VoT: Vision-of-Thought for Unified Multimodal Representation Alignment

Abstract

Current text-to-image systems typically employ a"text encoder plus diffusion decoder"paradigm, in which text semantics directly modulate continuous latent noise. Despite their success, these methods lack an explicit, interpretable intermediate representation that effectively bridges high-level linguistic semantics and low-level visual signals. In this paper, we propose Vision-of-Thought (VoT), a framework that introduces a discrete visual-thinking layer between vision-language models (VLMs) and diffusion transformers (DiTs). Instead of treating VLMs merely as text encoders, we use them as multimodal planners that generate discrete VoT tokens representing high-level visual plans, such as objects and layouts, before rendering pixels. We train a specialized VoT tokenizer in the VLM semantic space with a closed-loop objective that combines VLM alignment, feature reconstruction, and vector-quantization losses. These objectives make the tokens semantically readable by the VLM while preserving the visual information needed for generation. Experimental results demonstrate that VoT improves semantic alignment and provides a structured interface for interpretable and controllable generation.