Twins: Learn to Predict Unified Representations with Focal Loss

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Original abstract

Unified multimodal models seek a shared visual token space that supports both multimodal understanding and image generation. Discrete methods unify the interface via a shared codebook, whereas continuous pipelines often rely on two disparate representations -- semantic features (e.g., ViT) for understanding and low-level latents (e.g., VAE) for synthesis -- resulting in mismatched latent spaces. We propose Twins, a unified continuous token space formed by channel-wise concatenating ViT and VAE features on the same token grid, so the sequence length is unchanged and attention cost does not increase. However, jointly modeling Twins in a Diffusion Transformer exposes a severe optimization imbalance: the model fits the ViT component well but struggles to match the VAE latent distribution. We trace this imbalance to three sources of heterogeneity: frequency bias, intrinsic dimensionality, and condition-aligned vs condition-independent uncertainty. To address it, we adapt a focal regression objective for flow matching that upweights large-error VAE dimensions, better balancing optimization across the ViT and VAE components. On ImageNet, this yields up to 10.57 gFID gain over naive MSE loss without classifier-free guidance. Twins also performs competitively on multimodal understanding benchmarks and improves reconstruction fidelity, narrowing the gap between understanding- and generation-oriented representations.

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