# Reconstruction Alignment Improves Unified Multimodal Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07295 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.07295/

## Key facts

- Cited by 49 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 92 of its 114 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 92)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Evaluating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10355/) (2023)
- [MME: A Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13394/) (2023)
- [Expanding Performance Boundaries of Open-Source Multimodal Models with Model, Data, and Test-Time Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05271/) (2024)
- [MaskGIT: Masked Generative Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04200/) (2022)
- [Qwen-Image Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02324/) (2025)
- [FLUX.1 Kontext: Flow Matching for In-Context Image Generation and Editing in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15742/) (2025)
- [GenEval: An Object-Focused Framework for Evaluating Text-to-Image Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11513/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [Chain-of-Visual-Thought: Teaching VLMs to See and Think Better with Continuous Visual Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19418/) (2025)
- [UniCorn: Towards Self-Improving Unified Multimodal Models through Self-Generated Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03193/) (2026)
- [SRUM: Fine-Grained Self-Rewarding for Unified Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12784/) (2025)
- [Generation Enhances Understanding in Unified Multimodal Models via Multi-Representation Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21406/) (2026)
- [Tuna-2: Pixel Embeddings Beat Vision Encoders for Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.24763/) (2026)
- [Generative Universal Verifier as Multimodal Meta-Reasoner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13804/) (2025)
- [GIR-Bench: Versatile Benchmark for Generating Images with Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11026/) (2025)
- [Uniform Discrete Diffusion with Metric Path for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24717/) (2025)
- [GENIUS: Generative Fluid Intelligence Evaluation Suite](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11144/) (2026)
- [Does Understanding Inform Generation in Unified Multimodal Models? From Analysis to Path Forward](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20561/) (2025)
- [VQRAE: Representation Quantization Autoencoders for Multimodal Understanding, Generation and Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.23386/) (2025)
- [SuperFlow: Training Flow Matching Models with RL on the Fly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.17951/) (2025)
- [UniGame: Turning a Unified Multimodal Model Into Its Own Adversary](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19413/) (2025)
- [VideoCoCo: Code-as-CoT for Physically-Consistent Video Generation via an Agentic Dual-Engine System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.27380/) (2026)
- [Endogenous Reprompting: Self-Evolving Cognitive Alignment for Unified Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20305/) (2026)
- [Evolution of Video Generative Foundations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.06339/) (2026)
- [Learning to Generate via Understanding: Understanding-Driven Intrinsic Rewarding for Unified Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06043/) (2026)
- [CoCo: Code as CoT for Text-to-Image Preview and Rare Concept Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.08652/) (2026)
- [Uni-Edit: Intelligent Editing Is A General Task For Unified Model Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.21487/) (2026)
- [RefineAnything: Multimodal Region-Specific Refinement for Perfect Local Details](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.06870/) (2026)
- [Are Image-to-Video Models Good Zero-Shot Image Editors?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19435/) (2025)
- [AlphaGRPO: Unlocking Self-Reflective Multimodal Generation in UMMs via Decompositional Verifiable Reward](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12495/) (2026)
- [MetaPoint: Unlocking Precise Spatial Control in Agentic Visual Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.05031/) (2026)
- [Steering Visual Generation in Unified Multimodal Models with Understanding Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.05781/) (2026)
- [Rethinking UMM Visual Generation: Masked Modeling for Efficient Image-Only Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16139/) (2026)
- [TorchUMM: A Unified Multimodal Model Codebase for Evaluation, Analysis, and Post-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10784/) (2026)
- [Extending One-Step Image Generation from Class Labels to Text via Discriminative Text Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.18168/) (2026)
- [Camera Control for Text-to-Image Generation via Learning Viewpoint Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.19954/) (2026)
- [RepFusion: Leveraging Multimodal Priors for Denoising in Representation Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.14700/) (2026)
- [Uncovering Understanding-Generation Synergy in Native Unified Multimodal Models: From Representation, Task to System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01607/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unified multimodal models (UMMs) unify visual understanding and generation within a single architecture. However, conventional training relies on image-text pairs (or sequences) whose captions are typically sparse and miss fine-grained visual details, even when they use hundreds of words to describe a simple image. We introduce Reconstruction Alignment (RECA), a resource-efficient post-training method that leverages visual understanding encoder embeddings as dense "text prompts", providing rich supervision without captions. Concretely, RECA conditions a UMM on its own visual understanding embeddings and optimizes it to reconstruct the input image with a self-supervised reconstruction loss, thereby realigning understanding and generation. Despite its simplicity, RECA is broadly applicable: across autoregressive, masked-autoregressive, and diffusion-based UMMs, it consistently improves generation and editing fidelity. With only 27 GPU hours, post-training with RECA substantially improves image generation performance on GenEval (0.73 rightarrow 0.90) and DPGBench (80.93 rightarrow 88.15), while also boosting editing benchmarks (ImgEdit 3.38 rightarrow 3.75, GEdit 6.94 rightarrow 7.27). Notably, RECA surpasses much larger open-source models and applies broadly across diverse UMM architectures, establishing it as an efficient and general post-training alignment strategy for UMMs.