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arXiv · 2509.03498

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
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Abstract

We introduce OneCAT, a unified multimodal model that seamlessly integrates understanding, generation, and editing within a novel, pure decoder-only transformer architecture. Our framework 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 inputs. This is achieved through a modality-specific Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) structure trained with a single autoregressive (AR) objective, which also natively supports dynamic resolutions. Furthermore, we pioneer a multi-scale visual autoregressive mechanism within the Large Language Model (LLM) that drastically reduces decoding steps 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 sets a new performance standard, outperforming existing open-source unified multimodal models across benchmarks for multimodal generation, editing, and understanding.

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Han Li, Xinyu Peng, Yaoming Wang, Zelin Peng, Xin Chen, Rongxiang Weng, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, Wenrui Dai, Hongkai Xiong. 2025-09-03. OneCAT: Decoder-Only Auto-Regressive Model for Unified Understanding and Generation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03498

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