Wenjie Wang
Publications
DeepGen 1.0: A Lightweight Unified Multimodal Model for Advancing Image Generation and Editing
Current unified multimodal models for image generation and editing typically rely on massive parameter scales (e.g., >10B), entailing prohibitive training costs and deployment footprints. In this work, we present DeepGen 1.0, a lightweight 5B unified model that achieves comprehensive capabilities competitive with or surpassing much larger counterparts. To overcome the limitations of compact models in semantic understanding and fine-grained control, we introduce Stacked Channel Bridging (SCB), a deep alignment framework that extracts hierarchical features from multiple VLM layers and fuses them with learnable 'think tokens' to provide the generative backbone with structured, reasoning-rich guidance. We further design a data-centric training strategy spanning three progressive stages: (1) Alignment Pre-training on large-scale image-text pairs and editing triplets to synchronize VLM and DiT representations, (2) Joint Supervised Fine-tuning on a high-quality mixture of generation, editing, and reasoning tasks to foster omni-capabilities, and (3) Reinforcement Learning with MR-GRPO, which leverages a mixture of reward functions and supervision signals, resulting in substantial gains in generation quality and alignment with human preferences, while maintaining stable training progress and avoiding visual artifacts. Despite being trained on only ~50M samples, DeepGen 1.0 achieves leading performance across diverse benchmarks, surpassing the 80B HunyuanImage by 28% on WISE and the 27B Qwen-Image-Edit by 37% on UniREditBench. By open-sourcing our training code, weights, and datasets, we provide an efficient, high-performance alternative to democratize unified multimodal research.
GenArena: How Can We Achieve Human-Aligned Evaluation for Visual Generation Tasks?
The rapid advancement of visual generation models has outpaced traditional evaluation approaches, necessitating the adoption of Vision-Language Models as surrogate judges. In this work, we systematically investigate the reliability of the prevailing absolute pointwise scoring standard, across a wide spectrum of visual generation tasks. Our analysis reveals that this paradigm is limited due to stochastic inconsistency and poor alignment with human perception. To resolve these limitations, we introduce GenArena, a unified evaluation framework that leverages a pairwise comparison paradigm to ensure stable and human-aligned evaluation. Crucially, our experiments uncover a transformative finding that simply adopting this pairwise protocol enables off-the-shelf open-source models to outperform top-tier proprietary models. Notably, our method boosts evaluation accuracy by over 20% and achieves a Spearman correlation of 0.86 with the authoritative LMArena leaderboard, drastically surpassing the 0.36 correlation of pointwise methods. Based on GenArena, we benchmark state-of-the-art visual generation models across diverse tasks, providing the community with a rigorous and automated evaluation standard for visual generation.