arXiv AI

Mind What Matters for Reasoning: Aligning Cross-Modal Attention via Selective Probability Mass Concentration

The paper introduces Selective Probability Mass Concentration (sPMC), a training framework that strengthens implicit visual grounding in multimodal large language models by selectively regularizing attention heads most responsive to visual evidence. sPMC treats attention over visual tokens as a spatial probability distribution and encourages mass to concentrate on semantically relevant regions using segmentation-derived priors, while leaving other heads unconstrained. Across six multimodal benchmarks, sPMC yields an average zero‑shot improvement of 3% and gains up to 11.3% for various models by regularizing only 3%–15% of their attention heads.

arXiv AI

1d ago

Skip the Talk, Re-Focus on Vision: Latent Reasoning for Reasoning Segmentation in Multimodal Large Language Models

The paper introduces LIRSeg, a method that replaces explicit Chain-of-Thought reasoning in multimodal large language models with a compact set of learnable latent tokens for reasoning segmentation. LIRSeg is trained in two stages—spatial alignment and GRPO—while employing extreme-advantage sampling, decoupled exploration-stability updates, and latent diversity amplification to enhance token informativeness. Experiments show that LIRSeg improves segmentation accuracy and reasoning efficiency, achieving significant gIoU gains over the VisionReasoner baseline and reducing reasoning tokens by about 16×.

By Tianhang Guo, Yulin He, Wei Chen, Wenjuan Zhou, Yuhang Li, Xinbiao Gan

llms agents computer-vision robotics multimodal benchmarks safety

arXiv AI

Aug 5

Balancing Efficiency and Efficacy: Training-Free Attention-Guided Switching Between Explicit and Latent Thoughts for MLLMs

arXiv:2608. 03450v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) requires both fine-grained visual perception and rigorous logical deduction.

By Haoqian Kang, Liupeng Li, Kuofeng Gao, Jinpeng Wang, Zhenyu Lu, Bin Chen, Ke Chen, Yaowei Wang

llms multimodal benchmarks safety

arXiv AI

Jun 2

LookWise: Knowing When and Where to Look for Fine-Grained Visual Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models

arXiv:2603. 00171v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are shifting towards "Thinking with Images" by actively exploring image details.

By Yuxiang Shen, Hailong Huang, Zhenkun Gao, Xueheng Li, Man Zhou, Chengjun Xie, Haoxuan Che, Xuanhua He, Jie Zhang

llms multimodal benchmarks

arXiv AI

Aug 7

Look Twice: Training-Free Evidence Highlighting for Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering

arXiv:2604. 01280v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering (KB-VQA) requires Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to identify and combine fine-grained visual cues with retrieved textual evidence.

By Marco Morini, Sara Sarto, Marcella Cornia, Lorenzo Baraldi, Rita Cucchiara

llms nlp multimodal benchmarks

arXiv AI

Jul 28

Disentangling Semantic Attention from Structural Bias in the Attention Manifold

arXiv:2607. 24017v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The empirical success of attention mechanism in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often obscures its inherent, subtle flaws.

By Pengkun Jiao, Bin Zhu, Jingjing Chen, Yu-gang Jiang

llms multimodal benchmarks safety

arXiv Machine Learning

Jun 26

Staying VIGILant: Mitigating Visual Laziness via Counterfactual Visual Alignment in MLLMs

arXiv:2606. 26387v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) extend large language models (LLMs) with visual perception, enabling joint reasoning over images and text.

By Xi Xiao, Chen Liu, Chih-Ting Liao, Yunbei Zhang, Qizhen Lan, Yuxiang Wei, Lin Zhao, Janet Wang, Jianyang Gu, Muchao Ye, Tianyang Wang, Hao Xu

llms reinforcement-learning multimodal benchmarks safety

arXiv AI

Aug 25

Think with Structured Grounding: Perceptual Reinforcement Learning for Chart and Visual-Tabular Understanding

arXiv:2608.22429v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) capable of thinking with images often rely on external tools for fine-grained perception. However, this relian...

By Changjiang Jiang, Qiannian Zhao, Lei Xin, Jinxiang Xie, Preslav Nakov, Zhuohan Xie

llms reinforcement-learning fine-tuning efficiency multimodal

arXiv AI

Aug 18

Beyond Visual CoT: Internalized Visual Thinking for Proactive Video Reasoning

arXiv:2608. 15869v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models increasingly use visual chain-of-thought (Visual CoT) to reason about spatial, temporal, and embodied environments.

By Xiaoyu Zhu, Xinke Deng, Suresh Taddewadikar, Arnab Kumar Mondal, Zhongyu Jiang, Ian Fasel, Joerg Liebelt

llms rag robotics fine-tuning multimodal

arXiv AI

Jun 16

Thinking with Visual Grounding

arXiv:2606. 16122v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual thinking should not only sound right; it should show its evidence.

By Junkai Zhang, Yihe Deng, Kai-Wei Chang, Wei Wang

llms agents reinforcement-learning multimodal benchmarks

arXiv AI

Jun 17

See First, Answer Later: Visual Evidence Pre-Alignment via Sufficiency-Driven RL

arXiv:2606. 17678v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) integrate strong text reasoning with visual inputs, yet their responses can be inconsistent with the underlying images, indicating ineffective utilization of visual evidence during inference.

By Yilian Liu, Sicong Leng, Guoshun Nan, Junyi Zhu, Jiayu Huang, Minghao Sun, Xuancheng Zhu, Yisong Chen, Zexian Wei, Xiaofeng Tao

llms reinforcement-learning fine-tuning multimodal benchmarks safety

arXiv Computation and Language

Sep 4

Attend to Evidence: Evidence-Anchored Spatial Attention Supervision for Multimodal RLVR

The paper introduces EASE, a method that enhances multimodal reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) by adding visual‑evidence process supervision. EASE transforms annotated evidence regions into smoothed visual‑token targets and uses them to guide attention during RL training, but only on high‑reward trajectories. Experiments on Qwen2.5‑VL‑7B, Qwen3‑VL‑4B, and Qwen3‑VL‑8B show that EASE improves average scores over DAPO by 2.5 to 3.1 points across perception, hallucination, visual math, and multimodal reasoning benchmarks, and diagnostics confirm better alignment of visual attention with annotated evidence.

By Ruina Hu, Chen Wang, Lai Wei, Jionghao Bai, Bin Yu, Weiran Huang, Kai Wang, Yue Wang

llms reinforcement-learning multimodal benchmarks safety

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

llms multimodal benchmarks

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