Synthetic Perception: Can Generated Images Unlock Latent Visual Prior for Text-Centric Reasoning?

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Huang, Yuesheng, Zhang, Peng, Wu, Xiaoxin, Liu, Riliang, Liang, Jiaqi
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Huang, Yuesheng
Zhang, Peng
Wu, Xiaoxin
Liu, Riliang
Liang, Jiaqi
author_facet Huang, Yuesheng
Zhang, Peng
Wu, Xiaoxin
Liu, Riliang
Liang, Jiaqi
contents A significant ``modality gap" exists between the abundance of text-only data and the increasing power of multimodal models. This work systematically investigates whether images generated on-the-fly by Text-to-Image (T2I) models can serve as a mechanism to unlock latent visual priors for text-centric reasoning. Through a comprehensive evaluation framework on text classification, we analyze the impact of critical variables, including T2I model quality (e.g., Flux.1, SDXL), prompt engineering strategies, and multimodal fusion architectures. Our findings demonstrate that this ``synthetic perception" can yield significant performance gains by effectively projecting text into a visual semantic space, even when augmenting strong large language model baselines like Llama-3 and Qwen-2.5. We show that this approach serves as a form of cross-modal probing, mitigating the sensory deprivation inherent in pure text training. However, the effectiveness is highly conditional, depending on the semantic alignment between text and the generated image, the task's visual groundability, and the generative fidelity of the T2I model. Our work establishes a rigorous benchmark for this paradigm, demonstrating its viability as a pathway to enrich language understanding in traditionally unimodal scenarios.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_17623
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Synthetic Perception: Can Generated Images Unlock Latent Visual Prior for Text-Centric Reasoning?
Huang, Yuesheng
Zhang, Peng
Wu, Xiaoxin
Liu, Riliang
Liang, Jiaqi
Multimedia
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
A significant ``modality gap" exists between the abundance of text-only data and the increasing power of multimodal models. This work systematically investigates whether images generated on-the-fly by Text-to-Image (T2I) models can serve as a mechanism to unlock latent visual priors for text-centric reasoning. Through a comprehensive evaluation framework on text classification, we analyze the impact of critical variables, including T2I model quality (e.g., Flux.1, SDXL), prompt engineering strategies, and multimodal fusion architectures. Our findings demonstrate that this ``synthetic perception" can yield significant performance gains by effectively projecting text into a visual semantic space, even when augmenting strong large language model baselines like Llama-3 and Qwen-2.5. We show that this approach serves as a form of cross-modal probing, mitigating the sensory deprivation inherent in pure text training. However, the effectiveness is highly conditional, depending on the semantic alignment between text and the generated image, the task's visual groundability, and the generative fidelity of the T2I model. Our work establishes a rigorous benchmark for this paradigm, demonstrating its viability as a pathway to enrich language understanding in traditionally unimodal scenarios.
title Synthetic Perception: Can Generated Images Unlock Latent Visual Prior for Text-Centric Reasoning?
topic Multimedia
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.17623