# ILLUME: Illuminating Your LLMs to See, Draw, and Self-Enhance

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.06673 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06673/

## Key facts

- Cited by 64 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 54 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Dec 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 54)

- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06281/) (2023)
- [MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Expert AGI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16502/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10355/) (2023)
- [Towards VQA Models That Can Read](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08920/) (2019)
- [MME: A Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13394/) (2023)
- [ChartQA: A Benchmark for Question Answering about Charts with Visual and Logical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10244/) (2022)
- [DocVQA: A Dataset for VQA on Document Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00398/) (2020)
- [Scaling Autoregressive Models for Content-Rich Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10789/) (2022)
- [MM-Vet: Evaluating Large Multimodal Models for Integrated Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02490/) (2023)
- [How Far Are We to GPT-4V? Closing the Gap to Commercial Multimodal Models with Open-Source Suites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16821/) (2024)
- [ShareGPT4V: Improving Large Multi-Modal Models with Better Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12793/) (2023)
- [GenEval: An Object-Focused Framework for Evaluating Text-to-Image Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11513/) (2023)
- [SEED-Bench: Benchmarking Multimodal LLMs with Generative Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16125/) (2023)
- [Chameleon: Mixed-Modal Early-Fusion Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09818/) (2024)
- [A Diagram Is Worth A Dozen Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.07396/) (2016)
- [Emu3: Next-Token Prediction is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18869/) (2024)
- [Autoregressive Model Beats Diffusion: Llama for Scalable Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06525/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 64)

- [Emerging Properties in Unified Multimodal Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14683/) (2025)
- [Show-o2: Improved Native Unified Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15564/) (2025)
- [FutureSightDrive: Thinking Visually with Spatio-Temporal CoT for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17685/) (2025)
- [Mogao: An Omni Foundation Model for Interleaved Multi-Modal Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05472/) (2025)
- [Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation Models: Advances, Challenges, and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02567/) (2025)
- [Harmonizing Visual Representations for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21979/) (2025)
- [Uni-cot: Towards Unified Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Across Text and Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05606/) (2025)
- [Muddit: Liberating Generation Beyond Text-to-Image with a Unified Discrete Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23606/) (2025)
- [ILLUME+: Illuminating Unified MLLM with Dual Visual Tokenization and Diffusion Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01934/) (2025)
- [TokLIP: Marry Visual Tokens to CLIP for Multimodal Comprehension and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05422/) (2025)
- [OpenUni: A Simple Baseline for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23661/) (2025)
- [Vision as a Dialect: Unifying Visual Understanding and Generation via Text-Aligned Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18898/) (2025)
- [UniLiP: Adapting CLIP for Unified Multimodal Understanding, Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.23278/) (2025)
- [DualToken: Towards Unifying Visual Understanding and Generation with Dual Visual Vocabularies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14324/) (2025)
- [Skywork UniPic 2.0: Building Kontext Model with Online RL for Unified Multimodal Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.04548/) (2025)
- [Interleaving Reasoning for Better Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06945/) (2025)
- [AlignTok: Aligning Visual Foundation Encoders to Tokenizers for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25162/) (2025)
- [FireEdit: Fine-grained Instruction-based Image Editing via Region-aware Vision Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19839/) (2025)
- [UniGen: Enhanced Training & Test-Time Strategies for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14682/) (2025)
- [ReasonGen-R1: CoT for Autoregressive Image generation models through SFT and RL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24875/) (2025)
- [UniCorn: Towards Self-Improving Unified Multimodal Models through Self-Generated Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03193/) (2026)
- [SemHiTok: A Unified Image Tokenizer via Semantic-Guided Hierarchical Codebook for Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06764/) (2025)
- [NExT-OMNI: Towards Any-to-Any Omnimodal Foundation Models with Discrete Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13721/) (2025)
- [Personalized Image Generation with Deep Generative Models: A Decade Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13081/) (2025)
- [VeOmni: Scaling Any Modality Model Training with Model-Centric Distributed Recipe Zoo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02317/) (2025)
- [Co-Reinforcement Learning for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17534/) (2025)
- [Hyper-Bagel: A Unified Acceleration Framework for Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18824/) (2025)
- [Lance: Unified Multimodal Modeling by Multi-Task Synergy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18678/) (2026)
- [HBridge: H-Shape Bridging of Heterogeneous Experts for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20520/) (2025)
- [UniUGG: Unified 3D Understanding and Generation via Geometric-Semantic Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11952/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we introduce ILLUME, a unified multimodal large language model (MLLM) that seamlessly integrates multimodal understanding and generation capabilities within a single large language model through a unified next-token prediction formulation. To address the large dataset size typically required for image-text alignment, we propose to enhance data efficiency through the design of a vision tokenizer that incorporates semantic information and a progressive multi-stage training procedure. This approach reduces the dataset size to just 15M for pretraining -- over four times fewer than what is typically needed -- while achieving competitive or even superior performance with existing unified MLLMs, such as Janus. Additionally, to promote synergistic enhancement between understanding and generation capabilities, which is under-explored in previous works, we introduce a novel self-enhancing multimodal alignment scheme. This scheme supervises the MLLM to self-assess the consistency between text descriptions and self-generated images, facilitating the model to interpret images more accurately and avoid unrealistic and incorrect predictions caused by misalignment in image generation. Based on extensive experiments, our proposed ILLUME stands out and competes with state-of-the-art unified MLLMs and specialized models across various benchmarks for multimodal understanding, generation, and editing.