arXiv AI

Beyond the Sequentiality Bottleneck: A Hybrid Diffusion-Autoregressive Framework for Efficient Multimodal Reasoning

arXiv AI
Oct 2

Selection-Based Structured Reasoning: Toward Efficient Multimodal Search Agents

Selection-Based Structured Reasoning (SSR) is a framework that replaces free-form reasoning with the selection of pre-specified natural‑language reasoning candidates, allowing multimodal agents to choose from a set of reusable high‑level reasoning traces. By scoring these candidates in parallel using a shared context KV cache, SSR eliminates the need for an auxiliary task head and reduces inference cost. Experiments on seven multimodal search benchmarks with 2B and 4B models show that SSR maintains competitive success rates while cutting per‑turn reasoning latency by over 90% and overall inference latency by 28–54%.

By Feiyu Gavin Zhu, Xiaoyu Zhu, Jiqi Yang, Rui Yang, Arnab Kumar Mondal, Yancheng Wang, Xinke Deng, Jean Oh, Reid Simmons, Joerg Liebelt, Xiang Kong, Zhongyu Jiang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

CanvasAnneal: Curriculum Reinforcement Learning for Diffusion Language Models

CanvasAnneal is a curriculum‑guided reinforcement learning framework designed to improve Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) on complex reasoning and tool‑use tasks. It starts training by injecting reasoning traces from a stronger teacher model into the diffusion canvas, then gradually reduces this guidance so the model learns to generate reasoning independently. Experiments on mathematical reasoning and tool‑use benchmarks show that CanvasAnneal outperforms standard diffusion RL methods such as diffu‑GRPO on tasks like MATH500, Countdown, and Tau2, and accelerates reward improvement, though the gains vary by task.

By Blake Olson, Yuhang Song, Emmett McQuinn, Yuan Shangguan
arXiv AI
Jul 1

Breaking Failure Cascades: Step-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Medical Multimodal Reasoning

arXiv:2606. 31825v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent multimodal large language models have shown great promise in clinical image reasoning, but existing post-training pipelines remain predominantly outcome-centric, relying on final answer correctness or sequence-level preferences.

By Junha Jung, Minbyul Jeong, Suhyeon Lim, Sungwook Jung, Jaehoon Yun, Taeyun Roh, Mujeen Sung, Jaewoo Kang
arXiv AI
Jul 1

Token-Sparse Medical Multimodal Reasoning via Dual-Stream Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606. 31599v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) combining reinforcement learning (RL) ignite remarkable progress in multimodal reasoning, yet still struggle with medical images, which typically exhibit extremely sparse visual evidence to inform clinical decision-making.

By Kaitao Chen, Weiqian Zhao, Jiamin Wu, Qihao Zheng, Shangquan Sun, Chunfeng Song, Xiaosong Wang, Mu Zhou, Mianxin Liu
arXiv Machine Learning
3d ago

Parallelizable Probabilistic Latent Reasoning for Diverse Reasoning Trajectories

The paper introduces Probabilistic Latent Reasoning Models (PLRM), a parallelizable variational framework that moves reasoning from token‑by‑token language generation into a continuous latent space. PLRM uses a JEPA‑style objective to infer latent distributions in parallel and a mixture‑based prior with a discrete strategy variable to preserve multiple distinct reasoning trajectories. Experiments show PLRM matches deterministic latent models on single‑trajectory tasks and outperforms stochastic baselines on multi‑trajectory benchmarks while enabling efficient training.

By Seokhyun Lee, Seongjun Lee, Changhee Lee
arXiv AI
Oct 9

More Than Meets the Eye? Uncovering the Reasoning-Planning Disconnect in Training Vision-Language Driving Models

The paper introduces DriveMind, a large-scale driving Visual Question Answering corpus that aligns chain-of-thought reasoning with trajectory planning. Experiments with Vision‑Language Model agents show a causal disconnect: removing navigation priors significantly harms planning, while removing the chain-of-thought has little effect. The authors propose the Reasoning‑Planning Decoupling Hypothesis and present a training‑free probe to assess an agent’s reliance on priors.

By Xurui Song, Shuo Huai, JingJing Jiang, Jiayi Kong, Jun Luo