In this paper, highly-efficient optical gating in a junction device based on vanadium dioxide($VO_2$) thin film grown by a sol-gel method was investigated as a gate terminal of a three-terminal device using infrared light with a wavelength of ~1554.6 nm. Due to the photoinduced phase transition, the threshold voltage of the $VO_2$ junction device, at which the device current abruptly jumps, could be tuned with a sensitivity of ~96.5 V/W by adjusting the optical power of the infrared light directly illuminating the device. Compared with the tuning efficiency of the previous device fabricated using $VO_2$ thin film deposited by a pulsed laser deposition method, the threshold voltage of this device could be tuned by ~76.8 % at an illumination power of ~39.8 mW resulting in a tuning efficiency of ~1.930 %/mW, which is ~4.9 times larger than the previous device.