Recent unified image generation models have achieved remarkable success by employing MLLMs for semantic understanding and diffusion backbones for image generation. However, these models remain fundamentally limited in spatially-aware tasks due to a lack of intrinsic spatial understanding and the absence of explicit geometric guidance during generation. In this paper, we propose SpatialFusion, a novel framework that internalizes 3D geometric awareness into unified image generation models. Specifically, we first employ a Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) architecture to augment the MLLM with a parallel spatial transformer to enhance 3D geometric modeling capability. By sharing self-attention with the MLLM, the spatial transformer learns to derive metric-depth maps of target images from rich semantic contexts. These explicit geometric scaffolds are then injected into the diffusion backbone through a specialized depth adapter, providing precise spatial constraints for spatially-coherent image generation. Through a progressive two-stage training strategy, SpatialFusion significantly enhances performance on spatially-aware benchmarks, notably outperforming leading models such as GPT-4o. Additionally, it achieves generalized performance gains across both text-to-image generation and image editing scenarios, all while maintaining negligible inference overhead.
@article{arxiv.2604.26341,
title = {SpatialFusion: Endowing Unified Image Generation with Intrinsic 3D Geometric Awareness},
author = {Haiyi Qiu and Kaihang Pan and Jiacheng Li and Juncheng Li and Siliang Tang and Yueting Zhuang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.26341},
year = {2026}
}