CLEAR: Unlocking Generative Potential for Degraded Image Understanding in Unified Multimodal Models

hxz, zhangzef, Max Zhenyu Zhang, Linhao Yu, Yao Chen, Yiqian Zhang, Haiyun Guo, Shuohuan Wang, Yu Sun

CLEAR: Unlocking Generative Potential for Degraded Image Understanding in Unified Multimodal Models: 8 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #27 of 37 papers on 2026-04-07. Day-by-day upvote history.

Image degradation from blur, noise, compression, and poor illumination severely undermines multimodal understanding in real-world settings. Unified multimodal models that combine understanding and generation within a single architecture are a natural fit for this challenge, as their generative pathway can model the fine-grained visual structure that degradation destroys. Yet these models fail to leverage their own generative capacity on degraded inputs. We trace this disconnect to two compounding factors: existing training regimes never ask the model to invoke generation during reasoning, and the standard decode-reencode pathway does not support effective joint optimization. We present CLEAR, a framework that connects the two capabilities through three progressive steps: (1) supervised fine-tuning on a degradation-aware dataset to establish the generate-then-answer reasoning pattern; (2) a Latent Representation Bridge that replaces the decode-reencode detour with a direct, optimizable connection between generation and reasoning; (3) Interleaved GRPO, a reinforcement learning method that jointly optimizes text reasoning and visual generation under answer-correctness rewards. We construct MMD-Bench, covering three degradation severity levels across six standard multimodal benchmarks. Experiments show that CLEAR substantially improves robustness on degraded inputs while preserving clean-image performance. Our analysis further reveals that removing pixel-level reconstruction supervision leads to intermediate visual states with higher perceptual quality, suggesting that task-driven optimization and visual quality are naturally aligned.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

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