Yihang Zou
Publications
VideoCoCo: Code-as-CoT for Physically-Consistent Video Generation via an Agentic Dual-Engine System
Text-to-video models have achieved remarkable visual quality, yet they still struggle to generate physically consistent dynamics because the temporal evolution of a scene must be inferred implicitly from a highly compressed text prompt. Existing chain-of-thought approaches introduce intermediate plans or visual states, but these representations are typically non-executable or temporally sparse, limiting their ability to instantiate and control the complete spatiotemporal process. To address this limitation, we introduce VideoCoCo, an agentic dual-engine framework in which executable Blender code serves as a process-level chain of thought. Given a text prompt, a coding agent synthesizes a Blender program that explicitly specifies the scene and its temporal evolution. The executable simulation engine runs the program to produce a deterministic spatiotemporal draft, which is subsequently transformed into a photorealistic video by a generative video engine through draft-conditioned editing. This decomposition separates process-level reasoning from high-fidelity visual realization. To adapt the video editor to simulated drafts, we construct VideoCoCo-3K, a curated dataset of draft-instruction-target triplets. VideoCoCo improves the OmniWeaving baseline from 0.475 to 0.558 on PhyGenBench and from 52.18 to 77.88 on VBench-2.0, achieving the best average score on both benchmarks. These results demonstrate that executable code provides an effective, controllable, and inspectable intermediate representation for physically consistent video generation.
CoCo: Code as CoT for Text-to-Image Preview and Rare Concept Generation
Recent advancements in Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) have significantly advanced text-to-image (T2I) generation, particularly through the integration of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. However, existing CoT-based T2I methods largely rely on abstract natural-language planning, which lacks the precision required for complex spatial layouts, structured visual elements, and dense textual content. In this work, we propose CoCo (Code-as-CoT), a code-driven reasoning framework that represents the reasoning process as executable code, enabling explicit and verifiable intermediate planning for image generation. Given a text prompt, CoCo first generates executable code that specifies the structural layout of the scene. The code is then executed in a sandboxed environment to render a deterministic draft image. Subsequently, the model refines this draft through fine-grained image editing to produce the final high-fidelity result. To support this training paradigm, we construct CoCo-10K, a curated dataset containing structured draft-final image pairs designed to teach both structured draft construction and corrective visual refinement. Empirical evaluations on StructT2IBench, OneIG-Bench, and LongText-Bench show that CoCo achieves improvements of 68.83%, 54.8%, and 41.23%, respectively, over direct generation, while also outperforming other CoT-enhanced generation methods. These results demonstrate that executable code is an effective and reliable reasoning paradigm for precise, controllable, and structured text-to-image generation.