# Uni-cot: Towards Unified Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Across Text and Vision

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05606 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05606/

## Key facts

- Cited by 56 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 72 of its 91 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Aug 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Multimodal reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/multimodal-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 72)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06281/) (2023)
- [MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Expert AGI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16502/) (2023)
- [MME: A Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13394/) (2023)
- [MathVista: Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning of Foundation Models in Visual Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02255/) (2023)
- [Expanding Performance Boundaries of Open-Source Multimodal Models with Model, Data, and Test-Time Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05271/) (2024)
- [Generating Long Sequences with Sparse Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10509/) (2019)
- [Linformer: Self-Attention with Linear Complexity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04768/) (2020)
- [SigLIP 2: Multilingual Vision-Language Encoders with Improved Semantic Understanding, Localization, and Dense Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14786/) (2025)
- [FLUX.1 Kontext: Flow Matching for In-Context Image Generation and Editing in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15742/) (2025)
- [GenEval: An Object-Focused Framework for Evaluating Text-to-Image Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11513/) (2023)
- [Emerging Properties in Unified Multimodal Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14683/) (2025)
- [Janus-Pro: Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation with Data and Model Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17811/) (2025)
- [Emu3: Next-Token Prediction is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18869/) (2024)
- [Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00923/) (2023)
- [Show-o: One Single Transformer to Unify Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12528/) (2024)
- [Long Range Arena: A Benchmark for Efficient Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.04006/) (2020)
- [Vision-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06749/) (2025)
- [MagicBrush: A Manually Annotated Dataset for Instruction-Guided Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10012/) (2023)
- [ViperGPT: Visual Inference via Python Execution for Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08128/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [ThinkMorph: Emergent Properties in Multimodal Interleaved Chain-of-Thought Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.27492/) (2025)
- [ReasonEdit: Towards Reasoning-Enhanced Image Editing Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22625/) (2025)
- [UniDriveVLA: Unifying Understanding, Perception, and Action Planning for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02190/) (2026)
- [Thinking-while-Generating: Interleaving Textual Reasoning throughout Visual Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16671/) (2025)
- [Think-Then-Generate: Reasoning-Aware Text-to-Image Diffusion with LLM Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10332/) (2026)
- [Demystifying Video Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16870/) (2026)
- [RationalRewards: Reasoning Rewards Scale Visual Generation Both Training and Test Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11626/) (2026)
- [DraCo: Draft as CoT for Text-to-Image Preview and Rare Concept Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05112/) (2025)
- [ThinkGen: Generalized Thinking for Visual Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.23568/) (2025)
- [ThinkRL-Edit: Thinking in Reinforcement Learning for Reasoning-Centric Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03467/) (2026)
- [UniReason 1.0: A Unified Reasoning Framework for World Knowledge Aligned Image Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02437/) (2026)
- [WiseEdit: Benchmarking Cognition- and Creativity-Informed Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00387/) (2025)
- [Visual-Aware CoT: Achieving High-Fidelity Visual Consistency in Unified Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.19686/) (2025)
- [UniT: Unified Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Test-time Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12279/) (2026)
- [LatentUM: Unleashing the Potential of Interleaved Cross-Modal Reasoning via a Latent-Space Unified Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02097/) (2026)
- [UReason: Benchmarking Reasoning-to-Generation Alignment in Unified Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08336/) (2026)
- [Beyond Textual CoT: Interleaved Text-Image Chains with Deep Confidence Reasoning for Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08157/) (2025)
- [IRG-MotionLLM: Interleaving Motion Generation, Assessment and Refinement for Text-to-Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10730/) (2025)
- [Unified Thinker: A General Reasoning Modular Core for Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03127/) (2026)
- [DuoGen: Towards General Purpose Interleaved Multimodal Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00508/) (2026)
- [StruVis: Enhancing Reasoning-based Text-to-Image Generation via Thinking with Structured Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06032/) (2026)
- [FiRe: Fine-grained Multimodal Reasoning for Enhanced Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13491/) (2026)
- [DDA-Thinker: Decoupled Dual-Atomic Reinforcement Learning for Reasoning-Driven Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.25477/) (2026)
- [Generation Navigator: A State-Aware Agentic Framework for Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17969/) (2026)
- [PhyEditBench: A Real-World Multi-Stage Benchmark for Physics-Aware Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.26551/) (2026)
- [ViGoR-Bench: How Far Are Visual Generative Models From Zero-Shot Visual Reasoners?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25823/) (2026)
- [Uni-ViGU: Towards Unified Video Generation and Understanding via A Diffusion-Based Video Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08121/) (2026)
- [TorchUMM: A Unified Multimodal Model Codebase for Evaluation, Analysis, and Post-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10784/) (2026)
- [OmniVerifier-M1: Multimodal Meta-Verifier with Explicit Structured Recalibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28805/) (2026)
- [Reason, Then Re-reason: Cross-view Revisiting Improves Spatial Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.11683/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has been widely adopted to enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) by decomposing complex tasks into simpler, sequential subtasks. However, extending CoT to vision-language reasoning tasks remains challenging, as it often requires interpreting transitions of visual states to support reasoning. Existing methods often struggle with this due to limited capacity of modeling visual state transitions or incoherent visual trajectories caused by fragmented architectures. To overcome these limitations, we propose Uni-CoT, a Unified Chain-of-Thought framework that enables coherent and grounded multimodal reasoning within a single unified model. The key idea is to leverage a model capable of both image understanding and generation to reason over visual content and model evolving visual states. However, empowering a unified model to achieve that is non-trivial, given the high computational cost and the burden of training. To address this, Uni-CoT introduces a novel two-level reasoning paradigm: A Macro-Level CoT for high-level task planning and A Micro-Level CoT for subtask execution. This design significantly reduces the computational overhead. Furthermore, we introduce a structured training paradigm that combines interleaved image-text supervision for macro-level CoT with multi-task objectives for micro-level CoT. Together, these innovations allow Uni-CoT to perform scalable and coherent multi-modal reasoning. Furthermore, thanks to our design, all experiments can be efficiently completed using only 8 A100 GPUs with 80GB VRAM each. Experimental results on reasoning-driven image generation benchmark (WISE) and editing benchmarks (RISE and KRIS) indicates that Uni-CoT demonstrates SOTA performance and strong generalization, establishing Uni-CoT as a promising solution for multi-modal reasoning. Project Page and Code: https://sais-fuxi.github.io/projects/uni-cot/