IV-CoT: Implicit Visual Chain-of-Thought for Structure-Aware Text-to-Image Generation
Summary
Unified multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved strong text-to-image generation quality, but still struggle with structure-aware prompt following, where object counts, spatial relations, attribute bindings, and coarse layouts must be preserved.
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Computer Science > Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
arXiv:2606.24849v1 (cs)
[Submitted on 23 Jun 2026]
Title:IV-CoT: Implicit Visual Chain-of-Thought for Structure-Aware Text-to-Image Generation
Authors:Zixuan Li,Haokun Lin,Yicheng Xiao,Zhiwei Li,Xinyang Song,Zelong Zheng,Yong He,Heng Yao,Ke Ding,Chao Yu,Chuan Yuan,Qi Li,Zhenan Sun
View a PDF of the paper titled IV-CoT: Implicit Visual Chain-of-Thought for Structure-Aware Text-to-Image Generation, by Zixuan Li and 12 other authors
Abstract:Unified multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved strong text-to-image generation quality, but still struggle with structure-aware prompt following, where object counts, spatial relations, attribute bindings, and coarse layouts must be preserved. We attribute this limitation in part to the entanglement of structural planning and appearance rendering within a single conditioning stream. To address this issue, we propose Implicit Visual Chain-of-Thought (IV-CoT), a latent visual reasoning framework for query-conditioned image generation. IV-CoT decomposes the visual conditioning queries into a structural-to-semantic cascade, where structural queries first form a latent visual plan and semantic queries then render appearance conditioned on this plan. To guide the structural queries, we introduce training-only sketch supervision, which encourages them to capture structure from sketches without requiring sketch extraction or intermediate decoding at inference time. IV-CoT performs implicit CoT reasoning in a single forward pass and achieves superior results on GenEval and T2I-CompBench. Visualizations and analyses demonstrate that the learned structural and semantic queries play complementary roles in structure-aware generation.
| | | | --- | --- | | Subjects: | Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) | | Cite as: |arXiv:2606.24849[cs.CV] | | | (orarXiv:2606.24849v1[cs.CV] for this version) | | |https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.24849<br>Focus to learn more<br>arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite |
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From: Zixuan Li \[view email]
[v1] Tue, 23 Jun 2026 17:28:00 UTC (16,977 KB)
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