# UnifiedMLLM: Enabling Unified Representation for Multi-modal Multi-tasks With Large Language Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.02503 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02503/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in MLLM training and visual instruction tuning, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 31 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Aug 2024.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [MLLM training and visual instruction tuning](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/mllm-training-and-visual-instruction-tuning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [Make-A-Video: Text-to-Video Generation without Text-Video Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14792/) (2022)
- [Video-LLaMA: An Instruction-tuned Audio-Visual Language Model for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02858/) (2023)
- [ImageBind: One Embedding Space To Bind Them All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05665/) (2023)
- [CogVideo: Large-scale Pretraining for Text-to-Video Generation via Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15868/) (2022)
- [Generation and Comprehension of Unambiguous Object Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02283/) (2015)
- [MagicBrush: A Manually Annotated Dataset for Instruction-Guided Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10012/) (2023)
- [NExT-GPT: Any-to-Any Multimodal LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05519/) (2023)
- [AudioLDM: Text-to-Audio Generation with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12503/) (2023)
- [SpeechGPT: Empowering Large Language Models with Intrinsic Cross-Modal Conversational Abilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11000/) (2023)
- [CRIS: CLIP-Driven Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15174/) (2021)
- [I2VGen-XL: High-Quality Image-to-Video Synthesis via Cascaded Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04145/) (2023)
- [LAVT: Language-Aware Vision Transformer for Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02244/) (2021)
- [Generating Images with Multimodal Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17216/) (2023)
- [Diffsound: Discrete Diffusion Model for Text-to-sound Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09983/) (2022)
- [Vision-Language Transformer and Query Generation for Referring Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05565/) (2021)
- [AnyGPT: Unified Multimodal LLM with Discrete Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12226/) (2024)
- [Any-to-Any Generation via Composable Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11846/) (2023)
- [LLaVA-Plus: Learning to Use Tools for Creating Multimodal Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05437/) (2023)
- [Latent-Shift: Latent Diffusion with Temporal Shift for Efficient Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08477/) (2023)
- [LayoutTransformer: Layout Generation and Completion with Self-attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.14615/) (2020)
- [GroundingGPT:Language Enhanced Multi-modal Grounding Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06071/) (2024)
- [CoDi-2: In-Context, Interleaved, and Interactive Any-to-Any Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18775/) (2023)
- [Auffusion: Leveraging the Power of Diffusion and Large Language Models for Text-to-Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01044/) (2024)
- [FRESCO: Spatial-Temporal Correspondence for Zero-Shot Video Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12962/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Toward Visual Grounding: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20206/) (2024)
- [RSUniVLM: A Unified Vision Language Model for Remote Sensing via Granularity-oriented Mixture of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05679/) (2024)
- [M2-omni: Advancing Omni-MLLM for Comprehensive Modality Support with Competitive Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18778/) (2025)
- [UniVid: The Open-Source Unified Video Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24200/) (2025)
- [JavisGPT: A Unified Multi-modal LLM for Sounding-Video Comprehension and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22905/) (2025)
- [Advancing Fine-Grained Visual Understanding with Multi-Scale Alignment in Multi-Modal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.09691/) (2024)
- [FedVLMBench: Benchmarking Federated Fine-Tuning of Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09638/) (2025)
- [Beyond Cross-Modal Alignment: Measuring and Leveraging Modality Gap in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14888/) (2025)
- [FOCUS: Unified Vision-Language Modeling for Interactive Editing Driven by Referential Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16806/) (2025)
- [Omni-AVSR: Towards Unified Multimodal Speech Recognition with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07253/) (2025)
- [UniWhisper: Efficient Continual Multi-task Training for Robust Universal Audio Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.21772/) (2026)
- [A Novel MLLM-based Approach for Autonomous Driving in Different Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10603/) (2024)
- [UniAfford: Token-Routed Multitask Learning for Generalizable 2D-3D Affordance Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37264/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Significant advancements has recently been achieved in the field of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs), demonstrating their remarkable capabilities in understanding and reasoning across diverse tasks. However, these models are often trained for specific tasks and rely on task-specific input-output formats, limiting their applicability to a broader range of tasks. This raises a fundamental question: Can we develop a unified approach to represent and handle different multi-modal tasks to maximize the generalizability of MLLMs? In this paper, we propose UnifiedMLLM, a comprehensive model designed to represent various tasks using a unified representation. Our model exhibits strong capabilities in comprehending the implicit intent of user instructions and preforming reasoning. In addition to generating textual responses, our model also outputs task tokens and grounding tokens, serving as indicators of task types and task granularity. These outputs are subsequently routed through the task router and directed to specific expert models for task completion. To train our model, we construct a task-specific dataset and an 100k multi-task dataset encompassing complex scenarios. Employing a three-stage training strategy, we equip our model with robust reasoning and task processing capabilities while preserving its generalization capacity and knowledge reservoir. Extensive experiments showcase the impressive performance of our unified representation approach across various tasks, surpassing existing methodologies. Furthermore, our approach exhibits exceptional scalability and generality. Our code, model, and dataset will be available at urlhttps://github.com/lzw-lzw/UnifiedMLLM.