Thinking with Drafting: Optical Decompression via Logical Reconstruction
Authors: name: Jingxuan Wei, name: Honghao He, name: Caijun Jia, name: Siyuan Li, name: Zheng Sun, name: Yuhang Xu, name: Yuanyuan Lin, name: Linzhuang Sun, name: Yuchen Wu, name: Bihui Yu, name: Xiangxiang Zhang, name: Cheng Tan
Organization: ByteDance

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.