The paper argues that stochastic decoding, common in large language models, is not ideal for Visual Question Answering (VQA) because VQA is a closed‑ended task with head‑heavy answer distributions and epistemic uncertainty. The authors formalize how model calibration relates to predictive accuracy and identify conditions under which greedy decoding is optimal. Experiments across multiple benchmarks show greedy decoding outperforms stochastic sampling, and a new Greedy Decoding for Reasoning Models further improves multimodal reasoning performance.
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made strong progress on visual question answering and image captioning, yet they still produce fluent claims about objects, attributes, or relations that...
arXiv:2603. 28026v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multimodal multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) provides a standardized and objectively measurable setting for evaluating vision-language models (VLMs).
SAVOR is a training framework for multimodal large language models that adds token and answer confidence to the output schema, optimises a Group Relative Policy Optimisation objective to penalise calibration error and poor abstention, and uses the learned confidence at inference to revisit visual evidence only when uncertain. Experiments on POPE, HallusionBench, AMBER, and MMHal-Bench with InternVL3-8B and Qwen3-VL-8B backbones show that SAVOR reduces hallucination while maintaining general capability on MME and MMBench, achieving lower Expected Calibration Error than DPO and decoding baselines.
arXiv:2608. 06938v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The visual reasoning ability of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is crucial for downstream applications, particularly counter-commonsense reasoning, which requires models to reason beyond common assumptions.
arXiv:2606. 29984v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) is an important paradigm for improving the reasoning capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs).
arXiv:2608. 03450v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) requires both fine-grained visual perception and rigorous logical deduction.
The paper introduces S‑MME, a benchmark for diagnosing shortcut‑biased behavior in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) on long‑video question answering. It proposes CLEAR, a training‑free framework that estimates and mitigates bias by treating the full video‑question pair as a complete view and intervening on hidden states during inference. Experiments on five benchmarks demonstrate that CLEAR improves prediction accuracy and robustness across different MLLMs.
VaME (Variational Multimodal Embeddings) introduces a framework that treats latent reasoning as a learnable distribution over trajectories, enabling autoregressive exploration in latent space guided by answer reconstruction. By augmenting embedding-token readout with a latent-fused embedding and optimizing over stochastic variational trajectories via reinforcement learning with a Semantic Decoding Reward, VaME achieves superior performance on the MMEB-V2 benchmark and reasoning-intensive tasks like MRMR. The method also delivers at least a 4.25× inference speedup compared to deterministic latent autoregressive baselines.
arXiv:2605. 18160v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In recent years, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, primarily attributed to effective paradigms for integrating visual and textual information.
arXiv:2609.35942v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent work in visual question answering has shown that vision-language models can exhibit strong reasoning capabilities by translating visual inputs i...
The paper introduces three new vision‑centric evaluation benchmarks—temporal frame retrieval, video future prediction, and causal memory distortion—to assess visual question answering in large video models. Unlike traditional benchmarks that rely on text-based multiple choice questions, these tasks require models to reason directly from visual inputs. The authors find that current state‑of‑the‑art models struggle with visual queries, highlighting a gap in visual understanding that future research should address.
arXiv:2606. 15160v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have improved considerably in recent years.