Form and Void: Entangled Composition through an Autonomous AI Agent

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 \textbf{\emph{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 \textbf{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 \textbf{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.

Unified multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved strong text-to-image generation quality, but still struggle with structure-aware prompt following, where object counts, spatial relations, attribute bindings, and coarse layouts must be preserved. We attribute this limitation in part to the entanglement of structural planning and appearance rendering within a single conditioning stream. To address this issue, we propose Implicit Visual Chain-of-Thought (IV-CoT), a latent visual reasoning framework for query-conditioned image generation. IV-CoT decomposes the visual conditioning queries into a structural-to-semantic cascade, where structural queries first form a latent visual plan and semantic queries then render appearance conditioned on this plan. To guide the structural queries, we introduce training-only sketch supervision, which encourages them to capture structure from sketches without requiring sketch extraction or intermediate decoding at inference time. IV-CoT performs implicit CoT reasoning in a single forward pass and achieves superior results on GenEval and T2I-CompBench. Visualizations and analyses demonstrate that the learned structural and semantic queries play complementary roles in structure-aware generation.

Text-to-image (T2I) models can produce visually compelling images, yet they remain limited on open-world tasks that require complex semantic understanding, multi-step reasoning, and the integration of external world knowledge. Existing efforts introduce agent capabilities into image generation, but they either prescribe a fixed workflow or place only a subset of the open-world image generation process under agent control. Consequently, reasoning, tool invocation, and image generation are not coordinated by a single policy. We propose ToolArtist, a fully agentic image generation model obtained by post-training a Unified Multimodal Model (UMM). ToolArtist dynamically orchestrates reasoning, external tool use, and native image generation within one unified policy. During Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), we equip a teacher agent with search tools alongside an image-generation tool. We then convert the collected trajectories into a UMM compatible format, where the image-generation tool is concealed while the resulting generated images are retained. During Reinforcement Learning (RL), we develop an agentic RL infrastructure for UMMs and introduce Reason-Act-Draw GRPO (RAD-GRPO), which uses complementary intent and quality rewards to jointly optimize the model. Experiments show that placing the entire open-world image-generation process under an agent policy consistently outperforms approaches with fixed pipelines or only partially agent-controlled components. We release the training data and the complete post-training infrastructure.