Unlike large language models (LLMs) that exhibit strong reasoning capabilities, vision-language models (VLMs) struggle with visual reasoning, even on geometry problems that admit equivalent text, diagram, and combined diagram+text views. We show that these views often elicit different behaviors: a model may solve a problem from text but fail on the corresponding diagram, or succeed visually while failing textually.
arXiv:2608. 05131v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD) has become a standard post-training approach for improving visual reasoning in multimodal large language models (MLLMs).
By Aniri, Jinhe Bi, Peng Liao, Zengjie Jin, Volker Tresp, Fei Shen, Yunpu Ma, Tat-Seng Chua
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:2608. 15006v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Although visual reasoning is crucial for solving complex geometry tasks, existing vision-language models rely heavily on text-only reasoning.
By Penghao Yin, Haomin Wang, Qihong Tang, Xiaoye Qu, Hongjie Zhang, Xiao-Ping Zhang
arXiv:2606. 29984v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) is an important paradigm for improving the reasoning capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs).
By Peng, Lee, Yin Zhang, Yanglin Zhang, Haonan Wu, Zishan Liu, Ruoxi Zang, Xin Zhu, Jiayin Zheng, Jian Yao, Zefeng Ji, Fei Ma
arXiv:2507. 16518v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown impressive reasoning capabilities.
By Xiuwei Chen, Wentao Hu, Hanhui Li, Yongxin Wang Jun Zhou, Zisheng Chen, Meng Cao, Yihan Zeng, Kui Zhang, Yu-Jie Yuan, Jianhua Han, Hang Xu, Xiaodan Liang
arXiv:2606. 19120v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) trains a model on its own rollouts and uses a frozen copy to provide dense token-level targets conditioned on a reference target.
By Sihan Wang, Xiyao Liu, Lianqing Liu, Zhi Han
The paper introduces a multimodal in‑context learning framework that uses contrastive demonstration modeling to align large language models’ responses with the required reasoning paths. By contrasting suboptimal and better responses and incorporating a response‑conditioned retrieval mechanism, the method explicitly guides models beyond surface imitation. Experiments on various multimodal tasks, especially visual question answering, show consistent performance gains.
By Mingbo Yang, Wenqiang Wang, Zhaolu Kang, Peng Chen, Yannan Chen, Sunshang Wang, Yan Xiao
arXiv:2609.35942v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Recent work in visual question answering has shown that vision-language models can exhibit strong reasoning capabilities by translating visual inputs i...
By Ting-Chih Chen, Emile van Krieken, Shujian Yu, Filip Ilievski
arXiv:2610.02117v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: On-policy self-distillation has recently emerged as an effective approach for improving language-model reasoning by supervising students with a froze...
By Sophia Sirko-Galouchenko, Monika Wysoczanska, Andrei Bursuc, Nicolas Thome, Spyros Gidaris
Uni-LaDiR (Unified Latent Diffusion Reasoner) is a new framework that unifies multimodal reasoning by mapping teacher reasoning steps from different modalities into a shared latent space of thought tokens. It employs a diffusion model to predict the next block of thought tokens, jointly training the encoder and reasoner with shared weights to ensure tokens are both useful and predictable. The approach achieves relative gains of 7.3% on visual reasoning benchmarks and 6.1% on robot manipulation tasks compared to the strongest baselines.
By Haoqiang Kang, Yizhe Zhang, Nikki Lijing Kuang, Yian Ma, Lianhui Qin
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