检验统一模型在图文输出间是否保持语义一致
Can Unified Generation and Understanding Models Maintain Semantic Equivalence Across Different Output Modalities?

- 设计三阶段诊断框架,分离推理与生成能力
- 文本理解强但图像作答性能骤降,差距超40%
- 问题不在生成质量,而在跨模态语义对齐
统一多模态大模型(U-MLLMs)将理解与生成整合于单一架构中,但现有评估常分开测试各项能力,忽视了语义等价性——即不同输出模态下推理结果的一致性。本文探究当前U-MLLMs是否满足此前提。发现模型虽具备强大文本推理能力,但在要求以图像形式呈现相同答案时,性能显著下降。为此提出VGUBench框架,包含三项诊断任务:(1) 文本生成理解,建立文本响应的推理准确率基线;(2) 图像生成理解,评估生成正确视觉回答的能力;(3) 视觉渲染控制任务,测试直接将显式描述转为图像的能力。评估显示:尽管文本理解与图像渲染表现良好,但在图像问答任务中性能大幅下滑,且图像回答能力与基础渲染质量相关性极低(r < 0.1)。结果表明,失败根源不在于生成保真度不足,而是跨模态语义对齐机制失效。研究为未来统一模型的设计提供了诊断视角。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Unified Multimodal Large Language Models (U-MLLMs) integrate understanding and generation within a single architecture. However, existing evaluations typically assess these capabilities separately, overlooking semantic equivalence, i.e., the ability to manifest consistent reasoning results regardless of the output modality. In this work, we investigate whether current U-MLLMs satisfy this premise. We observe that while models demonstrate robust textual reasoning, they fail to maintain semantic equivalence when required to render the same results in the image modality. To rigorously diagnose this discrepancy, we introduce VGUBench, a framework to decouple reasoning logic from generation fidelity. VGUBench comprises three diagnostic tasks: (1)Textual Generative Understanding, establishing a baseline for reasoning accuracy in textual response; (2)Visual Generative Understanding, evaluating the ability to generate visual responses that represent the correct answer; and (3)a Visual Rendering control task, which assesses the ability to directly render explicit visual descriptions into images without complex reasoning. Our evaluation reveals a significant disparity: despite strong performance in textual understanding and visual rendering, U-MLLMs exhibit a marked performance collapse when required to generate visual answers to questions. Furthermore, we find a negligible correlation between visual answering performance and basic rendering quality. These results suggest that the failure stems not from insufficient generation fidelity, but from a breakdown in cross-modal semantic alignment. We provide diagnostic insights to address this challenge in future Unified Generation and Understanding Models.
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