CoWorld Reasoner is an agentic framework that leverages a Video World Model (VWM) as a unified visual reasoning engine for Vision‑Language Models (VLMs). It exposes multiple visual operations through tools and skills, allowing the VLM to decide when to imagine, select an operation, generate visual content, and interpret the resulting evidence. The framework includes a VLM‑VWM Harness Co‑Evolution mechanism that jointly refines tools, skills, and execution code based on feedback, while keeping model weights fixed. Across seven benchmarks covering spatial, temporal, causal, and perceptual reasoning, CoWorld Reasoner outperforms direct VLM reasoning and improves accuracy on all benchmarks, achieving notable gains on MMSI and ERQA.
By Dongjie Cheng, Ruifeng Yuan, Ran Wei, Ning Song, Yongqi Li, Wenjie Li
The paper introduces RIG-BENCH, a benchmark for evaluating reasoning-driven image generation (RIG) in four cognitively demanding domains—Concept-based, Transformation-based, Pattern & Structure, and Scenario-based—using 2000 curated samples. It highlights a reasoning-generation gap in current unified generative models (UGMs) and world simulators, noting that these models often produce locally plausible but globally illogical outputs. RIG-BENCH aims to serve as a rigorous stress test and diagnostic framework to guide the development of next-generation, logically grounded UGMs and simulators.
By Yutong Liu, Nan Huang, Xu Cao, James M. Rehg
VBVR-Pro is a closed‑loop testbed that enables native visual reasoning through generation, offering 300 procedurally generated tasks that scale training and allow strong transfer to external benchmarks. It supplies verifiable reward scorers based on deterministic, task‑specific rules, outperforming VLM‑as‑a‑judge approaches and providing reliable signals for reinforcement learning. The suite also facilitates controlled modality studies, revealing that video generation excels at persistent spatiotemporal tracking while interleaved generation offers a compute‑efficient alternative, and highlights the importance of vision‑native trajectories for reasoning.
By Junxiang Xu, Ruisi Wang, Fanyi Pu, Maijunxian Wang, Ran Ji, Tongxi Zhou, Chenyang Gu, Jing Zuo, Hongcan Xiao, Yimeng Geng, Wanqi Yin, Wei Chen, Oscar Qian, Zhengan Yan, Ziqi Huang, Haiwen Diao, Liang Pan, Bo Li, Xiangyu Fan, Dezhi Luo, Fengyuan Yu, Zehong Zhao, Qingying Gao, Tinghui Zhu, Yilan Zhang, Jingqi Tong, Pinyuan Feng, Zhengze Jiang, Letian Wang, Ziyu Guo, Renrui Zhang, Jieneng Chen, Sonia Joseph, Constantin Venhoff, Saman Motamed, Mengyue Yang, Chandra Sripada, Alan Yuille, Philip Torr, Lvmin Zhang, Vikash Kumar, Daniel Khashabi, Nikolaus Kriegeskorte, Rapha\"el Milli\`ere, Vincent C. M\"uller, Anyi Rao, Quan Wang, Ziwei Liu, Dahua Lin, Lei Yang, Hokin Deng, Zhongang Cai
arXiv:2608.19583v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Recent studies suggest that video generation models can exhibit certain forms of zero-shot visual reasoning through generated frames. Yet rel...
By Xuan He, Cong Wei, Yuhao Cheng, Linrui Ma, Yuxuan Zhang, Zuojun Li, Yuhao Wen, Jize Jiang, Zeyi Liu, Yuren Hao, Songcheng Cai, Keming Wu, Penghui Du, Kai Zou, Rui Yang, Chenkai Sun, Ke Yang, Ping Nie, Kelsey R Allen, Chenglong Wang, Michel Galley, Jianfeng Gao, ChengXiang Zhai
arXiv:2608. 15869v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models increasingly use visual chain-of-thought (Visual CoT) to reason about spatial, temporal, and embodied environments.
By Xiaoyu Zhu, Xinke Deng, Suresh Taddewadikar, Arnab Kumar Mondal, Zhongyu Jiang, Ian Fasel, Joerg Liebelt
arXiv:2608. 19583v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent studies suggest that video generation models can exhibit certain forms of zero-shot visual reasoning through generated frames.
