arXiv AI
Sep 10

VoT: Vision-of-Thought for Unified Multimodal Representation Alignment

The paper introduces Vision-of-Thought (VoT), a framework that inserts a discrete visual-thinking layer between vision‑language models (VLMs) and diffusion transformers (DiTs). Instead of using VLMs solely as text encoders, they act as multimodal planners that generate VoT tokens—high‑level visual plans such as objects and layouts—before pixel rendering. A specialized VoT tokenizer is trained with a closed‑loop objective combining VLM alignment, feature reconstruction, and vector‑quantization losses, ensuring the tokens are semantically readable by the VLM while preserving necessary visual information. Experimental results show that VoT improves semantic alignment and offers a structured, interpretable interface for controllable generation.

By Jingxiang Sun, Chao Liao, Zhengxiong Luo, Chaorui Deng, Chen-lin Zhang, Junke Wang, Ceyuan Yang, Haoqi Fan, Weilin Huang