CRAFT: Continuous Reasoning and Agentic Feedback Tuning for Multimodal Text-to-Image Generation
On the map: LLM reasoning → Multimodal reasoning
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Abstract (arXiv)
Recent work has shown that inference-time reasoning and reflection can improve text-to-image generation without retraining. However, existing approaches often rely on implicit, holistic critiques or unconstrained prompt rewrites, making their behavior difficult to interpret, control, or stop reliably. In contrast, large language models have benefited from explicit, structured forms of **thinking** based on verification, targeted correction, and early stopping. We introduce CRAFT (Continuous Reasoning and Agentic Feedback Tuning), a training-free and model-agnostic framework for multimodal image generation. CRAFT transforms a user prompt into a set of explicit, dependency-structured visual constraints, verifies generated images using a vision-language model, and performs targeted prompt updates only when specific constraints are violated. This iterative process includes an explicit stopping criterion, resulting in an interpretable and controllable inference-time refinement loop. Across multiple model families and challenging benchmarks, CRAFT consistently improves compositional accuracy, text rendering, and preference-based evaluations, with particularly strong gains for lightweight generators. Importantly, these improvements incur only a negligible inference-time overhead, allowing smaller or cheaper models to approach the quality of substantially more expensive systems. Our results suggest that explicitly structured, constraint-driven inference-time reasoning is a key ingredient for improving the reliability of multimodal generative models.
Key facts. Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 13 of its 19 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 23 Dec 2025.
Builds on
13 of 19 references.
References · 13
- 2021High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 18,694
- 2022Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latentscited by 6,539
- 2022Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understandingcited by 6,322
- 2023SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesiscited by 4,290
- 2022Scaling Autoregressive Models for Content-Rich Text-to-Image Generationcited by 1,287
- 2025Qwen-Image Technical Reportcited by 973
- 2025FLUX.1 Kontext: Flow Matching for In-Context Image Generation and Editing in Latent Spacecited by 960
- 2024Evaluating Text-to-Visual Generation with Image-to-Text Generationcited by 465
- 2023TIFA: Accurate and Interpretable Text-to-Image Faithfulness Evaluation with Question Answeringcited by 416
- 2025Z-Image: An Efficient Image Generation Foundation Model with Single-Stream Diffusion Transformercited by 247
- 2022Optimizing Prompts for Text-to-Image Generationcited by 204
- 2024Improving Text-to-Image Consistency via Automatic Prompt Optimizationcited by 88
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.
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- 2025ImAgent: A Unified Multimodal Agent Framework for Test-Time Scalable Image Generation
- 2026M3: High-fidelity Text-to-Image Generation via Multi-Modal, Multi-Agent and Multi-Round Visual Reasoning
- 2026Iterative Refinement Improves Compositional Image Generation
- 2026GenAgent: Scaling Text-to-Image Generation via Agentic Multimodal Reasoning
- 2026FiRe: Fine-grained Multimodal Reasoning for Enhanced Image Generation
- 2026Unified Text-Image Generation with Weakness-Targeted Post-Training
- 2026Large Language Models are Universal Reasoners for Visual Generation
- 2026Think in Strokes, Not Pixels: Process-Driven Image Generation via Interleaved Reasoning