arXiv AI

Internalized Reasoning for Long-Context Visual Document Understanding

arXiv:2604. 02371v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Visual long-document understanding is critical for enterprise, legal, and scientific applications, yet the best performing open recipes have not explored reasoning, a capability which has driven leaps in math and code performance.

arXiv AI
Jul 17

Stop Thinking, Start Looking: Efficient Post-Training for Multimodal Document Question Answering via Reasoning-Free Alignment

arXiv:2607. 14682v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient multimodal document question answering with explicit visual grounding, locating the precise document region that supports each answer remains an open challenge.

By Harikrishnan P M, Goutham Vignesh, Ganesh Parab, Saisubramaniam Gopalakrishnan, Vishal Vaddina, Varun V, Rohit Agrawal
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

CoVA-SFT: A Large-Scale Dataset for Chain of Visual Abstractions

CoVA‑SFT is a new large‑scale dataset comprising 51.9K samples and over 222K multimodal reasoning steps that teach models to interleave text and visual abstractions across five layout families and 17 complex tasks. It includes explicit rationale formulations, agentic renderings, and verification loops to help models build and maintain internal visual workspaces for purely textual reasoning problems. A companion benchmark, CoVA‑Bench, contains 1,700 held‑out test samples for reproducible evaluation, and models fine‑tuned on CoVA‑SFT outperform all interleaved CoT baselines by more than 2× on average, though they still lag behind strong text‑only CoT baselines.

By Tsung-Han Wu, Heekyung Lee, Anya Ji, Haoming Chen, Trevor Darrell, Joseph E. Gonzalez, David M. Chan
arXiv AI
Aug 5

DocTrace: Towards Traceable Long Document VQA via Hierarchical Evidence Graph Reasoning

arXiv:2608. 03292v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long Document Visual Question Answering (LongDocVQA) requires Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to locate, integrate, and reason over heterogeneous document elements distributed across multiple pages.

By Le Xiang, Zhicheng Guan, Hong Chen, Xiaocong Lin, Zhenghua Lei, Teng Hu, Bolei He, Long Zeng
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 24

Realize What Matters: Principled Context Representation for Large-Scale Reasoning

The paper introduces R3Con, a framework that applies principled design rules—derived from cognitive relevance theory—to construct effective context representations for large-scale reasoning tasks. By systematically organizing vast, heterogeneous information into manageable structures, R3Con outperforms nine state‑of‑the‑art baselines on two large‑document reasoning benchmarks, achieving up to 20 percentage points higher accuracy. Notably, R3Con enables smaller models (4B–9B) to surpass larger 35B models and even Claude Code, demonstrating that principled context representation can reduce dependence on model scale.

By Michael Theologitis, Dean Light, Shuyue Stella Li, Benjamin Newman, Yulia Tsvetkov, Dan Suciu
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 22

Pay More Attention To Text In High-Resolution MLLMs

The paper introduces EviSpec, a training‑free compiler that generates complementary evidence specifications to improve high‑resolution multimodal large language models (MLLMs). By explicitly guiding visual search with structured evidence specifications, EviSpec achieves significant relative gains—up to 14.8% over random evidence—across five MLLMs and three benchmarks, and also sets new state‑of‑the‑art results on VQA and hallucination‑focused tasks.

By Zhongkuan Mao, Wenzhuo Zhao, Xianjie Liu, Yidong Wang, Zhao Gao, Ronghao Xian, Yao Jiang, Yi Zhang, Liangjian Wen, Keren Fu
arXiv AI
6d ago

Highlight-Then-Summarize: Learning to Compress Evidence for Long-Context Understanding

The paper introduces Highlight-Then-Summarize (H2S), a two-step approach that first highlights question-relevant evidence in long documents and then condenses it into a compact, question-conditioned summary before generating an answer. The authors built the H2S-Dataset with 6,647 examples spanning 11 benchmark families, and developed H2S-RL to reward evidence selection and summary construction. Evaluated on the H2S-Bench suite, the H2S-14B model outperforms larger open-source models, achieving the highest overall score and maintaining strong performance even with a reduced output budget.

By Zhaoyuan Xia (Peking University, Baidu Inc), Qinghongbing Xie (Tsinghua University), Yung Xiang Hue (Tsinghua University), Jianguang Jiang (Baidu Inc), Gaofeng Lu (Baidu Inc), Zhenyu Jiao (Baidu Inc), Xing Yuan (Baidu Inc), Dai Dai (Baidu Inc), Tong Mo (Peking University), Long Zeng (Tsinghua University)