Gestalt: Large Multimodal Interplay Model

2026-09-30

AI Summary

This study addresses the bottleneck of existing multimodal large models that overlook modality-specific characteristics and cross-modal correlations by proposing a Multimodal Interaction Pyramid framework. Methodologically, it constructs a unified discrete diffusion model alongside an interactive partition architecture. Inspired by human perception, learnable interaction tokens are introduced to mediate cross-modal information exchange, thereby restructuring data organization and training strategies to enable an evolution from modality-specific processing to deep integration. This work effectively balances the preservation of modality specificity with robust multimodal integration capabilities, yielding significant improvements in both image generation and understanding performance.

Abstract

In this paper, we propose Gestalt, a new paradigm of large multimodal model built around multimodal interplay. Despite rapid advances, large multimodal models are reaching a bottleneck: existing approaches focus primarily on accommodating additional modalities while overlooking the distinct characteristics of each modality and the relations among them. Motivated by the multistage property of human multisensory perception, we propose a multimodal interplay pyramid that organizes multimodal modeling as a progression from modality-specific processing, through cross-modal alignment, to deeper multimodal integration. Guided by this pyramid, Gestalt adopts a unified discrete diffusion framework and an interplay-partitioned architecture, with learnable interplay tokens mediating cross-modal exchange and integration. The pyramid also structures its data organization and training strategy. Strong performance across image generation, multimodal understanding, and text-only evaluation shows that Gestalt significantly improves cross-modal integration while preserving modality-specific information, effectively harnessing the strengths of diffusion-based multimodal models and offering a promising path toward unified multimodal intelligence.

Problem

• Large Multimodal Models
• Multimodal Interplay
• Cross-modal Integration
• Modality-specific Characteristics

Innovation

• Multimodal Interplay Pyramid
• Discrete Diffusion Framework
• Interplay-Partitioned Architecture
• Learnable Interplay Tokens
• Large Multimodal Model