with 11,193 instructions for eight visual scenarios: charts, tables, simulated maps, dashboards, flowcharts, relation graphs, floor plans, and visual puzzles. This benchmark, constructed with simple lines and geometric elements, exposes the shortcomings of most advanced LMMs like Claude-3.5-Sonnet and GPT-4o in abstract image understanding, spatial relations reasoning, and visual element induction. Besides, to verify the quality of our synthetic data, we fine-tune an LMM using 62,476 synthetic chart, table and road map instructions. The results demonstrate improved chart understanding and map navigation performance, and also demonstrate potential benefits for other visual reasoning tasks. Our code is available at: https://github.com/zwq2018/Multi-modal-Self-instruct.

Understanding 3D scenes is fundamental to embodied intelligence, requiring joint reasoning over heterogeneous information from multiple modalities, including visual and geometric cues. However, the relevance of these modalities often varies across queries. Existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) typically rely on fixed modality combinations, overlooking query-dependent modality needs. Such a rigid design can introduce semantic noise from irrelevant modalities while underutilizing more informative ones, leading to wasted computation and diluted reasoning. To address these challenges, this paper proposes SmartMage, a unified MLLM that dynamically orchestrates heterogeneous modalities for semantic-aware 3D scene understanding. Specifically, SmartMage incorporates: (1) a Semantic-guided Modality Adaptive RouTing (SMART) module that selects task-relevant modalities using semantic priors, text-modality alignment, and modality quality; and (2) a Modality-Aware Gating Expert (MAGE) module that leverages modality priors to guide expert activation, fostering adaptive specialization in multimodal reasoning. Empirically, SmartMage achieves state-of-the-art performance across five 3D scene understanding benchmarks, and attains competitive results on RGB-only video understanding benchmarks. In our diagnostic benchmark ScanFacet, tasks are divided into fine-grained semantic categories, enabling analysis of modality combinations preferred by each semantic type. The observed modality-semantic patterns provide further evidence of SmartMage's effectiveness. Project page: https://yuecheong.github.io/SmartMage/.

Multimodal foundation models that can holistically process text alongside images, video, audio, and other sensory modalities are increasingly used in a variety of real-world applications. However, it is challenging to characterize and study progress in multimodal foundation models, given the range of possible modeling decisions, tasks, and domains. In this paper, we introduce Holistic Evaluation of Multimodal Models (HEMM) to systematically evaluate the capabilities of multimodal foundation models across a set of 3 dimensions: basic skills, information flow, and real-world use cases. Basic multimodal skills are internal abilities required to solve problems, such as learning interactions across modalities, fine-grained alignment, multi-step reasoning, and the ability to handle external knowledge. Information flow studies how multimodal content changes during a task through querying, translation, editing, and fusion. Use cases span domain-specific challenges introduced in real-world multimedia, affective computing, natural sciences, healthcare, and human-computer interaction applications. Through comprehensive experiments across the 30 tasks in HEMM, we (1) identify key dataset dimensions (e.g., basic skills, information flows, and use cases) that pose challenges to today's models, and (2) distill performance trends regarding how different modeling dimensions (e.g., scale, pre-training data, multimodal alignment, pre-training, and instruction tuning objectives) influence performance. Our conclusions regarding challenging multimodal interactions, use cases, and tasks requiring reasoning and external knowledge, the benefits of data and model scale, and the impacts of instruction tuning yield actionable insights for future work in multimodal foundation models.

As deep learning models evolve, new applications and challenges are rapidly emerging. Tasks that once relied on a single modality, such as text, images, or audio, are now enriched by seamless interactions between multimodal data. These connections bridge information gaps: an image can visually materialize a text, while audio can add context to an image. Researchers have developed numerous multimodal models, but most rely on resource-intensive training across multiple modalities. Similarly, extending these models to new languages often follows the same resource-heavy training strategy. In this work, we propose a multimodal and multilingual architecture, CACARA, trained through emergent alignment learning, enabling the seamless integration of new modalities into an existing bimodal/multimodal model without requiring full retraining. This work breaks new ground by demonstrating that this emergent alignment paradigm can unlock multilingual capabilities from monolingual training. By fine-tuning the newly incorporated modality only on data aligned with the English language, our model develops support for over 100 languages without explicit multilingual pretraining or tuning of the text encoder. Such emergent multimodal and multilingual properties are gained efficiently, preserving previously learned knowledge at a training cost comparable to that of a monolingual model. Our strategy achieves up to a 14.24 percentage points improvement in R@1 audio-to-text retrieval, outperforming state-of-the-art multimodal models -- all without the heavy computational cost of retraining across every modality and language.

