Recent advances in multimodal generative models have enabled instruction-based image generation to move beyond semantic manipulation to knowledge-driven visual reasoning. However, these methods focus on explicit commonsense reasoning, shallow causal understanding, and direct knowledge recall, failing at knowledge-intensive generation.
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
Vision Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate strong perceptual abilities but remain limited in tasks requiring analytical reasoning across multiple visual states, such as multi-image comparison, change detection, and multi-step visual inference. These capabilities are critical for real-world multimodal applications where reasoning must be grounded in systematic differences between visual contexts.
arXiv:2606. 14792v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: RL-based post-training has been widely adopted to enable interleaved visual and textual reasoning in unified multimodal models capable of both text and image generation.
By Yoonjeon Kim, Yuhta Takida, Chieh-Hsin Lai, Eunho Yang, Yuki Mitsufuji
arXiv:2606. 11209v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual question answering increasingly requires multi-step reasoning.
By Jingpei Wu, Xiao Han, Weixiang Shen, Boer Zhang, Zifeng Ding, Volker Tresp
arXiv:2512. 03438v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agentic reasoning models trained with multimodal reinforcement learning (MMRL) have become increasingly capable, yet they are almost universally optimized using sparse, outcome-based rewards computed based on the final answers.
By Reuben Tan, Baolin Peng, Zhengyuan Yang, Hao Cheng, Oier Mees, Theodore Zhao, Andrea Tupini, Isar Meijer, Qianhui Wu, Yuncong Yang, Lars Liden, Yu Gu, Sheng Zhang, Xiaodong Liu, Lijuan Wang, Marc Pollefeys, Yong Jae Lee, Jianfeng Gao
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as an effective approach for improving multimodal reasoning. However, most existing methods evaluate an entire response using a binary reward based only on final-answer correctness, thereby discarding the supervision available in intermediate reasoning steps.
arXiv:2608. 08326v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as an effective approach for improving multimodal reasoning.
By Yifan Li, Ruxin Sun, Tongzhou Zhao
arXiv:2604. 09508v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation (VRAG) empowers Vision-Language Models to retrieve and reason over visually rich documents.
By Yucheng Shen, Jiulong Wu, Jizhou Huang, Dawei Yin, Lingyong Yan, Min Cao
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:2608. 07581v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Group-based reinforcement learning methods for multimodal large language models typically rely on trajectory-level credit assignment that applies a single advantage to all tokens in a response.
By Shuai Lyu, Yuning Gong, Ruiling Gao, Xiaoran Shang, Zhonghong Ou, Ping Zong, Yifan Zhu, Yuan Sun, Yang Qin, Peng Hu
arXiv:2606. 15099v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models predominantly rely on explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to bridge perception and action.
By Dianqiao Lei, Lianlei Shan