OmniTaskonomy maps 19 generation tasks against 25 understanding capabilities: I2I-then-I2T training improves understanding, and gradient alignment tracks the gains
Using controlled paired image-to-image (I2I) generation and image-to-text (I2T) understanding tasks on the unified multimodal model BAGEL, the authors find that a recipe of I2I training that updates shared parameters followed by I2T finetuning improves understanding with gains that grow as I2I data increases, build OmniTaskonomy, a taxonomy spanning 19 I2I tasks and 25 understanding capabilities, produce a selective task-dependent generation-to-understanding transfer map, and find that stronger gradient alignment between generation and understanding is associated with larger downstream transfer gains.