Render-of-Thought: Rendering Textual Chain-of-Thought as Images for Visual Latent Reasoning
Yifan Wang, Shiyu Li Tencent, Peiming Li, Xiaochen Yang University of Glasgow, Zheng Wei Tencent Technology (Beijing) Company Limited, Yang Tang Tencent
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has achieved remarkable success in unlocking the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Although CoT prompting enhances reasoning, its verbosity imposes substantial computational overhead. Recent works often focus exclusively on outcome alignment and lack supervision on the intermediate reasoning process. These deficiencies obscure the analyzability of the latent reasoning chain. To address these challenges, we introduce Render-of-Thought (RoT), the first framework to reify the reasoning chain by rendering textual steps into images, making the latent rationale explicit and traceable. Specifically, we leverage the vision encoders of existing Vision Language Models (VLMs) as semantic anchors to align the vision embeddings with the textual space. This design ensures plug-and-play implementation without incurring additional pre-training overhead. Extensive experiments on mathematical and logical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves 3-4\times token compression and substantial inference acceleration compared to explicit CoT. Furthermore, it demonstrates a competitive efficiency-accuracy Pareto exploration compared to other methods, validating the feasibility of this paradigm. Our code is available at https://github.com/TencentBAC/RoT
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表