# MICON-Bench: Benchmarking and Enhancing Multi-Image Context Image Generation in Unified Multimodal Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.19497 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19497/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18265/) (2025)
- [Qwen-Image Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02324/) (2025)
- [GenEval: An Object-Focused Framework for Evaluating Text-to-Image Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11513/) (2023)
- [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)
- [NExT-GPT: Any-to-Any Multimodal LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05519/) (2023)
- [BLIP3-o: A Family of Fully Open Unified Multimodal Models-Architecture, Training and Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09568/) (2025)
- [PixArt-Sigma: Weak-to-Strong Training of Diffusion Transformer for 4K Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04692/) (2024)
- [Emu Edit: Precise Image Editing via Recognition and Generation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10089/) (2023)
- [DreamLLM: Synergistic Multimodal Comprehension and Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11499/) (2023)
- [OmniGen2: Towards Instruction-Aligned Multimodal Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18871/) (2025)
- [Show-o2: Improved Native Unified Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15564/) (2025)
- [In-Context Edit: Enabling Instructional Image Editing with In-Context Generation in Large Scale Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.20690/) (2025)
- [Less-to-More Generalization: Unlocking More Controllability by In-Context Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02160/) (2025)
- [Playground v3: Improving Text-to-Image Alignment with Deep-Fusion Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10695/) (2024)
- [Echo-4o: Harnessing the Power of GPT-4o Synthetic Images for Improved Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09987/) (2025)
- [OneIG-Bench: Omni-dimensional Nuanced Evaluation for Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07977/) (2025)
- [XVerse: Consistent Multi-Subject Control of Identity and Semantic Attributes via DiT Modulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21416/) (2025)
- [DreamOmni2: Multimodal Instruction-based Editing and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06679/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [MultiBind: A Benchmark for Attribute Misbinding in Multi-Subject Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21937/) (2026)
- [TorchUMM: A Unified Multimodal Model Codebase for Evaluation, Analysis, and Post-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10784/) (2026)
- [StructGen: Disambiguating Multi-Reference Image Generation via Structured Context Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.15619/) (2026)
- [MIEScore: Human-Aligned Evaluation for Multi-Source Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.02059/) (2026)
- [TRACE-Bench: Decomposing and Diagnosing Multi-Reference Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.16765/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advancements in Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) have enabled remarkable image understanding and generation capabilities. However, while models like Gemini-2.5-Flash-Image show emerging abilities to reason over multiple related images, existing benchmarks rarely address the challenges of multi-image context generation, focusing mainly on text-to-image or single-image editing tasks. In this work, we introduce MICON-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark covering six tasks that evaluate cross-image composition, contextual reasoning, and identity preservation. We further propose an MLLM-driven Evaluation-by-Checkpoint framework for automatic verification of semantic and visual consistency, where multimodal large language model (MLLM) serves as a verifier. Additionally, we present Dynamic Attention Rebalancing (DAR), a training-free, plug-and-play mechanism that dynamically adjusts attention during inference to enhance coherence and reduce hallucinations. Extensive experiments on various state-of-the-art open-source models demonstrate both the rigor of MICON-Bench in exposing multi-image reasoning challenges and the efficacy of DAR in improving generation quality and cross-image coherence. Github: https://github.com/Angusliuuu/MICON-Bench.