Mobile-O: Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation on Mobile Device

TL;DR

Mobile-O is a compact, efficient multimodal model enabling real-time visual understanding and generation on mobile devices, achieving high performance with minimal computational resources.

Contribution

It introduces Mobile-O, a lightweight vision-language-diffusion model with a novel MCP module, enabling unified multimodal tasks on edge devices with high efficiency.

Findings

Achieves 74% on GenEval, outperforming competitors by 5-11%.

Runs in ~3 seconds per image on an iPhone, enabling real-time processing.

Outperforms existing models in visual understanding benchmarks by 5-15%.

Abstract

Unified multimodal models can both understand and generate visual content within a single architecture. Existing models, however, remain data-hungry and too heavy for deployment on edge devices. We present Mobile-O, a compact vision-language-diffusion model that brings unified multimodal intelligence to a mobile device. Its core module, the Mobile Conditioning Projector (MCP), fuses vision-language features with a diffusion generator using depthwise-separable convolutions and layerwise alignment. This design enables efficient cross-modal conditioning with minimal computational cost. Trained on only a few million samples and post-trained in a novel quadruplet format (generation prompt, image, question, answer), Mobile-O jointly enhances both visual understanding and generation capabilities. Despite its efficiency, Mobile-O attains competitive or superior performance compared to other unified models, achieving 74% on GenEval and outperforming Show-O and JanusFlow by 5% and 11%, while running 6x and 11x faster, respectively. For visual understanding, Mobile-O surpasses them by 15.3% and 5.1% averaged across seven benchmarks. Running in only ~3s per 512x512 image on an iPhone, Mobile-O establishes the first practical framework for real-time unified multimodal understanding and generation on edge devices. We hope Mobile-O will ease future research in real-time unified multimodal intelligence running entirely on-device with no cloud dependency. Our code, models, datasets, and mobile application are publicly available at https://amshaker.github.io/Mobile-O/