arXiv AI

CARV: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Compositional Analogical Reasoning in Multimodal LLMs

arXiv:2603. 27958v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Analogical reasoning tests a fundamental aspect of human cognition: mapping the relation from one pair of objects to another.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 15

Func-R1: Incentivizing Mathematical Function Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models

arXiv:2609.14779v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Performing deliberate mathematical reasoning in visual contexts is a hallmark of advanced Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and requires a sophi...

By Mingze Yin, Xiaohan Wang, Dian Li, Haichao Yao, Yilin Zhao, Youjun Chen, Gang Liu, Jintai Chen, Yiheng Zhu, Chang-Yu Hsieh, Aimin Pan
arXiv AI
6d ago

Can Linguistic Reasoning Vectors Enhance Multimodal Reasoning Ability?

The paper introduces LIFT, a lightweight vector‑intervention technique that transfers reasoning capability from a base large language model (LLM) to a vision‑language model (VLM) without retraining the VLM backbone. LIFT defines Reasoning Vectors as differences in hidden states between a reasoning path with an explicit trace and a solver path without it, and injects these vectors into the VLM’s language‑side activations. Experiments on two VLMs across six reasoning benchmarks show that vectors derived from the base LLM consistently outperform those derived from the aligned VLM, indicating that the base LLM is a more effective source for recovering degraded reasoning. "whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that a simple, frozen‑backbone intervention can partially restore reasoning abilities in multimodal models, highlighting the value of leveraging the original language model’s reasoning power."

By Ziyi Wang, Li Li, Aolin Zhou, Yankun Shen, Chonghan Liu, Shuxia Lin, Xu Yang
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 10

From Symbolic Perception to Logical Deduction: A Framework for Guiding Language Models in Geometric Reasoning

The paper introduces a framework that combines a Geometric Vision Parser and a Symbolic Solver to enable a Large Language Model to solve complex plane geometry problems. By translating diagrams into symbolic representations and performing formal deductions, the approach reduces hallucinations and produces interpretable, human-like solutions. Experiments on a new benchmark from 2025 Chinese Zhongkao exams show performance comparable to Gemini 2.5 Pro.

By Weichen Dai, Rafael Medeiros Cabral, Ziyi Shou, Yan Cao, Xin Shen, Dongcai Lu, Yi Zhou
arXiv AI
6d ago

Beyond Bag-of-Words: Diagnosing Compositional Binding Failures in Vision-Language Models

The paper introduces Auto-Comp, a fully automated, concept-driven pipeline that generates photorealistic compositional benchmarks for vision‑language models. Auto‑Comp creates paired Minimal and Contextual samples for each concept, enabling isolation of core binding abilities from visio‑linguistic complexity. Evaluations across 25 models reveal consistent failures in attribute and relational binding, with context helping relational tasks but hindering attribute tasks due to visual clutter.

By Cristian Sbrolli, Toshihiko Yamasaki, Matteo Matteucci
arXiv AI
Jun 16

UniT: Unified Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Test-time Scaling

arXiv:2602. 12279v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unified models can handle both multimodal understanding and generation within a single architecture, yet they typically operate in a single pass without iteratively refining their outputs.

By Leon Liangyu Chen, Haoyu Ma, Zhipeng Fan, Ziqi Huang, Animesh Sinha, Xiaoliang Dai, Jialiang Wang, Zecheng He, Jianwei Yang, Chunyuan Li, Junzhe Sun, Chu Wang, Serena Yeung-Levy, Felix Juefei-Xu
arXiv AI
2d ago

PRISM: A Category-Theoretic Framework for Measuring and Refining Multimodal Analogies

PRISM is a modality‑agnostic, category‑theoretic framework that measures and refines multimodal analogies by representing them as explicit relational mappings. It introduces a pullback score to quantify relational alignment and an iterative refinement loop that uses this score as feedback to improve generated images. On the AnaloBench benchmark, PRISM’s pullback score alone achieves 82.5% accuracy, and human evaluations show a 57.65% preference for refined outputs, though refinement may sometimes favor visually crowded compositions.

By Mirella Zeisler, Ojas Shirekar, Mircea Lic\v{a}, Chirag Raman
arXiv AI
Jul 9

Explain Before You Answer: A Survey on Compositional Visual Reasoning

arXiv:2508. 17298v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Compositional visual reasoning has emerged as a key research frontier in multimodal AI, aiming to endow machines with the human-like ability to decompose visual scenes, ground intermediate concepts, and perform multi-step logical inference.

By Fucai Ke, Joy Hsu, Zhixi Cai, Zixian Ma, Xin Zheng, Xindi Wu, Sukai Huang, Weiqing Wang, Pari Delir Haghighi, Gholamreza Haffari, Ranjay Krishna, Jiajun Wu, Hamid Rezatofighi