@inproceedings{sun-etal-2026-t2i,
    title = "{T}2{I}-{R}eason{B}ench: Benchmarking Reasoning-Informed Text-to-Image Generation",
    author = "Sun, Kaiyue  and
      Fang, Rongyao  and
      Duan, Chengqi  and
      Liu, Xian  and
      Li, Aoxue  and
      Liu, Xihui",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.433/",
    pages = "8919--8944",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "Text-to-image (T2I) generative models have achieved remarkable progress, demonstrating exceptional capability in synthesizing high-quality images from textual prompts. While existing research and benchmarks have extensively evaluated the ability of T2I models to follow the literal meaning of prompts, their ability to reason over prompts with domain knowledge to uncover implicit meaning and contextual nuances remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce T2I-ReasonBench, a novel benchmark designed to explore the knowledge-driven reasoning capabilities of T2I models.T2I-ReasonBench comprises 800 meticulously designed prompts organized into four dimensions: \textbf{(1) Idiom Interpretation}, \textbf{(2) Textual Image Design}, \textbf{(3) Entity Reasoning}, and \textbf{(4) Scientific Reasoning}. These dimensions challenge models to integrate domain knowledge, infer implicit meaning, and resolve contextual ambiguities. To quantify the performance, we introduce a two-stage evaluation framework: a large language model (LLM) generates prompt-specific question-criterion pairs that evaluate if the image includes the essential elements resulting from correct reasoning; a multimodal LLM (MLLM) then scores the generated image against these criteria. Our comprehensive study across 16 state-of-the-art diffusion and unified multimodal models (UMMs) reveal two primary bottlenecks. First, many models lack the foundational reasoning ability to fully comprehend complex prompts. Second, even models with stronger reasoning modules exhibit a persistent gap between their internal understanding and the final generated image. This highlights an urgent need for the next generation of T2I systems to not only improve their reasoning capability but also to enhance integration between reasoning and synthesis."
}