Does Gradient Conflict Predict the Understanding--Generation Trade-off? A Controlled Audit of Conflict-Metric Validity in Unified Multimodal Models

תקציר מקורי באנגליתarXiv:2609.38465v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Unified multimodal models (UMMs) are increasingly designed around gradient conflict between understanding and generation objectives. The premise that reducing these metrics improves the downstream understanding-generation trade-off has never been tested directly. We audit it in a controlled testbed, GRIDUMM, which mirrors key structural ingredients of UMM training while making the ground-truth trade-off exactly computable. Across 63 configurations and 372 measured checkpoints, no directional conflict metric reaches an absolute Spearman correlation of 0.3 with a confidence interval excluding zero for conflict measured during training against the eventual trade-off. A dose-response intervention that monotonically suppresses conflict leaves th