README.md
March 29, 2026 ยท View on GitHub
UniX: Unifying Autoregression and Diffusion for
Chest X-Ray Understanding and Generation
๐ฅ Better Unified Performance with 25% Parameters: +46.1% Understanding & +24.2% Generation Quality!
Ruiheng Zhang1,*, ย
Jingfeng Yao2,*, ย
Huangxuan Zhao1,*,โ๏ธ, ย
Hao Yan1, ย
Xiao He1, ย
Lei Chen2,
Zhou Wei1, ย
Yong Luo1, ย
Zengmao Wang1, ย
Lefei Zhang1, ย
Dacheng Tao3, ย
Bo Du1,โ๏ธ
1Wuhan University โ 2Huazhong University of Science and Technology โ 3Nanyang Technological University
*equal contribution โ โ๏ธ corresponding author
๐ฐ News
- [2026.01.19] ๐ Our paper UniX is released on arXiv! We also release the weights on Hugging Face.
- [2026.03.30] ๐ We release the training code.
๐ Release Plan
- Release paper
- Release UniX model weights
- Release inference code (CLI & Gradio WebUI)
- Release evaluation code
- Release training code
โก Quick Start
-
Install Environment
git clone https://github.com/ZrH42/UniX.git cd UniX conda create -n unix python=3.10 -y conda activate unix bash install.sh -
Download Weights at HuggingFace or ModelScope
weights/ โโโ UniX/ -
Launch Gradio Demo
python demo_gradio.py
๐ Introduction
UniX bridges this gap by answering a fundamental question: Can we decouple these conflicting goals while maintaining deep synergy? We propose a dual-branch architecture that "unifies" autoregressive understanding and diffusion generation through structural decoupling and dynamic coordination. Unlike prior parameter-sharing approaches restricted by feature interference, UniX introduces a novel Cross-Modal Self-Attention mechanism. This allows for precise semantic guidance during generation without degrading comprehension. With this integrated design, utilizing only 25% of the parameters required by previous methods like LLM-CXR, UniX achieves state-of-the-art performance among unified models, delivering a 46.1% improvement in understanding and a 24.2% gain in generation quality.
โจ Highlights
-
Decoupled Dual-Branch Architecture: Unifies autoregressive understanding and diffusion-based generation to fundamentally resolve intrinsic task conflicts and feature interference.
-
Superior Efficiency & Quality: Achieves unified performance with only 25% parameters while boosting understanding by 46.1% and generation quality by 24.2%.
-
Cross-Modal Synergy: Introduces a novel self-attention mechanism that enables dynamic semantic guidance for high-fidelity, continuous medical image synthesis.
๐ Get Started
| Document | Description |
|---|---|
| Installation | Environment setup and model preparation |
| Inference & Evaluation | Quick inference with pre-trained weights and evaluate |
| Training | Training scripts for understanding and generation tasks |
โค๏ธ Acknowledgements
This repo is mainly built on BAGEL, Janus-Pro, REPA, latent-diffusion, CheXbert, CheXGenBench. We thank the authors for their open-source contributions.
๐ Citation
If you find our work useful, please cite our paper:
@article{zhang2026unix,
title={UniX: Unifying Autoregression and Diffusion for Chest X-Ray Understanding and Generation},
author={Zhang, Ruiheng and Yao, Jingfeng and Zhao, Huangxuan and Yan, Hao and He, Xiao and Chen, Lei and Wei, Zhou and Luo, Yong and Wang, Zengmao and Zhang, Lefei and others},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.11522},
year={2026}
}