# OneCAT: Decoder-Only Auto-Regressive Model for Unified Understanding and Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03498 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03498/

## Key facts

- Cited by 50 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal MoE models, one of 12 directions in Mixture-of-experts.
- Builds on 97 of its 111 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Sep 2025.

## Placed in

- Mixture-of-experts / [Multimodal MoE models](https://mlsanity.com/moe/multimodal-moe-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 97)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12966/) (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)
- [InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10479/) (2025)
- [Towards VQA Models That Can Read](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08920/) (2019)
- [MathVista: Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning of Foundation Models in Visual Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02255/) (2023)
- [Expanding Performance Boundaries of Open-Source Multimodal Models with Model, Data, and Test-Time Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05271/) (2024)
- [LAION-400M: Open Dataset of CLIP-Filtered 400 Million Image-Text Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02114/) (2021)
- [InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18265/) (2025)
- [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)
- [MM-Vet: Evaluating Large Multimodal Models for Integrated Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02490/) (2023)
- [Conceptual 12M: Pushing Web-Scale Image-Text Pre-Training To Recognize Long-Tail Visual Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08981/) (2021)
- [SigLIP 2: Multilingual Vision-Language Encoders with Improved Semantic Understanding, Localization, and Dense Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14786/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [Reconstruction Alignment Improves Unified Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.07295/) (2025)
- [Beyond Language Modeling: An Exploration of Multimodal Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03276/) (2026)
- [LongCat-Next: Lexicalizing Modalities as Discrete Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27538/) (2026)
- [TUNA: Taming Unified Visual Representations for Native Unified Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02014/) (2025)
- [RealUnify: Do Unified Models Truly Benefit from Unification? A Comprehensive Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24897/) (2025)
- [SenseNova-U1: Unifying Multimodal Understanding and Generation with NEO-unify Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12500/) (2026)
- [InternVL-U: Democratizing Unified Multimodal Models for Understanding, Reasoning, Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09877/) (2026)
- [UniGenBench++: A Unified Semantic Evaluation Benchmark for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18701/) (2025)
- [Uni-X: Mitigating Modality Conflict with a Two-End-Separated Architecture for Unified Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24365/) (2025)
- [From Pixels to Words -- Towards Native Vision-Language Primitives at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14979/) (2025)
- [Tuna-2: Pixel Embeddings Beat Vision Encoders for Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.24763/) (2026)
- [NextFlow: Unified Sequential Modeling Activates Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02204/) (2026)
- [Quantifying the Gap between Understanding and Generation within Unified Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02140/) (2026)
- [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)
- [UniM: A Unified Any-to-Any Interleaved Multimodal Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05075/) (2026)
- [Does Understanding Inform Generation in Unified Multimodal Models? From Analysis to Path Forward](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20561/) (2025)
- [LatentUM: Unleashing the Potential of Interleaved Cross-Modal Reasoning via a Latent-Space Unified Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02097/) (2026)
- [Semantic Context Matters: Improving Conditioning for Autoregressive Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.14063/) (2025)
- [Toward Native Multimodal Modeling: A Roadmap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.25343/) (2026)
- [SenseNova-U1.5: Towards Native Unified Visual Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.11929/) (2026)
- [Efficient Context Scaling with LongCat ZigZag Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.23966/) (2025)
- [Edit-Compass & EditReward-Compass: A Unified Benchmark for Image Editing and Reward Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13062/) (2026)
- [Uni-Edit: Intelligent Editing Is A General Task For Unified Model Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.21487/) (2026)
- [Towards Holistic Modeling for Video Frame Interpolation with Auto-regressive Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14959/) (2026)
- [PlanViz: Evaluating Planning-Oriented Image Generation and Editing for Computer-Use Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06663/) (2026)
- [MetaPoint: Unlocking Precise Spatial Control in Agentic Visual Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.05031/) (2026)
- [UniDDT: Unifying Multimodal Understanding and Generation with Decoupled Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.16255/) (2026)
- [Steering Visual Generation in Unified Multimodal Models with Understanding Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.05781/) (2026)
- [Breaking Dual Bottlenecks: Evolving Unified Multimodal Models into Self-Adaptive Interleaved Visual Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14709/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce OneCAT, a unified multimodal model that seamlessly integrates understanding, generation, and editing within a novel, pure decoder-only transformer architecture. Our framework uniquely eliminates the need for external components such as Vision Transformers (ViT) or vision tokenizer during inference, leading to significant efficiency gains, especially for high-resolution inputs. This is achieved through a modality-specific Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) structure trained with a single autoregressive (AR) objective, which also natively supports dynamic resolutions. Furthermore, we pioneer a multi-scale visual autoregressive mechanism within the Large Language Model (LLM) that drastically reduces decoding steps compared to diffusion-based methods while maintaining state-of-the-art performance. Our findings demonstrate the powerful potential of pure autoregressive modeling as a sufficient and elegant foundation for unified multimodal intelligence. As a result, OneCAT sets a new performance standard, outperforming existing open-source unified multimodal models across benchmarks for multimodal generation, editing, and understanding.