UniReason 1.0: A Unified Reasoning Framework for World Knowledge Aligned Image Generation and Editing
On the map: LLM reasoning → Multimodal reasoning
Abstract (arXiv)
Unified multimodal models often struggle with complex synthesis tasks that demand deep reasoning, and typically treat text-to-image generation and image editing as isolated capabilities rather than interconnected reasoning steps. To address this, we propose UniReason, a unified framework that harmonizes these two tasks through two complementary reasoning paradigms. We incorporate world knowledge-enhanced textual reasoning into generation to infer implicit knowledge, and leverage editing capabilities for fine-grained editing-like visual refinement to further correct visual errors via self-reflection. This approach unifies generation and editing within a shared architecture, mirroring the human cognitive process of planning followed by refinement. We support this framework by systematically constructing a large-scale reasoning-centric dataset (~300k samples) covering five major knowledge domains (e.g., cultural commonsense, physics, etc.) for textual reasoning, alongside an agent-generated corpus for visual refinement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniReason achieves advanced performance on reasoning-intensive benchmarks such as WISE, KrisBench and UniREditBench, while maintaining superior general synthesis capabilities.
Key facts. Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 41 of its 48 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Feb 2026.
Builds on
41 of 48 references.
Closest ancestors · 5
Same direction, newest first
- 2025Uni-cot: Towards Unified Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Across Text and Vision7 Aug
- 2025Game-RL: Synthesizing Multimodal Verifiable Game Data to Boost VLMs' General Reasoning20 May
- 2025MindOmni: Unleashing Reasoning Generation in Vision Language Models with RGPO19 May
- 2025T2I-R1: Reinforcing Image Generation with Collaborative Semantic-level and Token-level CoT1 May
- 2025GoT: Unleashing Reasoning Capability of Multimodal Large Language Model for Visual Generation and Editing13 Mar
Other references · 36
- 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 59,932
- 2022Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformerscited by 5,931
- 2024Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesiscited by 4,094
- 2022Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flowcited by 3,550
- 2025SigLIP 2: Multilingual Vision-Language Encoders with Improved Semantic Understanding, Localization, and Dense Featurescited by 1,127
- 2025Qwen-Image Technical Reportcited by 973
- 2025FLUX.1 Kontext: Flow Matching for In-Context Image Generation and Editing in Latent Spacecited by 960
- 2023GenEval: An Object-Focused Framework for Evaluating Text-to-Image Alignmentcited by 946
- 2025Emerging Properties in Unified Multimodal Pretrainingcited by 855
- 2025Janus-Pro: Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation with Data and Model Scalingcited by 787
- 2024Show-o: One Single Transformer to Unify Multimodal Understanding and Generationcited by 734
- 2024SiT: Exploring Flow and Diffusion-based Generative Models with Scalable Interpolant Transformerscited by 707
24 more
- 2024ELLA: Equip Diffusion Models with LLM for Enhanced Semantic Alignmentcited by 455
- 2025Step1X-Edit: A Practical Framework for General Image Editingcited by 417
- 2025BLIP3-o: A Family of Fully Open Unified Multimodal Models-Architecture, Training and Datasetcited by 363
- 2024VILA-U: a Unified Foundation Model Integrating Visual Understanding and Generationcited by 290
- 2025MMaDA: Multimodal Large Diffusion Language Modelscited by 241
- 2025OmniGen2: Towards Instruction-Aligned Multimodal Generationcited by 241
- 2025Transfer between Modalities with MetaQueriescited by 231
- 2025ImgEdit: A Unified Image Editing Dataset and Benchmarkcited by 225
- 2024TokenFlow: Unified Image Tokenizer for Multimodal Understanding and Generationcited by 200
- 2025WISE: A World Knowledge-Informed Semantic Evaluation for Text-to-Image Generationcited by 196
- 2025Mogao: An Omni Foundation Model for Interleaved Multi-Modal Generationcited by 108
- 2025Echo-4o: Harnessing the Power of GPT-4o Synthetic Images for Improved Image Generationcited by 95
- 2025ShareGPT-4o-Image: Aligning Multimodal Models with GPT-4o-Level Image Generationcited by 94
- 2025Lumina-DiMOO: An Omni Diffusion Large Language Model for Multi-Modal Generation and Understandingcited by 83
- 2025Harmonizing Visual Representations for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generationcited by 74
- 2025KRIS-Bench: Benchmarking Next-Level Intelligent Image Editing Modelscited by 69
- 2025UniWorld-V1: High-Resolution Semantic Encoders for Unified Visual Understanding and Generationcited by 64
- 2025Pico-Banana-400K: A Large-Scale Dataset for Text-Guided Image Editingcited by 58
- 2025OpenUni: A Simple Baseline for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generationcited by 45
- 2025Interleaving Reasoning for Better Text-to-Image Generationcited by 40
- 2025OpenGPT-4o-Image: A Comprehensive Dataset for Advanced Image Generation and Editingcited by 27
- 2025UniREditBench: A Unified Reasoning-based Image Editing Benchmarkcited by 23
- 2025Autoregressive Semantic Visual Reconstruction Helps VLMs Understand Bettercited by 17
- 2025VQ-VA World: Towards High-Quality Visual Question-Visual Answeringcited by 3
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 11.
