VisionCreator: A Native Visual-Generation Agentic Model with Understanding, Thinking, Planning and Creation

Visual content generation has advanced from single-image to multi-image workflows, yet existing agents remain largely plan-driven and lack systematic reflection mechanisms to correct mid-trajectory visual errors. To address this limitation, we propose VisionCreator-R1, a native visual generation agent with explicit reflection, together with a Reflection-Plan Co-Optimization (RPCO) training methodology. Through extensive experiments and trajectory-level analysis, we uncover reflection-plan optimization asymmetry in reinforcement learning (RL): planning can be reliably optimized via plan rewards, while reflection learning is hindered by noisy credit assignment. Guided by this insight, our RPCO first trains on the self-constructed VCR-SFT dataset with reflection-strong single-image trajectories and planning-strong multi-image trajectories, then co-optimization on VCR-RL dataset via RL. This yields our unified VisionCreator-R1 agent, which consistently outperforms Gemini2.5Pro on existing benchmarks and our VCR-bench covering single-image and multi-image tasks.

Visual generation is evolving from generative models used through a single invocation into agentic control processes that can plan, select tools, inspect intermediate synthesized outputs, revise failures, and reuse prior experience. In most existing systems, the controller is an LLM or VLM, while visual generation models serve as tools or executors. However, existing work lacks a consistent criterion for determining when a generation system becomes agentic. Planning depth, tool use, multi-role collaboration, and reinforcement learning are often treated as evidence of agenticity, even though none of them necessarily determines which generation decisions the controller can make. We organize the field according to what the controller can directly control in the generation process. At L1 Conditioning Control, the controller prepares the input to a predetermined generator but does not control which visual operation is executed. At L2 Execution Control, it selects and invokes actual generation, editing, rendering, or other content-modifying operations. At L3 Outcome-Adaptive Control, it observes an intermediate outcome and uses that observation to change a subsequent operation within the current task. At L4 Experience-Adaptive Control, it retains experience from completed tasks and uses that experience to change decisions on future tasks. L0 Fixed Support separately denotes generators, editors, evaluators, reward models, benchmarks, and fixed pipelines without a deployed controller that makes generation-level decisions. These levels describe a progressively broader decision-making scope rather than model size, system complexity, output quality, tool or role count, or training method. Applying this framework across image, video, editing, 3D, world, slide, and user-interface generation reveals how controller capabilities have evolved and how their mechanisms are distributed across levels.

Humans often specify and create through visual artifacts: typography sheets, sketches, reference images, and annotated scenes. Yet modern visual generators still ask users to serialize this intent into text, a bottleneck that compresses signals like spatial structure, exact appearance, and glyph shape. We propose visual-to-visual (V2V) generation, in which the user conditions a generative model with a visual specification page rather than a text prompt. The page is not an edit target, but a visual document that specifies the desired output. We introduce V2V-Zero, a training-free framework that exposes this interface in existing vision-language model (VLM) conditioned generators by replacing text-only conditioning with final-layer hidden states extracted from visual pages, exploiting the fact that the frozen VLM already maps both text and images into the generator's conditioning space. On GenEval, V2V-Zero reaches 0.85 with a frozen Qwen-Image backbone, closely matching its optimized text-to-image performance without fine-tuning. To evaluate the broader V2V space, we introduce Simple-V2V Bench, spanning seven visual-conditioning tasks and seven models, including GPT Image 2, Nano Banana 2, Seedream 5.0 Lite, open-weight baselines, and a video extension. V2V-Zero scores 32.7/100, outperforming evaluated open-weight image baselines and revealing a clear capability hierarchy: attribute binding is strong, content generation is unreliable, and structural control remains hard even for commercial systems. A HunyuanVideo-1.5 extension scores 20.2/100, showing the interface transfers beyond images. Mechanistic analysis shows the default reasoning path is primarily visually routed, with 95.0% of conditioning-token attention mass on visual-page hidden states.