Can We Generate Images 🌇 with CoT 🧠?

May 23, 2025 · View on GitHub

Official repository for the paper "Can We Generate Images with CoT? Let's Verify and Reinforce Image Generation Step by Step" and "Delving into RL for Image Generation with CoT: A Study on DPO vs. GRPO".

[📖 Paper ImageGen-CoT] [📖 Paper DPO vs. GRPO] [🤗 HF Checkpoints] [🤗 HF Datasets]

💥 News

  • [2025.05.23] We release our new work for Image Generation exploring different RL Strategies: DPO vs. GRPO 🎉🚀🔥 (will open-source here)
  • [2025.05.03] We release our new work for Image Generation with GRPO and Bi-level CoT Reasoning: T2I-R1 🎉🚀🔥 and its open source
  • [2025.03.30] We release the training code and data for DPO
  • [2025.03.19] We release the training code and data for Fine-tuned ORM and PARM
  • [2025.02.28] The conference paper is accepted by CVPR 2025 🎉
  • [2025.01.23] We release the code and ckpts for autoregressive image generation with test-time scaling (ORM, PARM) and DPO 🚀
  • [2025.01.23] We release the arXiv paper 🚀
  • [2024.11.16] The conference paper is submitted to CVPR 2025 🚀

👀 Reasoning in Image Generation

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has been extensively explored by LLMs and LMMs in mathematics. However, it still remains an open question whether such strategies can be applied to verifying and reinforcing image generation scenarios. In this project, we provide the first comprehensive investigation of the potential of CoT reasoning to enhance autoregressive image generation.


We focus on three CoT reasoning techniques:

  1. Scaling Test-time Computation for verification (ORM, PRM, and our proposed PARM and PARM++)
  2. Aligning Model Preferences with Direct Preference Optimization (DPO)
  3. Integrating These Techniques for complementary effects

Our results demonstrate that these approaches can be effectively adapted and combined to significantly improve the image generation performance:


Furthermore, given the pivotal role of reward models in our findings, we propose the Potential Assessment Reward Model (PARM) and PARM++, specialized for autoregressive image generation:

  1. PARM adaptively assesses each generation step through a potential assessment approach, merging the strengths of existing reward models.
  2. PARM++ further introduces a reflection mechanism to empower generative models to self-correct the previous unsatisfactory image.


💪 Get Started

Installation

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/ZiyuGuo99/Image-Generation-CoT.git
cd Image-Generation-CoT

Create a conda environment:

conda create -n img_cot python=3.10
conda activate img_cot

Please follow the instructions here to install both PyTorch and TorchVision dependencies.

Install additional dependencies:

pip install -r requirements.txt
git clone https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmdetection.git
cd mmdetection; git checkout 2.x
pip install -v -e .
git clone https://github.com/LLaVA-VL/LLaVA-NeXT && cd LLaVA-NeXT && pip install -e ".[train]"

Prepare Checkpoints

  • Download reward models and DPO checkpoints from this link, and put then under Image-Generation-CoT/ckpts/.

  • Download the Mask2Former object detector for GenEval evaluation by running following command:

    mkdir geneval/evaluation/object
bash geneval/evaluation/download_models.sh geneval/evaluation/object

Prepare Training Data

  • Download training data from this link, and put then under Image-Generation-CoT/data/.

🚀 Training

Training ORM

To fine-tune the ORM model, run the following command:

bash scripts/orm_ft.sh

Training PARM

To train the PARM model, run the following command:

bash scripts/parm.sh

Training DPO

To train Show-o with DPO, run the following command:

bash scripts/dpo.sh

📊 Evaluation

0. Baseline Model (Show-o) 🎨

Run the following command to use the baseline model:

torchrun --nnodes=1 --nproc_per_node=8 --node_rank=0 --master_port=12475 main.py \
--prompts_file geneval/prompts/generation_prompts.txt \
--metadata_file geneval/prompts/evaluation_metadata.jsonl \
--config config.yaml

1. Scaling Test-time Computation 📈

1.1. Zero-shot ORM

Run the following command to use the zero-shot ORM:

torchrun --nnodes=1 --nproc_per_node=8 --node_rank=0 --master_port=12475 main.py \
--prompts_file geneval/prompts/generation_prompts.txt \
--metadata_file geneval/prompts/evaluation_metadata.jsonl \
--config config.yaml \
--reward_model orm_zs
1.2. Fine-tuned ORM

Run the following command to use the fine-tuned ORM:

torchrun --nnodes=1 --nproc_per_node=8 --node_rank=0 --master_port=12475 main.py \
--prompts_file geneval/prompts/generation_prompts.txt \
--metadata_file geneval/prompts/evaluation_metadata.jsonl \
--config config.yaml \
--reward_model orm_ft
1.3. PARM

Run the following command to use PARM:

torchrun --nnodes=1 --nproc_per_node=8 --node_rank=0 --master_port=12475 main.py \
--prompts_file geneval/prompts/generation_prompts.txt \
--metadata_file geneval/prompts/evaluation_metadata.jsonl \
--config config.yaml \
--reward_model parm

2. Preference Alignment with DPO 🔧

2.1. Initial DPO

Run the following command to use intial DPO:

torchrun --nnodes=1 --nproc_per_node=8 --node_rank=0 --master_port=12475 main.py \
--prompts_file geneval/prompts/generation_prompts.txt \
--metadata_file geneval/prompts/evaluation_metadata.jsonl \
--config config.yaml \
--dpo_model dpo
2.2. Iterative DPO

Run the following command to use iterative DPO:

torchrun --nnodes=1 --nproc_per_node=8 --node_rank=0 --master_port=12475 main.py \
--prompts_file geneval/prompts/generation_prompts.txt \
--metadata_file geneval/prompts/evaluation_metadata.jsonl \
--config config.yaml \
--dpo_model dpo_iter
2.3. Iterative DPO with PARM Guidance

Run the following command to use iterative DPO with PARM guidance:

torchrun --nnodes=1 --nproc_per_node=8 --node_rank=0 --master_port=12475 main.py \
--prompts_file geneval/prompts/generation_prompts.txt \
--metadata_file geneval/prompts/evaluation_metadata.jsonl \
--config config.yaml \
--dpo_model dpo_iter_parm_gudie

3. Reasoning Strategy Integration 🧩

3.1. Iterative DPO with PARM Guidance + PARM

Run the following command to combine iterative DPO with PARM guidance and PARM:

torchrun --nnodes=1 --nproc_per_node=8 --node_rank=0 --master_port=12475 main.py \
--prompts_file geneval/prompts/generation_prompts.txt \
--metadata_file geneval/prompts/evaluation_metadata.jsonl \
--config config.yaml \
--reward_model parm \
--dpo_model dpo_iter_parm_gudie

:white_check_mark: Citation

If you find this project useful for your research or applications, please kindly cite using this BibTeX:

@article{guo2025can,
  title={Can We Generate Images with CoT? Let's Verify and Reinforce Image Generation Step by Step},
  author={Guo, Ziyu and Zhang, Renrui and Tong, Chengzhuo and Zhao, Zhizheng and Gao, Peng and Li, Hongsheng and Heng, Pheng-Ann},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.13926},
  year={2025}
}

Explore our additional research on CoT Reasoning and 3D Vision: