Nexus-Gen: A Unified Model for Image Understanding, Generation, and Editing

Unified multimodal large language models (MLLMs) aim to integrate multimodal understanding and generation abilities through a single framework. Despite their versatility, existing open-source unified models exhibit performance gaps against domain-specific architectures. To bridge this gap, we present Nexus-Gen, a unified model that synergizes the language reasoning capabilities of LLMs with the image synthesis power of diffusion models. To align the embedding space of the LLM and diffusion model, we conduct a dual-phase alignment training process. (1) The autoregressive LLM learns to predict image embeddings conditioned on multimodal inputs, while (2) the vision decoder is trained to reconstruct high-fidelity images from these embeddings. During training the LLM, we identified a critical discrepancy between the autoregressive paradigm's training and inference phases, where error accumulation in continuous embedding space severely degrades generation quality. To avoid this issue, we introduce a prefilled autoregression strategy that prefills input sequence with position-embedded special tokens instead of continuous embeddings. Through dual-phase training, Nexus-Gen has developed the integrated capability to comprehensively address the image understanding, generation and editing tasks. All models, datasets, and codes are published atthis https URLto facilitate further advancements across the field.

@article{zhang2025_2504.21356,
  title={ Nexus-Gen: A Unified Model for Image Understanding, Generation, and Editing },
  author={ Hong Zhang and Zhongjie Duan and Xingjun Wang and Yuze Zhao and Weiyi Lu and Zhipeng Di and Yixuan Xu and Yingda Chen and Yu Zhang },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.21356},
  year={ 2025 }
}