Unified Thinker: A General Reasoning Core for Image Generation
Paper · 2026 · Sashuai Zhou, Qiang Zhou, Jijin Hu et al.
Summary
Open-source image generators and editors still struggle with instructions that require real reasoning, such as solving a puzzle or inferring an implicit intent. Proprietary systems like Nano Banana handle these much better. The authors propose Unified Thinker, which separates a trainable MLLM "Thinker" from the image Generator, for example a diffusion backbone. The Thinker turns a request into a structured plan containing an intent summary, constraints and ordered sub-goals, ending in an enhanced prompt. The Generator then renders that prompt. Because the two parts are separate, reasoning can be upgraded without retraining the Generator.
Training has two stages:
- Supervised fine-tuning on HieraReason-40K, a set of hierarchical reasoning traces synthesized with Gemini-3-Pro.
- Dual-phase reinforcement learning with the Generator in the loop, where the reward measures how well the final image satisfies the constraints. This ties the plans to what the Generator can actually draw.
The approach was tested on reasoning and general text-to-image generation and image editing. It gives large gains on reasoning benchmarks and transfers to other generators such as BAGEL. This suggests that separating reasoning from rendering is a practical, reusable design.
Key points
- Training data: HieraReason-40K (about 40K examples) draws on four sources covering text-to-image, general editing, reasoning generation and reasoning editing. Its traces are seeded with knowledge domains such as art and culture, logic, physics and chemistry, and natural sciences.
- Thinker backbones: Qwen2.5-VL-7B and Qwen3-VL-8B. The main training generator is Qwen-Image-Edit.
- RiseBench ablation: the overall score rises from 8.9 (baseline) to 16.4 with a Thinker, 20.2 after joint fine-tuning, and 24.2 after both Dual-RL stages. The 7B Thinker comes close to GPT-5 (26.9) and Gemini-2.5-Pro (25.2) used as planners, and beats Qwen3-VL-30B (23.1).
- WiseBench (overall):
- Qwen-Image-Edit: 0.62 → 0.73 (7B) and 0.74 (8B).
- BAGEL: 0.52 → 0.70, showing transfer across generators.
- Limitations: GEdit quality dips slightly when the Thinker is added (7.56 → 7.49) but ends at 7.67 after full training. Planning adds inference latency, and fine geometric edits and precise text rendering remain difficult.
Institutions
Fields, topics and concepts
📚 Shelves 2The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 18,614 worksComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 3,486 works
🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.Reasoning · 1,685 worksVision & language · 811 works
Cite
Cite as Sashuai Zhou, Qiang Zhou, Jijin Hu, Hanqing Yang, Yue Cao, Junpeng Ma, Yinchao Ma, Jun Song, Tiezheng Ge, Cheng Yu, Bo Zheng and Zhou Zhao. 2026. Unified Thinker: A General Reasoning Core for Image Generation. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers).
@inproceedings{zhou2026unified,
title = {{Unified Thinker: A General Reasoning Core for Image Generation}},
author = {Sashuai Zhou, Qiang Zhou, Jijin Hu, Hanqing Yang, Yue Cao, Junpeng Ma, Yinchao Ma, Jun Song, Tiezheng Ge, Cheng Yu, Bo Zheng and Zhou Zhao},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)},
year = {2026},
doi = {10.18653/v1/2026.acl-long.484},
url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.acl-long.484}
}References
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