Existing text-to-image models still struggle to generate images of multiple objects, especially in handling their spatial positions, relative sizes, overlapping, and attribute bindings. To efficiently address these challenges, we develop a training-free Multimodal-LLM agent (MuLan), as a human painter, that can progressively generate multi-object with intricate planning and feedback control. MuLan harnesses a large language model (LLM) to decompose a prompt to a sequence of sub-tasks, each generating only one object by stable diffusion, conditioned on previously generated objects. Unlike existing LLM-grounded methods, MuLan only produces a high-level plan at the beginning while the exact size and location of each object are determined upon each sub-task by an LLM and attention guidance. Moreover, MuLan adopts a vision-language model (VLM) to provide feedback to the image generated in each sub-task and control the diffusion model to re-generate the image if it violates the original prompt. Hence, each model in every step of MuLan only needs to address an easy sub-task it is specialized for. The multi-step process also allows human users to monitor the generation process and make preferred changes at any intermediate step via text prompts, thereby improving the human-AI collaboration experience. We collect 200 prompts containing multi-objects with spatial relationships and attribute bindings from different benchmarks to evaluate MuLan. The results demonstrate the superiority of MuLan in generating multiple objects over baselines and its creativity when collaborating with human users. The code is available at https://github.com/measure-infinity/mulan-code.

Incorporating visual knowledge into text-only dialogue systems has become a potential direction to imitate the way humans think, imagine, and communicate. However, existing multimodal dialogue systems are either confined by the scale and quality of available datasets or the coarse concept of visual knowledge. To address these issues, we provide a new paradigm of constructing multimodal dialogues as well as two datasets extended from text-only dialogues under such paradigm (ReSee-WoW, ReSee-DD). We propose to explicitly split the visual knowledge into finer granularity (``turn-level'' and ``entity-level''). To further boost the accuracy and diversity of augmented visual information, we retrieve them from the Internet or a large image dataset. To demonstrate the superiority and universality of the provided visual knowledge, we propose a simple but effective framework ReSee to add visual representation into vanilla dialogue models by modality concatenations. We also conduct extensive experiments and ablations w.r.t. different model configurations and visual knowledge settings. Empirical, encouraging results not only demonstrate the effectiveness of introducing visual knowledge at both entity and turn level but also verify the proposed model ReSee outperforms several state-of-the-art methods on automatic and human evaluations. By leveraging text and vision knowledge, ReSee can produce informative responses with real-world visual concepts. Our code is available at https://github.com/ImKeTT/ReSee.

We present a novel framework for multi-domain synthesis of artwork from semantic layouts. One of the main limitations of this challenging task is the lack of publicly available segmentation datasets for art synthesis. To address this problem, we propose a dataset, which we call ArtSem, that contains 40,000 images of artwork from 4 different domains with their corresponding semantic label maps. We generate the dataset by first extracting semantic maps from landscape photography and then propose a conditional Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)-based approach to generate high-quality artwork from the semantic maps without necessitating paired training data. Furthermore, we propose an artwork synthesis model that uses domain-dependent variational encoders for high-quality multi-domain synthesis. The model is improved and complemented with a simple but effective normalization method, based on normalizing both the semantic and style jointly, which we call Spatially STyle-Adaptive Normalization (SSTAN). In contrast to previous methods that only take semantic layout as input, our model is able to learn a joint representation of both style and semantic information, which leads to better generation quality for synthesizing artistic images. Results indicate that our model learns to separate the domains in the latent space, and thus, by identifying the hyperplanes that separate the different domains, we can also perform fine-grained control of the synthesized artwork. By combining our proposed dataset and approach, we are able to generate user-controllable artwork that is of higher quality than existing