Yaokang Wu
Author directory2026
UReason: Benchmarking Reasoning-to-Generation Alignment in Unified Multimodal Models
Cheng Yang | Chufan Shi | Bo Shui | Yaokang Wu | Muzi Tao | Huijuan Wang | Ivan Yee Lee | Yong Liu | Xuezhe Ma | Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Cheng Yang | Chufan Shi | Bo Shui | Yaokang Wu | Muzi Tao | Huijuan Wang | Ivan Yee Lee | Yong Liu | Xuezhe Ma | Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Unified multimodal models (UMMs) aim to integrate multimodal understanding and generation within a unified architecture, yet it remains unclear to what extent textual and visual modalities are aligned. To investigate this question, we use reasoning-guided image generation as a diagnostic task, where models produce textual reasoning first and then generate images. We introduce UReason, a benchmark for evaluating reasoning-to-generation alignment in this paradigm, consisting of 2,000 human-curated and human-verified instances spanning five reasoning-intensive tasks: Code, Arithmetic, Spatial, Attribute, and Text. To enable controlled analysis, we develop an evaluation framework that compares direct generation, reasoning-guided generation, and decontextualized generation, which conditions only on the refined prompt extracted from reasoning. Across eight widely used open-source UMMs, while we find that reasoning-guided generation yields improvements over direct generation, somewhat surprisingly, decontextualized generation consistently outperforms reasoning-guided generation by a large margin. Our further analyses suggest that the intended visual semantics in textual reasoning are not reliably reflected in the generated images, despite their unified design and training. Overall, UReason serves as a practical litmus test for reasoning-to-generation alignment and provides a challenging benchmark for developing next-generation, more tightly aligned UMMs.
InfoEdit: Probing Global Layout Reasoning in Infographic Editing
Cheng Yang | Chufan Shi | Huijuan Wang | Bo Shui | Yaokang Wu | Muzi Tao | Yibo Yan | Xuezhe Ma | Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Cheng Yang | Chufan Shi | Huijuan Wang | Bo Shui | Yaokang Wu | Muzi Tao | Yibo Yan | Xuezhe Ma | Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Multimodal foundation models edit natural photographs at production quality, yet the same models struggle with structured visual content such as infographics. Unlike photographs, infographics encode information through logical relations; editing one element often requires surrounding elements to be adapted. We refer to this global layout reasoning capability as reflow. Existing image-editing benchmarks neither provide a dedicated setting for structured visual content nor evaluate the reflow capability. We introduce InfoEdit, a novel benchmark of 1,000 infographics across eight logical-relation families, paired with 4,000 editing instructions across four editing tasks, and a reflow-aware evaluation protocol. Across eight frontier editors, only GPT-Image-2 clears 60% average success rate; most models fall below 7%, and no editor exceeds 36% on Swap-Block task even with perfect target localization. We further show that code-level editing can match the strongest pixel-level editor, revealing complementary strengths across tasks. InfoEdit identifies reflow as a central challenge in structured visual content editing and provides a diagnostic benchmark to facilitate future progress.