# OctoT2I: A Self-Evolving Agentic Text-to-Image Router

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.01803 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01803/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 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 53 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jun 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Multimodal and embodied agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/multimodal-and-embodied-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [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)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03442/) (2023)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.3215/) (2014)
- [ToolLLM: Facilitating Large Language Models to Master 16000+ Real-world APIs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16789/) (2023)
- [MetaGPT: Meta Programming for A Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00352/) (2023)
- [CAMEL: Communicative Agents for "Mind" Exploration of Large Language Model Society](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17760/) (2023)
- [HuggingGPT: Solving AI Tasks with ChatGPT and its Friends in Hugging Face](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17580/) (2023)
- [Qwen-Image Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02324/) (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)
- [PixArt-α: Fast Training of Diffusion Transformer for Photorealistic Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00426/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Adversarial Diffusion Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17042/) (2023)
- [Show-o: One Single Transformer to Unify Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12528/) (2024)
- [Visual ChatGPT: Talking, Drawing and Editing with Visual Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04671/) (2023)
- [Flow-GRPO: Training Flow Matching Models via Online RL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05470/) (2025)
- [Evaluating Text-to-Visual Generation with Image-to-Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01291/) (2024)
- [DiffusionDB: A Large-scale Prompt Gallery Dataset for Text-to-Image Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14896/) (2022)
- [Absolute Zero: Reinforced Self-play Reasoning with Zero Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03335/) (2025)
- [SDXL-Lightning: Progressive Adversarial Diffusion Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13929/) (2024)
- [T2I-CompBench++: An Enhanced and Comprehensive Benchmark for Compositional Text-to-image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06350/) (2023)
- [Auto-GPT for Online Decision Making: Benchmarks and Additional Opinions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02224/) (2023)
- [GPT4Tools: Teaching Large Language Model to Use Tools via Self-instruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18752/) (2023)
- [AutoAgents: A Framework for Automatic Agent Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17288/) (2023)
- [WISE: A World Knowledge-Informed Semantic Evaluation for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07265/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Agentic Visual Generation: From Generative Models to Agentic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.06758/) (2026)
- [Scalable Question-Centric Text-to-Image Evaluation: Reliable Ranking, Fine-Grained Diagnosis, and Cost-Aware Routing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.24112/) (2026)
- [EvoGen-Harness: Learning Where and How to Evolve Image-Generation Harnesses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.00383/) (2026)
- [TasteRoute: Personalized Routing for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.05896/) (2026)
- [Look Back to Move Forward: Learning to Revisit for Agentic Compositional Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.16224/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The explosive growth of Text-to-Image (T2I) models, from large-scale versions to lightweight, real-time ones, now faces diminishing marginal returns from single-model scaling. Agentic T2I methods emerged to alleviate this bottleneck by using multiple models. However, existing agentic T2I methods suffer from three key challenges: reliance on expensive handcrafted priors or human annotations, rigid single-path decision mechanisms, and a neglect of inference efficiency. To address these challenges, we introduce OctoT2I, a novel agentic framework that reformulates the T2I task as a joint optimization of generation quality and inference efficiency. OctoT2I implements a stateful, multi-round routing strategy that adaptively selects the most suitable tool based on its knowledge and memory. This strategy is enabled by a knowledge base built from scratch by our novel Self-Evolving Mechanism. This mechanism, which requires no human supervision, first autonomously defines foundational Conceptual Dimensions (eg, style, color, count) and then intelligently explores their combinations via an iterative" Propose--Solve--Evaluate--Learn"(PSEL) loop. The PSEL loop efficiently discovers each tool's capability frontier, driving continuous improvement without external guidance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OctoT2I achieves competitive performance (0.96) on GenEval while delivering a 90.3% inference speedup and a 56.6% energy-efficiency gain over the leading baseline (Flow-GRPO), striking an exceptional balance between performance and efficiency. Code and models will be made available.