InternVL-U: Democratizing Unified Multimodal Models for Understanding, Reasoning, Generation and Editing

TL;DR

InternVL-U is a lightweight, 4B-parameter unified multimodal model that effectively combines understanding, reasoning, generation, and editing, outperforming larger models through innovative design and data synthesis techniques.

Contribution

It introduces a novel unified multimodal model with modular visual representations and a reasoning-centric data pipeline, achieving high performance with fewer parameters.

Findings

Outperforms larger models like BAGEL on multiple tasks

Balances efficiency and performance effectively

Maintains strong understanding and reasoning capabilities

Abstract

Unified multimodal models (UMMs) that integrate understanding, reasoning, generation, and editing face inherent trade-offs between maintaining strong semantic comprehension and acquiring powerful generation capabilities. In this report, we present InternVL-U, a lightweight 4B-parameter UMM that democratizes these capabilities within a unified framework. Guided by the principles of unified contextual modeling and modality-specific modular design with decoupled visual representations, InternVL-U integrates a state-of-the-art Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) with a specialized MMDiT-based visual generation head. To further bridge the gap between aesthetic generation and high-level intelligence, we construct a comprehensive data synthesis pipeline targeting high-semantic-density tasks, such as text rendering and scientific reasoning, under a reasoning-centric paradigm that leverages Chain-of-Thought (CoT) to better align abstract user intent with fine-grained visual generation details. Extensive experiments demonstrate that InternVL-U achieves a superior performance - efficiency balance. Despite using only 4B parameters, it consistently outperforms unified baseline models with over 3x larger scales such as BAGEL (14B) on various generation and editing tasks, while retaining strong multimodal understanding and reasoning capabilities.