Multimodal Generation

The increasing variety of molecular data creates a need for generative models that can flexibly incorporate heterogeneous constraints across modalities. However, existing SMILES-based diffusion models are typically designed for a fixed conditioning modality, and introducing new constraints often requires retraining the model. To address this limitation, we propose Cross-Modality Controlled Molecule Generation with Diffusion Language Model (CMCM-DLM), a modular framework that extends a pre-trained diffusion model to support heterogeneous molecular constraints without retraining the backbone. We demonstrate CMCM-DLM using two complementary modalities: molecular structure and chemical properties. Specifically, a Structure Control Module (SCM) guides early diffusion steps to establish the molecular scaffold, while a Property Control Module (PCM) subsequently steers generation toward target chemical properties. This staged design enables flexible integration of different molecular constraints within a unified generative framework. Experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate effective cross-modal controllability and strong adaptability, highlighting the potential of CMCM-DLM for heterogeneous molecular data modeling and data-driven drug discovery.

Multimodal generative models (MGMs) have rapidly expanded beyond text generation to encompass images, music, video, human motion, and 3D objects. This survey categorises six primary text-conditioned generative modalities and examines how four techniques, namely self-supervised learning, mixture of experts, reinforcement learning from human feedback, and chain-of-thought prompting, are adapted across them, distinguishing shared mechanisms from experimentally supported benefits. We organise evaluation around faithfulness, compositionality, and robustness, and interpret evidence within each study's protocol. Selected within-study comparisons reported in the reviewed literature support four findings: preference gains need not improve text relevance, and reward optimisation can reduce within-prompt diversity; intermediate plans require tests of their realisation in final outputs; expert granularity changes the mechanism and its storage, computation, and runtime costs; and gains against an optimisation score need confirmation outside that scoring path. We further analyse trustworthiness risks, including bias, privacy leakage, and misuse of generated media, and examine the evidence for mitigation strategies.

Automatically evaluating multimodal generation presents a significant challenge, as automated metrics often struggle to align with human evaluation, especially for complex tasks that involve multiple modalities. We present MMMG, the first benchmark to bring the verifiable-task paradigm to multimodal generation, spanning 4 modality combinations (image, audio, interleaved text and image, interleaved text and audio). As few multimodal outputs can be checked by programs alone, MMMG targets tasks that are either verifiable or near-verifiable: by providing references, and constraining model judges with explicit rubrics. We keep tasks challenging for generation models while enabling reliable automatic evaluation through a combination of models and programs. MMMG encompasses 55 tasks (including 31 newly developed ones), each with a carefully designed evaluation pipeline, and 1288 instructions to systematically assess reasoning, controllability, and other key capabilities of multimodal generation models. Extensive validation demonstrates that MMMG is highly aligned with human judgment, achieving an average agreement of 94.4%. Benchmarking results on 29 models reveal that even though the state-of-the-art model, GPT Image, achieves 70.7% accuracy for image generation, it falls short on interleaved generation. Furthermore, results suggest considerable improvement space in audio generation, highlighting an important future direction.