arXiv AI

MentalThink: Shaping Thoughts in Mental SVG World

arXiv:2607. 03530v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce MentalThink, a visual-symbolic reasoning paradigm that equips Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) with an executable mechanism for "mental" visualization.

arXiv AI
Jun 11

MentisOculi: Revealing the Limits of Reasoning with Mental Imagery

arXiv:2602. 02465v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Frontier models are transitioning from multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that merely ingest visual information to unified multimodal models (UMMs) capable of native interleaved generation.

By Jana Zeller, Thadd\"aus Wiedemer, Fanfei Li, Thomas Klein, Prasanna Mayilvahanan, Matthias Bethge, Felix Wichmann, Ryan Cotterell, Wieland Brendel
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 21

Scaffolding Minds: Optimizing Latent Visual Target Representations for Multimodal Reasoning

arXiv:2608. 19669v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Latent reasoning has advanced multimodal reasoning through a two-stage training paradigm: (1) a helper image is encoded into latent tokens to teach visual chain-of-thought during a supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage, and (2) these latent tokens are further refined with reward feedback during a reinforcement learning (RL) stage.

By Haoqiang Kang, Yinpeng Chen, Luyang Liu, Jesper Sparre Andersen, Abhijit Ogale, Baochen Sun, Lichan Hong, Ed H. Chi
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 23

PointVG-R: Internalizing Geometric Reasoning in MLLMs for Precise Pointing Localization via Visual Chain of Thought

Pointing-based visual grounding requires models to precisely locate target objects by deciphering complex spatial relationships between the visual scene and pointing gestures. Traditional methods typically encode input images into static feature representations and perform reasoning primarily within the linguistic domain, often overlooking the rich perceptual cues and explicit spatial geometry inherent in images.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 20

Scaffolding Minds: Optimizing Latent Visual Target Representations for Multimodal Reasoning

Latent reasoning has advanced multimodal reasoning through a two-stage training paradigm: (1) a helper image is encoded into latent tokens to teach visual chain-of-thought during a supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage, and (2) these latent tokens are further refined with reward feedback during a reinforcement learning (RL) stage. In this paper, we identify two key limitations of this framework, one in each stage.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

Multimodal Thinking with Renderable Programs

The paper introduces SVGLM, a framework that integrates scalable vector graphics (SVG) primitives into vision‑language models to enable image generation within reasoning tasks. By treating SVG both as image descriptions and text instructions, SVGLM offers a compact and interpretable method for connecting text and image reasoning. The authors provide a curated SVG‑based image editing dataset and demonstrate strong SVG generation and image‑aware reasoning performance on a mathematical benchmark.

By Sunli Chen, Ding Zhong, Ziqiao Ma, Jiaxin Liu, Zeyuan Yang, Hao Zhang, Lie Lu, Joyce Chai, Chuang Gan
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

CoVA-SFT: A Large-Scale Dataset for Chain of Visual Abstractions

CoVA‑SFT is a new large‑scale dataset comprising 51.9K samples and over 222K multimodal reasoning steps that teach models to interleave text and visual abstractions across five layout families and 17 complex tasks. It includes explicit rationale formulations, agentic renderings, and verification loops to help models build and maintain internal visual workspaces for purely textual reasoning problems. A companion benchmark, CoVA‑Bench, contains 1,700 held‑out test samples for reproducible evaluation, and models fine‑tuned on CoVA‑SFT outperform all interleaved CoT baselines by more than 2× on average, though they still lag behind strong text‑only CoT baselines.

By Tsung-Han Wu, Heekyung Lee, Anya Ji, Haoming Chen, Trevor Darrell, Joseph E. Gonzalez, David M. Chan
arXiv AI
Jun 11

SVoT: State-aware Visualization-of-Thought for Spatial Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606. 11770v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spatial reasoning remains a challenge for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), as it requires reliable multi-hop inference over both intermediate states and state transitions.

By Chao Lei, Yanbei Jiang, Markus Hiller, Zhijian Zhou, Xunye Tian, Krista A. Ehinger, Nir Lipovetzky