# Concurrent Image Understanding and Generation: Self-Correcting Coupled Markov Jump Processes

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13188 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.13188/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Structured Denoising Diffusion Models in Discrete State-Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03006/) (2021)
- [Large Language Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09992/) (2025)
- [Emerging Properties in Unified Multimodal Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14683/) (2025)
- [Simple and Effective Masked Diffusion Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07524/) (2024)
- [Janus-Pro: Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation with Data and Model Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17811/) (2025)
- [Discrete Diffusion Modeling by Estimating the Ratios of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16834/) (2023)
- [Simplified and Generalized Masked Diffusion for Discrete Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04329/) (2024)
- [Dream 7B: Diffusion Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15487/) (2025)
- [A Continuous Time Framework for Discrete Denoising Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14987/) (2022)
- [Your Absorbing Discrete Diffusion Secretly Models the Conditional Distributions of Clean Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03736/) (2024)
- [Discrete Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15595/) (2024)
- [Generative Flows on Discrete State-Spaces: Enabling Multimodal Flows with Applications to Protein Co-Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04997/) (2024)
- [MMaDA: Multimodal Large Diffusion Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15809/) (2025)
- [Show-o2: Improved Native Unified Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15564/) (2025)
- [ImgEdit: A Unified Image Editing Dataset and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20275/) (2025)
- [Train for the Worst, Plan for the Best: Understanding Token Ordering in Masked Diffusions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06768/) (2025)
- [Remasking Discrete Diffusion Models with Inference-Time Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00307/) (2025)
- [OmniEdit: Building Image Editing Generalist Models Through Specialist Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07199/) (2024)
- [SDAR: A Synergistic Diffusion-AutoRegression Paradigm for Scalable Sequence Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06303/) (2025)
- [Lumina-DiMOO: An Omni Diffusion Large Language Model for Multi-Modal Generation and Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06308/) (2025)
- [Path Planning for Masked Diffusion Model Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03540/) (2025)
- [Generalized Interpolating Discrete Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04482/) (2025)
- [Informed Correctors for Discrete Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21243/) (2024)
- [Fine-Tuning Masked Diffusion for Provable Self-Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01384/) (2025)
- [Unified Diffusion VLA: Vision-Language-Action Model via Joint Discrete Denoising Diffusion Process](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01718/) (2025)
- [Don't Settle Too Early: Self-Reflective Remasking for Diffusion Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23653/) (2025)
- [A Configurable Library for Generating and Manipulating Maze Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10498/) (2023)
- [Foundation Inference Models for Markov Jump Processes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06419/) (2024)

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

- [VBVR-Pro: A Scalable and Verifiable Suite for Native Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.26105/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Human cognition does not separate understanding and generation. A teacher at a whiteboard speaks and draws textittogether, each modality reshapes the other. In this paper, we bring this coupled loop to artificial systems. Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) are ideally suited to this task, yet existing samplers either decode text and image interleavedly or independently update them in parallel branches that share only previous-step history, but not the other modality's latest decisions textitwithin the same step; combined with MDMs' inability to remask, cross-modal contradictions are neither detected nor repaired. We introduce Self-Correcting Coupled Markov Jump Processes (SC-CMJP), a framework in which one modality's transition rates are functionals of the other modality's confidence score, as weighted by cross-modal attention. Furthermore, a remasking jump retracts commitments the moment cross-modal evidence turns against them. In conjunction with SC-CMJP, we introduce textttCO_texttt2textttJump (Self-underlineCOrrecting underlineCOupled underlineJump), a novel training-free single-pass sampler for joint multimodal geneneration. For training and evaluation purposes, we have created and will release three large-scale joint multimodal generation corpora: JEdit-1M, JMaze-200K, JNono-200K, with matching in- and out-of-distribution benchmarks. textttCO_texttt2textttJump achieves best joint performance for image understanding and editing as well as visual reasoning (maze and nonogram solving). The performance of the sampler scales monotonically with the number of denoising steps, evidence that the benefits of cross-modal coupling textitcompound across the trajectory. Project page: https://coupled-jump.github.io