C3-UniMM: Causal Cycle-Consistent Unified Multimodal Modeling via Super Alignment and Shared Decoding Space

Abstract

Unified Multimodal Models aim to achieve any-to-any understanding and generation across arbitrary modalities. However, existing methods primarily rely on modeling implicit statistical correlations and lack cross-modal structural consistency constraints. This deficiency leads to profound issues, including semantic drift, poor compositional generalization, and instability under interventions. In this paper, we propose C3-UniMM, a unified multimodal modeling framework based on Causal Cycle Consistency and Super Alignment. Specifically, we introduce a Structured Latent Causal Graph (SLCG) as a shared cross-modal semantic space and design unified multimodal encoding blocks, enabling understanding and generation to be synergistically optimized within the identical causal semantic structure. Furthermore, we propose a Unified Decoding Space to enforce structural preservation and semantic invertibility during the cross-modal generation process. Theoretical analyses demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances both the invertibility and mechanism invariance of cross-modal mappings. Extensive experimental results across multiple understanding, generation, and compositional generalization tasks indicate that C3-UniMM substantially outperforms existing unified multimodal baselines.