Any-to-any generative models aim to enable seamless interpretation and generation across multiple modalities within a unified framework, yet their ability to preserve relationships across modalities remains uncertain. Do unified models truly achieve cross-modal coherence, or is this coherence merely perceived? To explore this, we introduce ACON, a dataset of 1,000 images (500 newly contributed) paired with captions, editing instructions, and Q&A pairs to evaluate cross-modal transfers rigorously. Using three consistency criteria—cyclic consistency, forward equivariance, and conjugated equivariance—our experiments reveal that any-to-any models do not consistently demonstrate greater cross-modal consistency than specialized models in pointwise evaluations such as cyclic consistency. However, equivariance evaluations uncover weak but observable consistency through structured analyses of the intermediate latent space enabled by multiple editing operations. We release our code and data at https://github.com/JiwanChung/ACON.

Rapid advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have extended information retrieval beyond text, enabling access to complex real-world documents that combine both textual and visual content. However, most documents are private, either owned by individuals or confined within corporate silos, and current retrievers struggle when faced with unseen domains or languages. To address this gap, we introduce PREMIR, a simple yet effective framework that leverages the broad knowledge of an MLLM to generate cross-modal pre-questions (preQs) before retrieval. Unlike earlier multimodal retrievers that embed entire documents as a single vector, PREMIR leverages preQs, decomposed from documents into finer token-level representations across modalities, enabling richer contextual understanding. Experiments show that PREMIR achieves state-of-the-art performance on out-of-distribution benchmarks, including closed-domain and multilingual settings, outperforming strong baselines across all metrics. We confirm the contribution of each component through in-depth ablation studies, and qualitative analyses of the generated preQs further highlight the framework’s robustness in real-world settings.