JanusFlow: Harmonizing Autoregression and Rectified Flow for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation

Abstract

We present JanusFlow, a powerful framework that unifies image understanding and generation in a single model.JanusFlow introduces a minimalist architecture that integrates autoregressive language models with rectified flow, a state-of-the-art method in generative modeling.Our key finding demonstrates that rectified flow can be straightforwardly trained within the large language model framework, eliminating the need for complex architectural modifications.To further improve the performance of our unified model, we adopt two key strategies: (i) decoupling the understanding and generation encoders, and (ii) aligning their representations during unified training.Extensive experiments show that JaunsFlow achieves comparable or superior performance to specialized models in their respective domains, while significantly outperforming existing unified approaches.This work represents a step toward more efficient and versatile vision-language models.

Cite

Text

Ma et al. "JanusFlow: Harmonizing Autoregression and Rectified Flow for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation." Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2025. doi:10.1109/CVPR52734.2025.00725

Markdown

[Ma et al. "JanusFlow: Harmonizing Autoregression and Rectified Flow for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation." Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2025.](https://mlanthology.org/cvpr/2025/ma2025cvpr-janusflow/) doi:10.1109/CVPR52734.2025.00725

BibTeX

@inproceedings{ma2025cvpr-janusflow,
  title     = {{JanusFlow: Harmonizing Autoregression and Rectified Flow for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation}},
  author    = {Ma, Yiyang and Liu, Xingchao and Chen, Xiaokang and Liu, Wen and Wu, Chengyue and Wu, Zhiyu and Pan, Zizheng and Xie, Zhenda and Zhang, Haowei and Yu, Xingkai and Zhao, Liang and Wang, Yisong and Liu, Jiaying and Ruan, Chong},
  booktitle = {Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition},
  year      = {2025},
  pages     = {7739-7751},
  doi       = {10.1109/CVPR52734.2025.00725},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/cvpr/2025/ma2025cvpr-janusflow/}
}