acceptodds
Published as a conference paper at NeurIPS 2026

Unify-Agent: A Unified Multimodal Agent for World-Grounded Image Synthesis

Shuang Chen, Quanxin Shou, Hangting Chen, Yucheng Zhou, Kaituo Feng, Wenbo Hu, yifan zhang, Yunlong Lin, Wenxuan Huang, Mingyang Song, Dasen Dai, Bolin Jiang, Manyuan Zhang, Yu Cheng, Nanyun Peng

Abstract

Unified multimodal models provide a natural and promising architecture for understanding diverse and complex real-world knowledge while generating high-quality images. However, they still rely primarily on frozen parametric knowledge, which makes them struggle with real-world image generation involving long-tail and knowledge-intensive concepts. Inspired by the broad success of agents on real-world tasks, we explore agentic modeling to address this limitation. Specifically, we present Unify-Agent, a unified multimodal agent for world-grounded image synthesis, which reframes image generation as an agentic pipeline consisting of prompt understanding, multimodal evidence searching, grounded recaptioning, and final synthesis. To train our model, we construct a tailored multimodal data pipeline and curate 143K high-quality agent trajectories for world-grounded image synthesis, enabling effective supervision over the full agentic generation process. We further introduce FactIP, a benchmark covering 12 categories of culturally significant and long-tail factual concepts that explicitly requires external knowledge grounding. Extensive experiments show that our proposed Unify-Agent substantially improves over its base unified model across diverse benchmarks and real world generation tasks, while approaching the world knowledge capabilities of the strongest closed-source models. As an early exploration of agent-based modeling for world-grounded image synthesis, our work highlights the value of tightly coupling reasoning, searching, and generation for reliable open-world agentic image synthesis.

Related papers

See more related submissions when the market opens.