arXiv Computer Vision

Order Matters: A Chinese Multi-Panel Meme Benchmark for Vision-Language Reasoning

The paper introduces CMPM, a Chinese Multi-Panel Meme benchmark comprising 1,214 annotated samples that capture five structural types, ordering dependencies, panel-order constraints, and optional comment context. It defines a two-layer evaluation: Task 1 tests structure typing and order-sensitive panel sequencing, while Task 2 assesses Chinese meme explanation generation using human ratings across visual, panel, humor, context, and faithfulness dimensions. Benchmarking five large vision‑language models shows that accuracy on canonical displays does not guarantee order understanding, as performance drops sharply under shuffled conditions, and that Gemini 3.1 Pro and GPT‑5.5 outperform open models in Task 2, with comment context providing only modest gains.

arXiv AI
Jun 6

Seeing Time: Benchmarking Chronological Reasoning and Shortcut Biases in Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2606. 05702v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advancements in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have significantly enhanced their ability to interpret complex visual semantics, yet their capacity for chronological reasoning remains under-explored.

By Haoyu Zhou, Qing Qing, Caichong Li, Qixin Zhang, Yongcheng Jing, Ziqi Xu, Juncheng Hu, Xikun Zhang, Renqiang Luo
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 9

Look Back, Think Ahead: Visual Memory on Demand for Efficient Multimodal Reasoning

The paper introduces ViMoD, a lightweight framework that dynamically manages visual memory for multimodal large language models. ViMoD uses Deformable Aggregation of Region-wise Tokens (DART) to create content‑adaptive coarse representations linked to recoverable fine tokens, and Temporal Routing for Adaptive Contextual Evidence (TRACE) to anticipate and adjust evidence needs during reasoning. On the Qwen3‑VL‑4B model, ViMoD achieves superior performance across eight reasoning benchmarks with only a 20% visual token budget and minimal additional parameters.

By Yicheng Xue, Han Wu, Jufeng Yang, Minjing Dong, Xinghao Chen, Hanting Chen, Jianyuan Guo
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 12

TokenSwap: Benchmarking and Reducing the Modality Gap in Multimodal LLMs

TokenSwap introduces a method to benchmark and reduce the modality gap in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) by interleaving semantically aligned images with text tokens. By transforming text-only benchmarks like MMLU into image‑interleaved versions (TokenSwap‑Bench), the authors reveal a pervasive performance drop—averaging 19.6%—across 42 MLLMs, with reasoning models showing smaller gaps. Training with TokenSwap mitigates this gap while maintaining strong text‑only and vision‑language performance.

By Andong Hua, Colton Bishop, Igor Mordatch, Arian Hosseini, Jindong Gu, Aleksandra Faust, Rebecca Roelofs, Yao Qin
arXiv AI
Sep 28

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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 4

Seeing Time: Benchmarking Chronological Reasoning and Shortcut Biases in Vision-Language Models

Recent advancements in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have significantly enhanced their ability to interpret complex visual semantics, yet their capacity for chronological reasoning remains under-explored. In this paper, we introduce a novel benchmark specifically designed to evaluate how VLMs perceive and reason about chronological information within and across images.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

UReason: Benchmarking Reasoning-to-Generation Alignment in Unified Multimodal Models

UReason is a benchmark that evaluates how well unified multimodal models (UMMs) align textual reasoning with image generation. It contains 2,000 human‑curated instances across five reasoning‑intensive tasks—Code, Arithmetic, Spatial, Attribute, and Text—and compares direct generation, reasoning‑guided generation, and decontextualized generation. The study finds that while reasoning‑guided generation improves over direct generation, decontextualized generation consistently outperforms it, indicating that the visual semantics in textual reasoning are not reliably reflected in the generated images.

By Cheng Yang, Chufan Shi, Bo Shui, Yaokang Wu, Muzi Tao, Huijuan Wang, Ivan Yee Lee, Yong Liu, Xuezhe Ma, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 7

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.

By Jiarui Jin, Anyang Ji
arXiv AI
Sep 23

TTE-Flash: Accelerating Reasoning-based Multimodal Representations via Think-Then-Embed Tokens

arXiv:2605.16638v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent research has demonstrated that Universal Multimodal Embedding (UME) benefits significantly from Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. In this pa...

By Jianpeng Cheng, Xian Wu, Jiangfan Zhang, Wentao Bao, Chaitanya Ahuja, Shlok Kumar Mishra, Xuanming Cui, Hanchao Yu, Yang Gao, Fan Xia, Haixing Dai, Frankie Yuan, Zihao Wang, Xiaobing Chen, Qi Guo, Shaodan Zhai, Aashu Singh, Xiangjun Fan, Jun Xiao