# A unified multimodal understanding and generation model for cross-disciplinary scientific research

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01363 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01363/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 129 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [GLU Variants Improve Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05202/) (2020)
- [Root Mean Square Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07467/) (2019)
- [GQA: Training Generalized Multi-Query Transformer Models from Multi-Head Checkpoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13245/) (2023)
- [LLaVA-Med: Training a Large Language-and-Vision Assistant for Biomedicine in One Day](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00890/) (2023)
- [Image Super-Resolution Using Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.00092/) (2014)
- [Chameleon: Mixed-Modal Early-Fusion Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09818/) (2024)
- [Emerging Properties in Unified Multimodal Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14683/) (2025)
- [Emu3: Next-Token Prediction is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18869/) (2024)
- [FourCastNet: A Global Data-driven High-resolution Weather Model using Adaptive Fourier Neural Operators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11214/) (2022)
- [Show-o: One Single Transformer to Unify Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12528/) (2024)
- [Galactica: A Large Language Model for Science](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09085/) (2022)
- [Transfusion: Predict the Next Token and Diffuse Images with One Multi-Modal Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11039/) (2024)
- [Janus: Decoupling Visual Encoding for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13848/) (2024)
- [SLAKE: A Semantically-Labeled Knowledge-Enhanced Dataset for Medical Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09542/) (2021)
- [Generative Multimodal Models are In-Context Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13286/) (2023)
- [WeatherBench: A benchmark dataset for data-driven weather forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.00469/) (2020)
- [FuXi: A cascade machine learning forecasting system for 15-day global weather forecast](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12873/) (2023)
- [Neural General Circulation Models for Weather and Climate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07222/) (2023)
- [WeatherBench 2: A benchmark for the next generation of data-driven global weather models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15560/) (2023)
- [Guiding Instruction-based Image Editing via Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17102/) (2023)
- [JanusFlow: Harmonizing Autoregression and Rectified Flow for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07975/) (2024)
- [Medical Visual Question Answering: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.10056/) (2021)
- [Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation Models: Advances, Challenges, and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02567/) (2025)
- [DeepSD: Generating High Resolution Climate Change Projections through Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03126/) (2017)
- [MedTrinity-25M: A Large-scale Multimodal Dataset with Multigranular Annotations for Medicine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02900/) (2024)
- [Deep Learning in Multimodal Remote Sensing Data Fusion: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01380/) (2022)
- [Multimodal Image Synthesis and Editing: The Generative AI Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.13592/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [PhyMo: A Physical-Field Modality for Multimodal AI4Physics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.27554/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Scientific discovery increasingly relies on integrating heterogeneous, high-dimensional data across disciplines nowadays. While AI models have achieved notable success across various scientific domains, they typically remain domain-specific or lack the capability of simultaneously understanding and generating multimodal scientific data, particularly for high-dimensional data. Yet, many pressing global challenges and scientific problems are inherently cross-disciplinary and require coordinated progress across multiple fields. Here, we present FuXi-Uni, a native unified multimodal model for scientific understanding and high-fidelity generation across scientific domains within a single architecture. Specifically, FuXi-Uni aligns cross-disciplinary scientific tokens within natural language tokens and employs science decoder to reconstruct scientific tokens, thereby supporting both natural language conversation and scientific numerical prediction. Empirically, we validate FuXi-Uni in Earth science and Biomedicine. In Earth system modeling, the model supports global weather forecasting, tropical cyclone (TC) forecast editing, and spatial downscaling driven by only language instructions. FuXi-Uni generates 10-day global forecasts at 0.25deg resolution that outperform the SOTA physical forecasting system. It shows superior performance for both TC track and intensity prediction relative to the SOTA physical model, and generates high-resolution regional weather fields that surpass standard interpolation baselines. Regarding biomedicine, FuXi-Uni outperforms leading multimodal large language models on multiple biomedical visual question answering benchmarks. By unifying heterogeneous scientific modalities within a native shared latent space while maintaining strong domain-specific performance, FuXi-Uni provides a step forward more general-purpose, multimodal scientific models.