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.
@article{arxiv.2602.11731,
title = {Thinking with Drafting: Optical Decompression via Logical Reconstruction},
author = {Jingxuan Wei and Honghao He and Caijun Jia and Siyuan Li and Zheng Sun and Yuhang Xu and Yuanyuan Lin and Linzhuang Sun and Yuchen Wu and Bihui Yu and Xiangxiang Zhang and Cheng Tan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.11731},
year = {2026}
}