Wei-Jie Xu
2026
UniCorn: Towards Self-Improving Unified Multimodal Models through Self-Generated Supervision
Zhen Fang | Ruiyan Han | XinYu Sun | Yuchen Ma | Ziheng Wang | Yu Zeng | Zehui Chen | Lin Chen | Wenxuan Huang | Wei-Jie Xu | Yi Cao | Feng Zhao
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zhen Fang | Ruiyan Han | XinYu Sun | Yuchen Ma | Ziheng Wang | Yu Zeng | Zehui Chen | Lin Chen | Wenxuan Huang | Wei-Jie Xu | Yi Cao | Feng Zhao
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
While Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) have achieved remarkable success in cross-modal comprehension, a significant gap persists in their ability to leverage such internal knowledge for high-quality generation. We formalize this discrepancy as Conduction Aphasia, a phenomenon where models accurately interpret multimodal inputs but struggle to translate that understanding into faithful and controllable synthesis. To address this, we propose UniCorn, a simple yet elegant self-improvement framework that eliminates the need for external data or teacher supervision. By partitioning a single UMM into three collaborative roles: Proposer, Solver, and Judge, UniCorn generates high-quality interactions via self-play and employs cognitive pattern reconstruction to distill latent understanding into explicit generative signals. To validate the restoration of multimodal coherence, we introduce UniCycle, a cycle-consistency benchmark based on a Text to Image to Text reconstruction loop. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniCorn achieves comprehensive and substantial improvements over the base model across six general image generation benchmarks. Notably, it achieves SOTA performance on TIIF(73.8), DPG(86.8), CompBench(88.5), and UniCycle while further delivering substantial gains of +5.0 on WISE and +6.5 on OneIG. These results highlight that our method significantly enhances T2I generation while maintaining robust comprehension, demonstrating the scalability of fully self-supervised refinement for unified multimodal intelligence.
2025
PIP: Perturbation-based Iterative Pruning for Large Language Models
Yi Cao | Wei-Jie Xu | Yucheng Shen | Weijie Shi | Chi-Min Chan | Jianfeng Qu | Jiajie Xu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Yi Cao | Wei-Jie Xu | Yucheng Shen | Weijie Shi | Chi-Min Chan | Jianfeng Qu | Jiajie Xu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
The rapid increase in the parameter counts of Large Language Models (LLMs), which often reach into the billions or even trillions, presents significant challenges for their practical deployment, particularly in resource-constrained environments. To address this issue, we propose PIP (Perturbation-based Iterative Pruning), a novel double-view structured pruning method to optimize LLMs, which combines information from two different views: the unperturbed view and the perturbed view. With the calculation of gradient differences, PIP iteratively prunes those that struggle to distinguish between these two views. Our experiments show that PIP reduces the parameter count by approximately 20% while retaining over 85% of the original model’s accuracy across varied benchmarks. In some cases, the performance of the pruned model is within 5% of the unpruned version, demonstrating PIP’s ability to preserve key aspects of model effectiveness. Moreover, PIP consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) structured pruning methods, establishing it as a leading technique for optimizing LLMs in constrained environments.