OneCAT: Decoder-Only Auto-Regressive Model for Unified Understanding and Generation

Han Li, Xinyu Peng, Yaoming Wang, Zelin Peng, Xin Chen, Rongxiang Weng, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, Wenrui Dai, Hongkai Xiong

Keywords: unified multimodal model, decoder-only architecture, mixture-of-expert, autoregressive

Abstract: We introduce OneCAT, a unified multimodal model that seamlessly integrates understanding, generation, and editing within a single decoder-only transformer architecture. OneCAT uniquely eliminates the need for external components such as Vision Transformers (ViT) or vision tokenizer during inference, leading to significant efficiency gains, especially for high-resolution image inputs and outputs. This is achieved through a modality-specific Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) design trained with a unified autoregressive (AR) objective, which also natively supports dynamic resolutions. Furthermore, we pioneer a multi-scale visual autoregressive mechanism within the Large Language Model (LLM) with proposed scale-aware adapter (SAA) that drastically reduces decoding latency compared to diffusion-based methods while maintaining state-of-the-art performance. Our findings demonstrate the powerful potential of pure autoregressive modeling as a sufficient and elegant foundation for unified multimodal intelligence. As a result, OneCAT outperforms existing unified models across benchmarks for multimodal understanding, generation, and editing.

Primary Area: foundation or frontier models, including LLMs

Submission Number: 3014