南大一篇84页的统一多模态理解和生成综述......

Core Insights - The article discusses the evolution and significance of Unified Foundation Models (UFM) in the realm of AI, particularly focusing on the integration of understanding and generation capabilities across multiple modalities [1][3][41] - A comprehensive survey titled "A Survey of Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation: Advances and Challenges" has been published, providing a systematic framework for UFM research, including architecture classification, technical details, training processes, and practical applications [1][4][41] Group 1: Importance of Unified Multimodal Models - The necessity of combining understanding and generation into a single model is emphasized, as it allows for more complex and coherent task execution [3][4] - Current open-source UFMs, while competitive in some tasks, still lag behind proprietary models like GPT-4o and Gemini 2.0 Flash, highlighting the need for a unified approach to overcome fragmentation in the open-source community [4][6] Group 2: Evolution of Unified Foundation Models - The evolution of UFM is categorized into three distinct stages: 1. Isolation Stage: Understanding and generation are handled by separate models [6] 2. Combination Stage: Understanding and generation modules are integrated within a single framework [7] 3. Emergent Stage: The ultimate goal where models can seamlessly switch between understanding and generation, akin to human cognitive processes [8][9] Group 3: Architectural Framework of UFM - The article categorizes UFM architectures into three main types based on the coupling of understanding and generation modules: 1. External Service Integration: LLMs act as task coordinators, calling external models for specific tasks [12][13] 2. Modular Joint Modeling: LLMs connect understanding and generation tasks through intermediary layers [14][15] 3. End-to-End Unified Modeling: A single architecture handles both understanding and generation tasks, representing the highest level of integration [20][21] Group 4: Technical Details of UFM - The technical aspects of UFM are broken down into encoding, decoding, and training processes, with detailed methodologies provided for each [22][32] - Encoding strategies include continuous, discrete, and hybrid approaches to convert multimodal data into a format suitable for model processing [27][30] - Decoding processes are designed to transform model outputs back into human-readable formats, utilizing various techniques to enhance quality and efficiency [28][31] Group 5: Applications and Future Directions - UFM applications span multiple fields, including robotics, autonomous driving, world modeling, and medical imaging, with specific use cases outlined for each domain [39][42] - Future research directions focus on improving modeling architectures, developing unified tokenizers, refining training strategies, and establishing benchmark tests to evaluate understanding and generation synergy [40][42]