11 papers.
- 2026DeepGen 1.0: A Lightweight Unified Multimodal Model for Advancing Image Generation and Editingcited by 14
- 2026Edit-Compass & EditReward-Compass: A Unified Benchmark for Image Editing and Reward Modelingcited by 6
- 2026GenMask: Adapting DiT for Segmentation via Direct Mask Generationcited by 3
- 2026DDA-Thinker: Decoupled Dual-Atomic Reinforcement Learning for Reasoning-Driven Image Editingcited by 2
- 2026Reason, Then Re-reason: Cross-view Revisiting Improves Spatial Reasoningcited by 2
- 2026H2R-Bench: Benchmarking Human-to-Robot Manipulation Video Generation in World Modelscited by 2
- 2026Edit Spillover as a Probe: Do Image Editing Models Implicitly Understand World Relations?cited by 1
- 2026TRACE-Bench: Decomposing and Diagnosing Multi-Reference Image Generationcited by 0
- 2026Agentic Visual Generation: From Generative Models to Agentic Controlcited by 0
- 2026Think Before You Score: Thinking Reward Model for Visual Generationcited by 0
- 2026UniEvo-VL: An On-policy Self-Distillation Training Recipe for Multimodal Model Self-improvementcited by 0
- 2026UniEvo-VL: An On-policy Self-Distillation Training Recipe for Multimodal Model Self-improvement30 Sep 2026
- 2026Think Before You Score: Thinking Reward Model for Visual Generation29 Sep 2026
- 2026Agentic Visual Generation: From Generative Models to Agentic Control6 Sep 2026
- 2026TRACE-Bench: Decomposing and Diagnosing Multi-Reference Image Generation17 Aug 2026
- 2026H2R-Bench: Benchmarking Human-to-Robot Manipulation Video Generation in World Models13 Aug 2026
- 2026Reason, Then Re-reason: Cross-view Revisiting Improves Spatial Reasoning10 Jun 2026
- 2026Edit-Compass & EditReward-Compass: A Unified Benchmark for Image Editing and Reward Modeling13 May 2026
- 2026DDA-Thinker: Decoupled Dual-Atomic Reinforcement Learning for Reasoning-Driven Image Editing28 Apr 2026
- 2026GenMask: Adapting DiT for Segmentation via Direct Mask Generation25 Mar 2026
- 2026Edit Spillover as a Probe: Do Image Editing Models Implicitly Understand World Relations?18 Mar 2026
- 2026DeepGen 1.0: A Lightweight Unified Multimodal Model for Advancing Image Generation and Editing12 Feb 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2025ROVER: Benchmarking Reciprocal Cross-Modal Reasoning for Omnimodal Generation
- 2025Uni-MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Unified Benchmark
- 2026ExpertVerse: A General-Purpose Benchmark for Expert-Level Reasoning in Knowledge-Intensive Visual Synthesis
- 2025R-Genie: Reasoning-Guided Generative Image Editing
- 2025GIR-Bench: Versatile Benchmark for Generating Images with Reasoning
- 2026ETCHR: Editing To Clarify and Harness Reasoning
- 2026InternVL-U: Democratizing Unified Multimodal Models for Understanding, Reasoning, Generation and Editing
- 2026Omni-R1: Towards the Unified Generative Paradigm for Multimodal Reasoning