The paper investigates how reinforcement learning can unintentionally obscure the chain‑of‑thought (CoT) reasoning in vision‑language models, making their internal reasoning less traceable. By analyzing activation patterns, the authors show that template‑associated activations become less distinguishable during RL and that targeted interventions can mitigate this effect. They introduce TAME, a method that uses sparse autoencoders to suppress these problematic activations while still encouraging accurate behavior, achieving significant gains in CoT monitorability across multiple datasets and model families.
By Xutao Mao, Jianing Zhu, Jinman Zhao, Tongliang Liu, Xiaowen Chu, Cong Wang, Bo Han
arXiv:2610.03389v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Vision language models (VLMs) incur substantial inference cost because every visual token is processed by the attention and MLP projections of every...
By Rahul Chowdhury, Timothy A Rupprecht, Xuan Shen, Shaoyi Huang, Pu Zhao, Yanzhi Wang
The paper introduces Perception and Reasoning Attribution (PARA), a method that quantifies how much of a vision‑language model’s errors can be fixed by better perception versus stronger reasoning. PARA reveals that reinforcement learning (RL) benefits more from improving reasoning than perception, and motivates a new group‑relative attention distillation objective called GRAD. GRAD directly guides weaker rollouts toward the visual attention patterns of the best rollouts, consistently boosting performance across multiple model scales and benchmarks.
By Zeyuan Yang, Zhuohao Chen, Jiaben Chen, Yao Zhang, Maohao Shen, Chuang Gan
The paper shows that controlled visual in‑context learning can help vision‑language models (VLMs) overcome errors caused by training priors. By providing demonstrations, the models focus more on visual evidence, yielding significant accuracy gains on counterfactual examples while leaving prior‑aligned performance largely unchanged. This effect is observed across five VLM families and five vision‑centric tasks, indicating that many VLMs possess latent visual grounding abilities that standard tests may miss.
By Kun Wang, Xindi Wu, Sanghyuk Chun, Olga Russakovsky, Esin Tureci
arXiv:2605. 14054v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Achieving robust perception-reasoning synergy is a central goal for advanced Vision-Language Models (VLMs).
By Haozhe Wang, Qixin Xu, Changpeng Wang, Taofeng Xue, Chong Peng, Wenhu Chen, Fangzhen Lin
arXiv:2607. 12815v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting is widely used as a test-time scaling strategy for Vision-Language Models (VLMs), but it remains unclear what is extended when VLMs generate longer reasoning traces.
By Hiroto Osaka, Shohei Taniguchi, Gouki Minegishi, Kai Yamashita, Masahiro Suzuki, Yutaka Matsuo
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting is widely used as a test-time scaling strategy for Vision-Language Models (VLMs), but it remains unclear what is extended when VLMs generate longer reasoning traces. We ask whether CoT requires continued access to image tokens, or whether it mainly operates over visual information already made available earlier in the forward pass.
arXiv:2609.15131v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) require substantial computation to process numerous visual tokens across all transformer layers. Most method...
By Yuyao Sun, Tao Deng, Shuang Li, Deqing Wang
arXiv:2606. 30185v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Improving vision-language models (VLMs) on visual reasoning typically requires retraining or hand-designed prompts and tools.
By Yutao Sun, Yanting Miao, Hao-Xuan Ma, Mengyu Zhou, Mingshuai Chen, Tiancheng Zhao, Dexin Wang, Lei Lv, Li Xu, Xiaoxi Jiang, Guanjun Jiang
arXiv:2606. 11576v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) benefit from chain-of-thought prompting and test-time scaling, but these gains often come with prohibitive inference cost due to large visual contexts and long decoding chains.
By Ahmadreza Jeddi, Minh Ngoc Le, Amirhossein Kazerouni, Hakki Can Karaimer, Hue Nguyen, Iqbal Mohomed, Michael Brudno, Alex Levinshtein, Konstantinos G. Derpanis, Babak Taati, Radek Grzeszczuk
The paper introduces RECAP, a training method that enhances vision‑language models by incorporating temporally localized reactivation of image evidence—called visual revisit—into the reinforcement learning process. Visual revisit peaks are shown to predict correctness and causally improve performance; masking them hurts accuracy more than masking non‑peaks, while adding revisit peaks to failed reasoning partially restores correct answers. RECAP applies revisit‑conditioned advantage estimation, dynamic discounting, and gated value prediction to propagate final rewards through visually important reasoning steps, achieving significant gains on HallusionBench and other benchmarks without extra rewards or inference‑time changes.
By Zhaolu Kang, Tailong Luo, Chenxin Li, Yingjie He, Zhenyu Yu, Fengyu Zhou, Jiachen Qian, Lei Wei, Shuang Chen, Jiachen Li, Eric Hanchen Jiang, Rongchao Zhang, Zhengtao Yao, Hoi Leong Lee, Guansu Wang, Kaiyue Zhou
arXiv:2601. 03309v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, which integrate pretrained large Vision-Language Models (VLM) into their policy backbone, are gaining significant attention for their promising generalization capabilities.
By Jianke Zhang, Xiaoyu Chen, Qiuyue Wang, Mingsheng Li, Yanjiang Guo, Yucheng Hu, Jiajun Zhang, Shuai Bai, Junyang Lin, Jianyu Chen