arXiv Machine Learning

Latent-Aligned Reasoning for Multimodal Recommendation

The paper introduces LARK, a two‑stage latent reasoning framework designed to mitigate cross‑modal dilution in multimodal recommendation systems. In the first stage, learnable latent tokens are interleaved with chain‑of‑thought reasoning and aligned with a frozen vision encoder to preserve visual details. The second stage projects these latent representations through a bridge MLP, employing item‑to‑item contrastive learning and aligning intermediate features with the first‑stage hidden states to anchor final embeddings to the model’s reasoning output. Experiments on three public benchmarks and an industrial dataset demonstrate that LARK achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance across multiple recommendation architectures, with ablation studies confirming the contribution of each component.

arXiv Computation and Language

Aug 27

MMEmb-R1: Reasoning-Enhanced Multimodal Embedding with Pair-Aware Selection and Adaptive Control

MMEmb-R1 is a multimodal embedding framework that enhances reasoning by treating it as a latent variable and selecting beneficial reasoning paths through pair-aware selection and counterfactual intervention. It uses reinforcement learning to invoke reasoning only when necessary, reducing unnecessary computation and latency. On the MMEB-V2 benchmark, MMEmb-R1 achieves a state‑of‑the‑art score of 71.2 with just 4 B parameters.

By Yuchi Wang, Dingkang Yang, Haiyang Yu, Weikang Bian, Jiefeng Long, Xiao Liang, Chao Feng, Hongsheng Li

rag reinforcement-learning efficiency multimodal benchmarks safety

arXiv Machine Learning

Jul 28

LanteRn: Latent Visual Structured Reasoning

arXiv:2603. 25629v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While language reasoning models excel in many tasks, visual reasoning remains challenging for current large multimodal models (LMMs).

By Andr\'e G. Viveiros, Nuno Gon\c{c}alves, Matthias Lindemann, Andr\'e Martins

llms rag diffusion reinforcement-learning fine-tuning multimodal benchmarks

arXiv Computer Vision

Sep 1

LaME: Learning to Think in Latent Space for Multimodal Embedding via Information Bottleneck

arXiv:2606.13061v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reasoning-driven universal multimodal embedding has advanced rapidly by introducing Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning into the embedding pipeline. D...

By Peixi Wu, Biao Yang, Feipeng Ma, Bosong Chai, Bo Lin, Wei Yuan, Fan Yang, Tingting Gao, Hebei Li, Xiaoyan Sun

rag diffusion efficiency multimodal

arXiv Machine Learning

Jun 16

DLWM: Diverse Latent World Models for Efficient Multimodal Reasoning

arXiv:2606. 15160v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have improved considerably in recent years.

By David Huang, Lianlei Shan

llms diffusion reinforcement-learning efficiency multimodal benchmarks

Hugging Face Trending Papers

Jun 22

VideoLatent: Video-Language Learning via Latent Self-Forcing

Recent advancements in chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning have shown promise in enhancing video understanding and reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, existing CoT-based MLLMs require labor-intensive CoT annotations and incur substantial training and inference overhead.

llms multimodal benchmarks safety

arXiv Machine Learning

Jun 2

DeepLatent: Think with Images via Parallel Latent Visual Reasoning

arXiv:2606. 00562v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The emerging paradigm of "thinking with images" embeds visual states into intermediate reasoning steps, defining a new frontier for Vision-Language Models.

By Dongchen Lu, Zhimo Li, Mao Shu, Huo Cao

llms rag reinforcement-learning robotics efficiency multimodal benchmarks

arXiv AI

Aug 18

Deep Thought Alignment: Trajectory-Level Latent Distillation for Video Reasoning

arXiv:2608. 16316v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) for video reasoning have long been hindered by the high computational cost of processing vast amounts of visual information.

By Ao Shen, Yongheng Zhang, Yinghui Li, Manning Wang, Di Yin, Xing Sun

efficiency 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 30

ReasonRec: A Reasoning-Augmented Multimodal Agent for Unified Recommendation

arXiv:2606. 28357v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in multimodal recommenders excel at feature fusion but remain opaque and inefficient decision-makers, lacking explicit reasoning and self-awareness of uncertainty.

By Yihua Zhang, Mingfu Liang, Jiyan Yang, Rong Jin, Wen-Yen Chen, Yiping Han, Huayu Li, Buyun Zhang, Liang Luo, Frank Shyu, Luke Simon, Sijia Liu, Tianlong Chen, Xi Liu

agents fine-tuning efficiency multimodal benchmarks

arXiv AI

Jul 16

Inverse-LLaVA: Rethinking Multimodal Alignment via Text-to-Vision Mapping

arXiv:2508. 12466v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Traditional multimodal learning approaches rely on alignment pre-training to bridge vision and language modalities, typically by projecting visual features into discrete text token spaces using large-scale image--text data.

By Xuhui Zhan, Tyler Derr

llms rag multimodal benchmarks safety

arXiv Computation and Language

Sep 1

Decompose, Look, and Reason: Reinforced Latent Reasoning for VLMs

arXiv:2604.07518v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Vision-Language Models often struggle with complex visual reasoning due to the visual information loss in textual CoT. Existing methods either add...

By Mengdan Zhu, Senhao Cheng, Liang Zhao

llms rag diffusion multimodal benchmarks safety

arXiv AI

Jun 3

Vision Inference Former: Sustaining Visual Consistency in Multimodal Large Language Models

arXiv:2605. 18160v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In recent years, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, primarily attributed to effective paradigms for integrating visual and textual information.

By Xinpeng Dong, Min Zhang, Kairong Han, Xu Tan, Fei Wu, Kun Kuang

llms computer-vision multimodal benchmarks safety

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