By Xuan He, Cong Wei, Yuhao Cheng, Linrui Ma, Yuxuan Zhang, Zuojun Li, Yuhao Wen, Zeyi Liu, Yuren Hao, Songcheng Cai, Keming Wu, Penghui Du, Kai Zou, Rui Yang, Chenkai Sun, Ke Yang, Ping Nie, Kelsey R Allen, Chenglong Wang, Michel Galley, Jianfeng Gao, ChengXiang Zhai
The paper introduces VWG-Bench, a benchmark covering nine reasoning dimensions and 38 tasks to evaluate video generative models on symbolic reasoning, physical laws, and goal pursuit. It also presents Vid-PRE, a prompt-rewriting framework that offloads reasoning to a VLM, improving logical performance without changing the generator architecture. Experiments show that current models excel at visual quality but struggle with logic-heavy tasks, while Vid-PRE significantly boosts reasoning across multiple generators.
By Meng Luo, Yicheng Liu, Jiahao Wang, Yuanxing Zhang, Xin Tao, Pengfei Wan, Kun Gai, Hao Fei
The paper introduces Latent Reasoning in Continuous space (LARC), a framework that replaces discrete token-based reasoning with reasoning over continuous hidden states to better align with image generation’s continuous nature. LARC is trained in two stages: curriculum supervised fine‑tuning that gradually shifts from token to latent reasoning, followed by an information‑gain reinforcement learning stage that refines latent reasoning without ground‑truth supervision. Experiments on multiple text‑to‑image benchmarks show that LARC improves generation quality, prompt adherence, and compositional fidelity, achieving state‑of‑the‑art results on GenEval and demonstrating robust test‑time scaling.
By Byungwoo Jeon, Yoonwoo Jeong, Hyunseok Lee, Minsu Cho, Jinwoo Shin
WOVEN is a new training source and benchmark for visual transition reasoning, comprising 36,076 examples across 20 scenes, 5 actions, and 8 reasoning types. The study shows that current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have a systematic deficit in spatial, embodied, physical, and temporal reasoning, and that training on WOVEN improves performance on 22 of 26 external benchmarks by up to 27.3 percentage points. The authors also provide a training recipe that prioritizes reasoning operations and larger visual changes for robust visual world modeling.
By Zheyu Fan, Yue Zhang, Mingkai Deng, Kangrui Wang, Qineng Wang, Canyu Chen, Jie Hao, Xing Fan, Chenlei Guo, Eric P. Xing, Mohit Bansal, Manling Li
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
The paper introduces Humanity's Sixth Sense (HSS), a benchmark designed to evaluate intuitive visual reasoning in multimodal large language models. HSS covers a wide range of image and video inputs, organizes them under a structured taxonomy, and pairs each with human‑written prompts that probe implicit temporal, spatial, social, and abstract cues that humans can infer at a glance. Current state‑of‑the‑art models, including GPT‑6‑astra, achieve far lower accuracy than humans (53.6 % vs. 93.1 %), highlighting a significant gap in intuitive visual understanding.
By Xingang Guo, Jing Gu, Brian Jang, Renxiong Wang, Utkarsh Tyagi, Daniel Quigley, Steven Li, David Yan, Daniel Yue Zhang, Darvin Yi, Forrest Huang, HiJae Kim, Tianyi Zhang, Jared Lichtarge, Jihua Huang, Le Xue, Manan Tomar, Qiuyi Richard Zhang, Ruofei Yu, Seth Neel, Yaning Hu, Marcella Valentine, Xinzhe Jiang, Daniel Evans, Chenguang Wang, Dustin Tran, Tong Zhao, Yinfei Yang, Yunzhong He
GraphVerse is a new benchmark for multimodal large language models that tests visual graph reasoning by combining perception, graph-based visual inputs, and multi-step reasoning. It introduces Graph-centric Image Editing strategies to actively challenge models while preserving semantics, and offers a VGR-Score metric that evaluates reasoning quality beyond simple answer accuracy. Experiments show current models have limitations in VGR and demonstrate the effectiveness of GraphVerse for broader multimodal reasoning tasks.
By Yuanfu Sun, Yuanhang Ren, Kang Li, Chuanhao Ji, Jiaxi Li, Jiajin Liu, Ninghao Liu, Qiaoyu Tan