arXiv AI

Improving Multimodal Reasoning via Worst Dimension Optimization

arXiv:2606. 07801v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal reasoning requires a path that retains integrity over a wide range of constraints, from visual grounding to logic consistency.

arXiv AI
Jun 12

PaLMR: Towards Faithful Visual Reasoning via Multimodal Process Alignment

arXiv:2603. 06652v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning has recently improved the reasoning ability of Large Language Models and Multimodal LLMs, yet prevailing reward designs emphasise final-answer correctness and consequently tolerate process hallucinations--cases where models reach the right answer while misperceiving visual evidence.

By Yantao Li, Qiang Hui, Chenyang Yan, Kanzhi Cheng, Fang Zhao, Chao Tan, Huanling Gao, Jianbing Zhang, Kai Wang, Xinyu Dai, Shiguo Lian
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 25

VIG: Visual Information Gain as a Reward Signal for Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Compression

The paper introduces VIG (Visual Information Gain), an information‑theoretic reward that evaluates each token in a multimodal chain‑of‑thought by measuring how much the image reduces its predictive uncertainty. VIG is computed online using two forward passes—one with and one without the image—eliminating the need for reference chains or external annotations. Experiments on six multimodal reasoning benchmarks and multiple Qwen3‑VL‑Thinking model sizes show that VIG consistently improves the accuracy–efficiency trade‑off, demonstrating that efficient multimodal reasoning arises from increasing visual information density rather than merely limiting chain length.

By Wen Luo, Xiaohan Yi, Xiaotao Huang, Liqun Huang
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 14

MMGR: Multi-Modal Generative Reasoning Benchmark and Evaluation

arXiv:2512.14691v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Modern multimodal generative models can synthesize visually compelling images and videos, but it remains unclear whether this visual fluency reflec...

By Zefan Cai, Haoyi Qiu, Tianyi Ma, Haozhe Zhao, Gengze Zhou, Tingting Liao, Xinyan Velocity Yu, Kung-Hsiang Huang, Ke Wan, Shawn Lin, Parisa Kordjamshidi, Minjia Zhang, Wen Xiao, Jiuxiang Gu, Nanyun Peng, Junjie Hu
arXiv AI
Sep 28

Can Linguistic Reasoning Vectors Enhance Multimodal Reasoning Ability?

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 AI
Sep 21

Beyond Final Answers: CRYSTAL Benchmark for Transparent Multimodal Reasoning Evaluation

CRYSTAL is a diagnostic benchmark comprising 6,372 multimodal reasoning instances that assess models through verifiable intermediate steps. It introduces two metrics—Match F1 and Ordered Match F1—to evaluate step-level precision, recall, and order. The benchmark, built via a Delphi-inspired pipeline with four independent MLLMs, reveals systematic failures in current models, such as cherry‑picking and disordered reasoning, and proposes a Causal Process Reward and CPR‑Curriculum to improve reasoning performance.

By Wayner Barrios, SouYoung Jin
arXiv AI
3d ago

PEAR: Adaptive Advantage Reshaping for Perception and Exploration in Large Vision-Language Models

PEAR is an adaptive advantage reshaping method designed to improve perception and exploration in large vision‑language models. It builds on visual dependency as a base signal and adds an entropy‑based exploration gain only at high‑entropy positions, giving larger gains where visual dependency is lower. Experiments on Qwen2.5‑VL‑3B/7B demonstrate that PEAR outperforms baseline methods across multimodal reasoning benchmarks and achieves leading results on textual reasoning and general multimodal tasks.

By Junxin Wang, Yingfeng Luo, Xiangchen Song, Weiqiao Shan, Runsong Zhao, Xinyu Liu, Shunjie Xing, Yifu Huo, Dingyang Lin, Qiuyu Gu, Yongyu Mu, Chenglong Wang, Changliang Li, Jingbo Zhu, Tong Xiao
arXiv AI
Jul 1

Breaking Failure Cascades: Step-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Medical Multimodal Reasoning

arXiv:2606. 31825v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent multimodal large language models have shown great promise in clinical image reasoning, but existing post-training pipelines remain predominantly outcome-centric, relying on final answer correctness or sequence-level preferences.

By Junha Jung, Minbyul Jeong, Suhyeon Lim, Sungwook Jung, Jaehoon Yun, Taeyun Roh, Mujeen Sung, Jaewoo Kang
arXiv AI
Jun 11

MentisOculi: Revealing the Limits of Reasoning with Mental Imagery

arXiv:2602. 02465v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Frontier models are transitioning from multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that merely ingest visual information to unified multimodal models (UMMs) capable of native interleaved generation.

By Jana Zeller, Thadd\"aus Wiedemer, Fanfei Li, Thomas Klein, Prasanna Mayilvahanan, Matthias Bethge, Felix Wichmann, Ryan Cotterell, Wieland Brendel