Symbolic Representation for Any-to-Any Generative Tasks

Jiaqi Chen, Xiaoye Zhu, Yue Wang, Tianyang Liu, Xinhui Chen, Ying Chen, Chak Tou Leong, Yifei Ke, Joseph Liu, Yiwen Yuan, Julian McAuley, Li-jia Li; Proceedings of the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), 2025, pp. 27816-27826

We propose a symbolic generative task description language and a corresponding inference engine that can represent arbitrary multimodal tasks as structured symbolic flows. Unlike conventional generative models, which rely on large-scale training and implicit neural representations to learn cross-modal mappings--often with high computational costs and limited flexibility--our framework introduces an explicit symbolic representation composed of three core primitives: functions, parameters, and topological logic. Using a pre-trained language model, our inference engine maps natural language instructions directly to symbolic workflows in a training-free manner. Our framework successfully performs over 12 diverse multimodal generative tasks, demonstrating strong performance and flexibility without requiring task-specific tuning. Experiments show that our method not only matches or outperforms existing state-of-the-art unified models in content quality but also offers greater efficiency, editability, and interruptibility. We believe symbolic task representations provide a cost-effective and extensible foundation for advancing the capabilities of generative AI.