The Thinking Pixel: Recursive Sparse Reasoning in Multimodal Diffusion Latents

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Sun, Yuwei, Yao, Yuxuan, Li, Hui, Zhu, Siyu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Sun, Yuwei
Yao, Yuxuan
Li, Hui
Zhu, Siyu
author_facet Sun, Yuwei
Yao, Yuxuan
Li, Hui
Zhu, Siyu
contents Diffusion models have achieved success in high-fidelity data synthesis, yet their capacity for more complex, structured reasoning like text following tasks remains constrained. While advances in language models have leveraged strategies such as latent reasoning and recursion to enhance text understanding capabilities, extending these to multimodal text-to-image generation tasks is challenging due to the continuous and non-discrete nature of visual tokens. To tackle this problem, we draw inspiration from modular human cognition and propose a recursive, sparse mixture-of-experts framework integrated into conventional diffusion models. Our approach introduces a recursive component within joint attention layers that iteratively refines visual tokens over multiple latent steps while efficiently sharing parameters via sparse selection of neural modules. At each step, a gating network is devised to dynamically select specialized neural modules, conditioned on the current visual tokens, the diffusion timestep, and the conditioning information. Comprehensive evaluation on class-conditioned ImageNet image generation tasks and additional studies on the GenEval and DPG benchmark demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in enhancing model image generation performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_25299
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Thinking Pixel: Recursive Sparse Reasoning in Multimodal Diffusion Latents
Sun, Yuwei
Yao, Yuxuan
Li, Hui
Zhu, Siyu
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Diffusion models have achieved success in high-fidelity data synthesis, yet their capacity for more complex, structured reasoning like text following tasks remains constrained. While advances in language models have leveraged strategies such as latent reasoning and recursion to enhance text understanding capabilities, extending these to multimodal text-to-image generation tasks is challenging due to the continuous and non-discrete nature of visual tokens. To tackle this problem, we draw inspiration from modular human cognition and propose a recursive, sparse mixture-of-experts framework integrated into conventional diffusion models. Our approach introduces a recursive component within joint attention layers that iteratively refines visual tokens over multiple latent steps while efficiently sharing parameters via sparse selection of neural modules. At each step, a gating network is devised to dynamically select specialized neural modules, conditioned on the current visual tokens, the diffusion timestep, and the conditioning information. Comprehensive evaluation on class-conditioned ImageNet image generation tasks and additional studies on the GenEval and DPG benchmark demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in enhancing model image generation performance.
title The Thinking Pixel: Recursive Sparse Reasoning in Multimodal Diffusion Latents
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.25299