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Towards Unified Multimodal Interleaved Generation via Group Relative Policy Optimization

arXiv cs.CV / 3/11/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper addresses the challenge of producing multimodal interleaved outputs, which are important for tasks such as visual storytelling and step-by-step visual reasoning.
  • A reinforcement learning-based post-training strategy is proposed to enable this capability in existing unified vision-language models without requiring large-scale multimodal interleaved datasets.
  • The method employs a hybrid dataset for warm-up and introduces a unified policy optimization framework extending Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to multimodal settings.
  • Their approach jointly generates text and images in a single decoding trajectory, optimizing hybrid rewards that assess textual relevance, visual-text alignment, and structural fidelity, along with process-level step-wise rewards.
  • Experiments demonstrate significant improvements in the quality and coherence of multimodal interleaved generation on benchmark datasets MMIE and InterleavedBench.

Computer Science > Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

arXiv:2603.09538 (cs)
[Submitted on 10 Mar 2026]

Title:Towards Unified Multimodal Interleaved Generation via Group Relative Policy Optimization

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Abstract:Unified vision-language models have made significant progress in multimodal understanding and generation, yet they largely fall short in producing multimodal interleaved outputs, which is a crucial capability for tasks like visual storytelling and step-by-step visual reasoning. In this work, we propose a reinforcement learning-based post-training strategy to unlock this capability in existing unified models, without relying on large-scale multimodal interleaved datasets. We begin with a warm-up stage using a hybrid dataset comprising curated interleaved sequences and limited data for multimodal understanding and text-to-image generation, which exposes the model to interleaved generation patterns while preserving its pretrained capabilities. To further refine interleaved generation, we propose a unified policy optimization framework that extends Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to the multimodal setting. Our approach jointly models text and image generation within a single decoding trajectory and optimizes it with our novel hybrid rewards covering textual relevance, visual-text alignment, and structural fidelity. Additionally, we incorporate process-level rewards to provide step-wise guidance, enhancing training efficiency in complex multimodal tasks. Experiments on MMIE and InterleavedBench demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances the quality and coherence of multimodal interleaved generation.
Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)
Cite as: arXiv:2603.09538 [cs.CV]
  (or arXiv:2603.09538v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.09538
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arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Submission history

From: Ming Nie [view email]
[v1] Tue, 10 Mar 2026 11:49:20 UTC (1,470 KB)
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