# UniFusion: A Unified Image Fusion Framework with Robust Representation and Source-Aware Preservation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.14214 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14214/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 68 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [Target-aware Dual Adversarial Learning and a Multi-scenario Multi-Modality Benchmark to Fuse Infrared and Visible for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16220/) (2022)
- [CDDFuse: Correlation-Driven Dual-Branch Feature Decomposition for Multi-Modality Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14461/) (2022)
- [DDFM: Denoising Diffusion Model for Multi-Modality Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06840/) (2023)
- [Multi-interactive Feature Learning and a Full-time Multi-modality Benchmark for Image Fusion and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02097/) (2023)
- [Equivariant Multi-Modality Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11443/) (2023)
- [Controllable Video Generation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16869/) (2025)
- [LRRNet: A Novel Representation Learning Guided Fusion Network for Infrared and Visible Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05172/) (2023)
- [Text-IF: Leveraging Semantic Text Guidance for Degradation-Aware and Interactive Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16387/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Misaligned Infrared and Visible Image Fusion via Cross-Modality Image Generation and Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11876/) (2022)
- [DIDFuse: Deep Image Decomposition for Infrared and Visible Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09210/) (2020)
- [CoCoNet: Coupled Contrastive Learning Network with Multi-level Feature Ensemble for Multi-modality Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10960/) (2022)
- [Task-Customized Mixture of Adapters for General Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12494/) (2024)
- [StitchFusion: Weaving Any Visual Modalities to Enhance Multimodal Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01343/) (2024)
- [DCEvo: Discriminative Cross-Dimensional Evolutionary Learning for Infrared and Visible Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17673/) (2025)
- [Benchmarking and Comparing Multi-exposure Image Fusion Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15156/) (2020)
- [Fine-Grained Preference Optimization Improves Spatial Reasoning in VLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21656/) (2025)
- [Spherical Space Feature Decomposition for Guided Depth Map Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08942/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Hyperspectral Image Super-Resolution via Self-Supervised Modality Decoupling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04802/) (2024)
- [FastVMT: Eliminating Redundancy in Video Motion Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05551/) (2026)
- [DifIISR: A Diffusion Model with Gradient Guidance for Infrared Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01187/) (2025)
- [From Text to Pixels: A Context-Aware Semantic Synergy Solution for Infrared and Visible Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00421/) (2023)
- [Efficient Rectified Flow for Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16549/) (2025)
- [Mutual-Guided Dynamic Network for Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12538/) (2023)
- [Integrating Extra Modality Helps Segmentor Find Camouflaged Objects Well](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14471/) (2025)
- [Med-CMR: A Fine-Grained Benchmark Integrating Visual Evidence and Clinical Logic for Medical Complex Multimodal Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00818/) (2025)
- [MFFW: A new dataset for multi-focus image fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.04780/) (2020)
- [MMT-ARD: Multimodal Multi-Teacher Adversarial Distillation for Robust Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17448/) (2025)
- [ReCo-KD: Region- and Context-Aware Knowledge Distillation for Efficient 3D Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08301/) (2026)
- [Instruction-Driven Fusion of Infrared-Visible Images: Tailoring for Diverse Downstream Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.09387/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Temporal and Cross-Modal Alignment for Enhanced Audiovisual Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01667/) (2026)
- [Uncertainty-aware Spatial-Frequency Registration and Fusion for Infrared and Visible Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13049/) (2026)
- [From 2D Grids to 1D Tokens: Reforming Shared Representations for Multimodal Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.12303/) (2026)
- [FTPFusion: Frequency-Aware Infrared and Visible Video Fusion with Temporal Perturbation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01900/) (2026)
- [DRFusion: Drift-Resilient Temporally Consistent Infrared-Visible Video Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.25775/) (2026)
- [SGPDFuse: Semantically-Guided Physics-Disentanglement General Multi-Modal Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29220/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Image fusion aims to integrate complementary information from multiple source images to produce a more informative and visually consistent representation, benefiting both human perception and downstream vision tasks. Despite recent progress, most existing fusion methods are designed for specific tasks (i.e., multi-modal, multi-exposure, or multi-focus fusion) and struggle to effectively preserve source information during the fusion process. This limitation primarily arises from task-specific architectures and the degradation of source information caused by deep-layer propagation. To overcome these issues, we propose UniFusion, a unified image fusion framework designed to achieve cross-task generalization. First, leveraging DINOv3 for modality-consistent feature extraction, UniFusion establishes a shared semantic space for diverse inputs. Second, to preserve the understanding of each source image, we introduce a reconstruction-alignment loss to maintain consistency between fused outputs and inputs. Finally, we employ a bilevel optimization strategy to decouple and jointly optimize reconstruction and fusion objectives, effectively balancing their coupling relationship and ensuring smooth convergence. Extensive experiments across multiple fusion tasks demonstrate UniFusion's superior visual quality, generalization ability, and adaptability to real-world scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/dusongcheng/UniFusion.