Janus is an innovative autoregressive framework that achieves unified multimodal understanding and generation through the separation of visual encoding. This decoupling alleviates the role conflict of the visual encoder in understanding and generation tasks, enhancing the flexibility of the framework. Janus goes beyond previous unified models, matching or exceeding the performance of task-specific models. Its simplicity, high flexibility, and effectiveness make it a strong candidate for next-generation unified multimodal models.