PromptCoT: Align Prompt Distribution via Adapted Chain-of-Thought
Junyi Yao, Yijiang Liu, Zhen Dong, Mingfei Guo, Helan Hu, Kurt Keutzer, Li Du, Daquan Zhou, Shanghang Zhang
Abstract
Diffusion-based generative models have exhibited remarkable capability in the production of high-fidelity visual content such as images and videos. However, their performance is significantly contingent upon the quality of textual inputs, commonly referred to as ‘'prompts'. The process of traditional prompt engineering necessitates empirical exper-tise and poses challenges for inexperienced users. In this paper, we introduce PromptCoT, an innovative enhancer that autonomously refines prompts for users. PromptCoT is designed based on the observation that prompts, which re-semble the textual information of high-quality images during training, lead to superior generation performance. Therefore, we fine-tune the Large Language Models (LLM) using a curated text dataset that comprises descriptions of high-quality visual content. Consequently, the LLM can capture the distribution of high-quality texts, enabling it to boost the original texts. Nonetheless, one drawback of LLMs is their tendency to generate irrelevant information. We employ a tailored Chain-of-Thought (CoT) mechanism to address the problem. Our CoT can extract and amalgamate crucial information from the prompt candidates, enabling a reasonable process based on the contextual cues to produce a more comprehensive and nuanced output. Considering computational efficiency, instead of allocating a dedicated LLM to each individual model or dataset, we integrate adapters that facil-itate task-specific adaptation, leveraging a shared LLM as the foundation for this process. With independent fine-tuning of adapters, we can adapt PromptCoT to new datasets while minimally increasing training costs and memory usage. We evaluate the effectiveness of PromptCoT by assessing on widely-used latent diffusion models for visual generation. The results demonstrate significant improvements in key performance metrics.
Ask about this paper
Your agent reads all of it.
Lune indexed this paper to the last equation, along with the top-tier papers that cite it. Ask a question and the answer quotes them.
Cited by top-tier papers5
- Seeing the Undefined: Chain-of-Action for Generative Semantic LabelsMeng Wei, Zhongnian Li, Peng Ying, Xinzheng XuACM MM 2025
- Vinci: Deep Thinking in Text-to-Image Generation using Unified Model with Reinforcement LearningWang Lin, Wentao Hu, Liyu Jia, Kaihang Pan et al.NeurIPS 2025
- Chain-of-Thought Guided Multi-Modal Object Re-IdentificationYa Gao, Shihao Li, Zhaojun Liu, Aihua Zheng et al.CVPR 2026
- SPRO: Improving Image Generation via Self-PlayRitika Jha, Aanisha Bhattacharyya, Yaman Singla, Rajiv Ratn Shah et al.NeurIPS 2025
- Predictive Regularization Against Visual Representation Degradation in Multimodal Large Language ModelsEnguang Wang, Qiang Wang, Yuanchen Wu, Ke Yan et al.CVPR 2026
Builds on5
- Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language SupervisionAlec Radford, Jong Wook Kim, Chris Hallacy, Aditya Ramesh et al.ICML 2021 · 47,906 citations
- Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackLong Ouyang, Jeffrey Wu, Xu Jiang, Diogo Almeida et al.NeurIPS 2022 · 24,707 citations
- High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion ModelsRobin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, Dominik Lorenz, Patrick Esser et al.CVPR 2022 · 13,123 citations
- Pick-a-Pic: An Open Dataset of User Preferences for Text-to-Image GenerationYuval Kirstain, Adam Polyak, Uriel Singer, Shahbuland Matiana et al.NeurIPS 2023 · 1,192 citations
- DiffusionDB: A Large-scale Prompt Gallery Dataset for Text-to-Image Generative ModelsZijie J. Wang, Evan Montoya, David Munechika, Haoyang Yang et al.ACL 2023 · 149 citations
Related papers
- Decoder-Only LLMs are Better Controllers for Diffusion ModelsZiyi Dong, Yao Xiao, Pengxu Wei, Liang LinACM MM 2024 · 3 citations
- Why Prompt Design Matters and Works: A Complexity Analysis of Prompt Search Space in LLMsXiang Zhang, Juntai Cao, Chenyu You, Dujian DingACL 2025 · 21 citations
- LLM Blueprint: Enabling Text-to-Image Generation with Complex and Detailed PromptsHanan Gani, Shariq Farooq Bhat, Muzammal Naseer, Salman Khan et al.ICLR 2024 · 61 citations
- Interleaved-Modal Chain-of-ThoughtJun Gao, Yongqi Li, Ziqiang Cao, Wenjie LiCVPR 2025
- CoT-Edit: Let CoT Guide Instruction Video EditingSen Liang, Fengbin Guan, Youliang Zhang, Xin Li et al.CVPR 2026 · 5 citations
