Dictionary entry Trending
visual chain-of-thought
also visual CoT or VCoT or VisCoT or thinking with images
Definition of visual chain-of-thought
-
: a multimodal AI reasoning method that uses visual information or intermediate visual representations, such as selected image regions, crops, sketches, diagrams, or generated images, across multiple steps instead of carrying out the whole reasoning process only in text
- The model used visual chain-of-thought to crop the diagram, inspect two regions, and then compare their geometry.
- A visual CoT can include a generated floor plan that helps the model reason about where objects are located.
Origin & history
Visual Chain of Thought was introduced as the name of a multimodal reasoning method in a 2023 research paper that used visual guidance to fill gaps in sequential reasoning. Related work subsequently used visual chain-of-thought for iterative interaction between images and language, region-grounded reasoning, and generated visual intermediates.
Editorial references
Sources & further reading
- Visual Chain of Thought: Bridging Logical Gaps with Multimodal Infillings↗ Research Paper · arXiv · 2023-05-03
- Visual Chain-of-Thought Prompting for Knowledge-Based Visual Reasoning↗ Peer Reviewed Research Paper · AAAI · 2024-03-24
- Thinking with images↗ Official Technical Announcement · OpenAI · 2025-04-16
Test yourself
Which of these is the meaning of visual chain-of-thought?
Cite this entry
"Visual chain-of-thought." AI Dictionary, Dadgogo, https://dadgogo.com/dictionary/visual-chain-of-thought/. Accessed 16 Oct. 2026.