MMaDA: Multimodal Large Diffusion Language Models

TL;DR

MMaDA introduces a unified multimodal diffusion model with innovative training and reinforcement learning strategies, achieving superior performance across textual reasoning, multimodal understanding, and image generation tasks.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel unified diffusion architecture, a mixed chain-of-thought fine-tuning strategy, and a new RL algorithm, UniGRPO, for improved multimodal foundation modeling.

Findings

Outperforms LLaMA-3-7B and Qwen2-7B in textual reasoning

Surpasses Show-o and SEED-X in multimodal understanding

Exceeds SDXL and Janus in text-to-image generation

Abstract

We introduce MMaDA, a novel class of multimodal diffusion foundation models designed to achieve superior performance across diverse domains such as textual reasoning, multimodal understanding, and text-to-image generation. The approach is distinguished by three key innovations: (i) MMaDA adopts a unified diffusion architecture with a shared probabilistic formulation and a modality-agnostic design, eliminating the need for modality-specific components. This architecture ensures seamless integration and processing across different data types. (ii) We implement a mixed long chain-of-thought (CoT) fine-tuning strategy that curates a unified CoT format across modalities. By aligning reasoning processes between textual and visual domains, this strategy facilitates cold-start training for the final reinforcement learning (RL) stage, thereby enhancing the model's ability to handle complex tasks from the outset. (iii) We propose UniGRPO, a unified policy-gradient-based RL algorithm specifically tailored for diffusion foundation models. Utilizing diversified reward modeling, UniGRPO unifies post-training across both reasoning and generation tasks, ensuring consistent performance improvements. Experimental results demonstrate that MMaDA-8B exhibits strong generalization capabilities as a unified multimodal foundation model. It surpasses powerful models like LLaMA-3-7B and Qwen2-7B in textual reasoning, outperforms Show-o and SEED-X in multimodal understanding, and excels over SDXL and Janus in text-to-image generation. These achievements highlight MMaDA's effectiveness in bridging the gap between pretraining and post-training within unified diffusion architectures, providing a comprehensive framework for future research and development. We open-source our code and trained models at: https://github.com/Gen-Verse/MMaDA