Thinking with Drafting: Optical Decompression via Logical Reconstruction

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11731v1
• Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2026 08:54:02 GMT
• Title: Thinking with Drafting: Optical Decompression via Logical Reconstruction
• Abstract summary: We present Thinking with Drafting (TwD) as a process of reconstructing latent logical structures from compressed visual tokens.<n>TwD forces the model to draft its mental model into executable code, rendering deterministic visual proofs for self-verification.<n>Our work establishes a closed-loop system where visual generation acts not as a creative output but as a logical verifier.
• Score: 19.018138128118775
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Existing multimodal large language models have achieved high-fidelity visual perception and exploratory visual generation. However, a precision paradox persists in complex reasoning tasks: optical perception systems transcribe symbols without capturing logical topology, while pixel-based generative models produce visual artifacts lacking mathematical exactness. To bridge this gap, we propose that reasoning over visual inputs be reconceptualized as optical decompression-the process of reconstructing latent logical structures from compressed visual tokens. Guided by the axiom that Parsing is Reasoning, we introduce Thinking with Drafting (TwD), which utilizes a minimalist Domain-Specific Language (DSL) as a grounding intermediate representation. Unlike standard approaches that hallucinate answers directly, TwD forces the model to draft its mental model into executable code, rendering deterministic visual proofs for self-verification. To validate this, we present VisAlg, a visual algebra benchmark. Experiments demonstrate that TwD serve as a superior cognitive scaffold. Our work establishes a closed-loop system where visual generation acts not as a creative output but as a logical verifier, offering a generalizable path for visual reasoning.

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