Thinking with Visual Grounding
arXiv:2606. 16122v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual thinking should not only sound right; it should show its evidence.
arXiv:2606. 16122v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual thinking should not only sound right; it should show its evidence.
arXiv:2511. 07403v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in vision-language tasks, but continue to struggle with spatial reasoning.
arXiv:2609.38716v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have made remarkable progress across visual perception tasks, yet spatial reasoning remains a persistent weaknes...
MultihopSpatial is a new benchmark for Vision‑Language Models that focuses on multi‑hop, compositional spatial reasoning with queries ranging from 1 to 3 hops across varied spatial perspectives. It introduces the Acc@50IoU metric, which jointly evaluates answer selection and precise bounding‑box prediction, and provides a large‑scale training corpus, MultihopSpatial‑Train, to improve spatial intelligence. Evaluation of 37 state‑of‑the‑art VLMs shows that compositional spatial reasoning remains a significant challenge, and reinforcement learning fine‑tuning on the corpus boosts both intrinsic spatial reasoning and downstream embodied manipulation performance.
arXiv:2606. 11770v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spatial reasoning remains a challenge for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), as it requires reliable multi-hop inference over both intermediate states and state transitions.
arXiv:2606. 11918v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) exhibit remarkable general capabilities but significantly underperform in spatial reasoning tasks.
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:2608.22429v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) capable of thinking with images often rely on external tools for fine-grained perception. However, this relian...
arXiv:2606. 17539v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spatial VLMs have made substantial progress in geometric perception, yet complex spatial reasoning requiring multi-step inference over depth, distance, and scene relations remains challenging.
arXiv:2606.22694v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) remain unreliable when spatial reasoning requires composing relations whose meanings depend on frames of reference. E...
The paper introduces GRIT, a training framework that adds visual grounding to reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for vision-language models, addressing the issue of Correct-but-Visually-Misgrounded Reasoning (CVMR). CVMR occurs when models produce correct final answers while misperceiving visual information during intermediate reasoning steps, a problem that standard RLVR rewards cannot detect. By analyzing token-level attention patterns, the authors show that CVMR tokens differ from well-grounded tokens and use this insight to guide GRIT, which improves both reasoning accuracy and grounding fidelity. Additionally, the authors present GRIT-Bench, a new benchmark for evaluating text-rich reasoning across varying text lengths and reasoning depths.
The paper investigates how visual presentation affects vision‑language models (VLMs) on the SPaRC spatial planning benchmark. By adding lightweight input‑side scaffolds that keep the visual modality but make spatial structure clearer, the authors achieve up to a 34.0‑percentage‑point accuracy boost across multiple VLMs, and an additional 4.6 points when combined with GRPO training. Analyses reveal that these improvements stem mainly from reduced grounding errors, while rule‑based reasoning remains difficult, highlighting visual presentation as a key determinant of whether VLM benchmarks test grounded perception, downstream reasoning, or both.