mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

UniReason 1.0: A Unified Reasoning Framework for World Knowledge Aligned Image Generation and Editing

arXiv 2602.02437 ↗First posted 2 Feb 2026cs.CV cs.AIcited by 11

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

  1. 2025Uni-cot: Towards Unified Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Across Text and Vision7 Aug
  2. 2025Game-RL: Synthesizing Multimodal Verifiable Game Data to Boost VLMs' General Reasoning20 May
  3. 2025MindOmni: Unleashing Reasoning Generation in Vision Language Models with RGPO19 May
  4. 2025T2I-R1: Reinforcing Image Generation with Collaborative Semantic-level and Token-level CoT1 May
  5. 2025GoT: Unleashing Reasoning Capability of Multimodal Large Language Model for Visual Generation and Editing13 Mar

Other references · 36

  1. 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 59,932
  2. 2022Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformerscited by 5,931
  3. 2024Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesiscited by 4,094
  4. 2022Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flowcited by 3,550
  5. 2025SigLIP 2: Multilingual Vision-Language Encoders with Improved Semantic Understanding, Localization, and Dense Featurescited by 1,127
  6. 2025Qwen-Image Technical Reportcited by 973
  7. 2025FLUX.1 Kontext: Flow Matching for In-Context Image Generation and Editing in Latent Spacecited by 960
  8. 2023GenEval: An Object-Focused Framework for Evaluating Text-to-Image Alignmentcited by 946
  9. 2025Emerging Properties in Unified Multimodal Pretrainingcited by 855
  10. 2025Janus-Pro: Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation with Data and Model Scalingcited by 787
  11. 2024Show-o: One Single Transformer to Unify Multimodal Understanding and Generationcited by 734
  12. 2024SiT: Exploring Flow and Diffusion-based Generative Models with Scalable Interpolant Transformerscited by 707
24 more
  1. 2024ELLA: Equip Diffusion Models with LLM for Enhanced Semantic Alignmentcited by 455
  2. 2025Step1X-Edit: A Practical Framework for General Image Editingcited by 417
  3. 2025BLIP3-o: A Family of Fully Open Unified Multimodal Models-Architecture, Training and Datasetcited by 363
  4. 2024VILA-U: a Unified Foundation Model Integrating Visual Understanding and Generationcited by 290
  5. 2025MMaDA: Multimodal Large Diffusion Language Modelscited by 241
  6. 2025OmniGen2: Towards Instruction-Aligned Multimodal Generationcited by 241
  7. 2025Transfer between Modalities with MetaQueriescited by 231
  8. 2025ImgEdit: A Unified Image Editing Dataset and Benchmarkcited by 225
  9. 2024TokenFlow: Unified Image Tokenizer for Multimodal Understanding and Generationcited by 200
  10. 2025WISE: A World Knowledge-Informed Semantic Evaluation for Text-to-Image Generationcited by 196
  11. 2025Mogao: An Omni Foundation Model for Interleaved Multi-Modal Generationcited by 108
  12. 2025Echo-4o: Harnessing the Power of GPT-4o Synthetic Images for Improved Image Generationcited by 95
  13. 2025ShareGPT-4o-Image: Aligning Multimodal Models with GPT-4o-Level Image Generationcited by 94
  14. 2025Lumina-DiMOO: An Omni Diffusion Large Language Model for Multi-Modal Generation and Understandingcited by 83
  15. 2025Harmonizing Visual Representations for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generationcited by 74
  16. 2025KRIS-Bench: Benchmarking Next-Level Intelligent Image Editing Modelscited by 69
  17. 2025UniWorld-V1: High-Resolution Semantic Encoders for Unified Visual Understanding and Generationcited by 64
  18. 2025Pico-Banana-400K: A Large-Scale Dataset for Text-Guided Image Editingcited by 58
  19. 2025OpenUni: A Simple Baseline for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generationcited by 45
  20. 2025Interleaving Reasoning for Better Text-to-Image Generationcited by 40
  21. 2025OpenGPT-4o-Image: A Comprehensive Dataset for Advanced Image Generation and Editingcited by 27
  22. 2025UniREditBench: A Unified Reasoning-based Image Editing Benchmarkcited by 23
  23. 2025Autoregressive Semantic Visual Reconstruction Helps VLMs Understand Bettercited by 17
  24. 2025VQ-VA World: Towards High-Quality Visual Question-Visual Answeringcited by 3

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 11.

11 papers.

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Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025ROVER: Benchmarking Reciprocal Cross-Modal Reasoning for Omnimodal Generation
  2. 2025Uni-MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Unified Benchmark
  3. 2026ExpertVerse: A General-Purpose Benchmark for Expert-Level Reasoning in Knowledge-Intensive Visual Synthesis
  4. 2025R-Genie: Reasoning-Guided Generative Image Editing
  5. 2025GIR-Bench: Versatile Benchmark for Generating Images with Reasoning
  6. 2026ETCHR: Editing To Clarify and Harness Reasoning
  7. 2026InternVL-U: Democratizing Unified Multimodal Models for Understanding, Reasoning, Generation and Editing
  8. 2026Omni-R1: Towards the Unified Generative Paradigm for Multimodal Reasoning