mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Generation Navigator: A State-Aware Agentic Framework for Image Generation

arXiv 2605.17969 ↗First posted 18 May 2026cs.CVcited by 3

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Multimodal and embodied agents

Abstract (arXiv)

Despite rapid advances in text-to-image generation, faithfully realizing user intent remains challenging, often requiring manual multi-turn trial and error. To automate this process, existing systems rely on either simple prompt rewriting or closed-loop agents driven by hand-crafted rules, rather than learning to adapt actions to the evolving generation process. In this paper, we reformulate image generation as a state-conditioned action-making problem and propose Generation Navigator, a multi-turn T2I agent that learns to dynamically steer the generation trajectory and output the next action. However, training this agent via reinforcement learning introduces a critical credit assignment challenge: naively rewarding a trajectory based solely on a single state assigns equal credit to all actions in the rollout, ignores the quality dynamics across turns, and fails to distinguish actions that improve the trajectory from those that degrade it or waste turns without progress. We resolve this with PRE-GRPO (Peak-Retention-Efficiency Group Relative Policy Optimization), a trajectory-level reinforcement learning objective that explicitly rewards discovering a high-quality image (Peak), avoiding subsequent quality degradation across turns (Retention), and minimizing unnecessary turns (Efficiency). Experiments show substantial improvements across benchmarks, reaching a WISE score of 0.90 and 79.06% reasoning accuracy on T2I-ReasonBench.

Key facts. Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Multimodal and embodied agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 28 of its 38 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 18 May 2026.

Builds on

28 of 38 references.

Closest ancestors · 4

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026Agentic Retoucher for Text-To-Image Generation5 Jan
  2. 2025AgentComp: From Agentic Reasoning to Compositional Mastery in Text-to-Image Models9 Dec
  3. 2025Maestro: Self-Improving Text-to-Image Generation via Agent Orchestration12 Sep
  4. 2025T2I-Copilot: A Training-Free Multi-Agent Text-to-Image System for Enhanced Prompt Interpretation and Interactive Generation28 Jul

Other references · 24

  1. 2020Language Models are Few-Shot Learnerscited by 32,419
  2. 2021High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 18,863
  3. 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 9,379
  4. 2019Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networkscited by 9,170
  5. 2022Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understandingcited by 6,355
  6. 2022PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathwayscited by 5,326
  7. 2023SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesiscited by 4,356
  8. 2024Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesiscited by 4,181
  9. 2020MiniLM: Deep Self-Attention Distillation for Task-Agnostic Compression of Pre-Trained Transformerscited by 1,463
  10. 2023GenEval: An Object-Focused Framework for Evaluating Text-to-Image Alignmentcited by 972
  11. 2025Emerging Properties in Unified Multimodal Pretrainingcited by 897
  12. 2023LLM-grounded Diffusion: Enhancing Prompt Understanding of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Large Language Modelscited by 243
12 more
  1. 2024Mastering Text-to-Image Diffusion: Recaptioning, Planning, and Generating with Multimodal LLMscited by 224
  2. 2025WISE: A World Knowledge-Informed Semantic Evaluation for Text-to-Image Generationcited by 204
  3. 2025Uni-cot: Towards Unified Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Across Text and Visioncited by 56
  4. 2025PromptEnhancer: A Simple Approach to Enhance Text-to-Image Models via Chain-of-Thought Prompt Rewritingcited by 43
  5. 2025Interleaving Reasoning for Better Text-to-Image Generationcited by 41
  6. 2025JarvisEvo: Towards a Self-Evolving Photo Editing Agent with Synergistic Editor-Evaluator Optimizationcited by 31
  7. 2024DialogGen: Multi-modal Interactive Dialogue System for Multi-turn Text-to-Image Generationcited by 26
  8. 2024Proactive Agents for Multi-Turn Text-to-Image Generation Under Uncertaintycited by 25
  9. 2026Think-Then-Generate: Reasoning-Aware Text-to-Image Diffusion with LLM Encoderscited by 15
  10. 2025Talk2Image: A Multi-Agent System for Multi-Turn Image Generation and Editingcited by 13
  11. 2025VisionDirector: Vision-Language Guided Closed-Loop Refinement for Generative Image Synthesiscited by 3
  12. 2026StruVis: Enhancing Reasoning-based Text-to-Image Generation via Thinking with Structured Visioncited by 3

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.

3 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026GenAgent: Scaling Text-to-Image Generation via Agentic Multimodal Reasoning
  2. 2026Gen-Searcher: Reinforcing Agentic Search for Image Generation
  3. 2026ToolArtist: Tool-Using Unified Multimodal Models for Agentic Image Generation
  4. 2026Getting Space Right: Agentic Rewards for Image Generation
  5. 2026APT: Feedback-Driven Agentic Post-Training for Text-to-Image Generation
  6. 2026GenEvolve: Self-Evolving Image Generation Agents via Tool-Orchestrated Visual Experience Distillation
  7. 2026VideoGen-Agent: Reinforcing Video Generation Agents
  8. 2026GenRouter: Unified Workflow Routing for Agentic Image Generation