Do Understanding and Generation Fight? A Diagnostic Study of DPO for Unified Multimodal Models

arXiv:2603.17044v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Unified multimodal models share a language model backbone for both understanding and generating images. Can DPO align both capabilities simultaneously? We present the first systematic study of this question, applying DPO to Janus-Pro at 1B and 7B parameters under seven training strategies and two post-hoc methods. The central finding is negative: generation quality resists DPO alignment across all tested conditions on this architecture. No method improves generation CLIPScore at 7B (|Delta| 0.5 at n=200 per seed, 3 seeds); at 1B, all methods

Source: arXiv cs.LG — read the full report at the original publisher.

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