Visual-CoG: Stage-Aware Reinforcement Learning with Chain of Guidance for Text-to-Image Generation

🤗 Upvotes: 34 | cs.CV

Authors:
Yaqi Li, Peng Chen, Mingyang Han, Pi Bu, Haoxiang Shi, Runzhou Zhao, Yang Yao, Xuan Zhang, Jun Song, Bo Zheng

Title:
Visual-CoG: Stage-Aware Reinforcement Learning with Chain of Guidance for Text-to-Image Generation

Arxiv:
http://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18032v2

Abstract:
Despite the promising progress of recent autoregressive models in text-to-image (T2I) generation, their ability to handle multi-attribute and ambiguous prompts remains limited. To address these limitations, existing works have applied chain-of-thought (CoT) to enable stage-aware visual synthesis and employed reinforcement learning (RL) to improve reasoning capabilities. However, most models provide reward signals only at the end of the generation stage. This monolithic final-only guidance makes it difficult to identify which stages contribute positively to the final outcome and may lead to suboptimal policies. To tackle this issue, we propose a Visual-Chain of Guidance (Visual-CoG) paradigm consisting of three stages: semantic reasoning, process refining, and outcome evaluation, with stage-aware rewards providing immediate guidance throughout the image generation pipeline. We further construct a visual cognition benchmark, VisCog-Bench, which comprises four subtasks to evaluate the effectiveness of semantic reasoning. Comprehensive evaluations on GenEval, T2I-CompBench, and the proposed VisCog-Bench show improvements of 15%, 5%, and 19%, respectively, demonstrating the superior performance of the proposed Visual-CoG. We will release all the resources soon.