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.
arXiv:2609.39168v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has improved the reasoning capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), yet existing...
The paper introduces ViMoD, a lightweight framework that dynamically manages visual memory for multimodal large language models. ViMoD uses Deformable Aggregation of Region-wise Tokens (DART) to create content‑adaptive coarse representations linked to recoverable fine tokens, and Temporal Routing for Adaptive Contextual Evidence (TRACE) to anticipate and adjust evidence needs during reasoning. On the Qwen3‑VL‑4B model, ViMoD achieves superior performance across eight reasoning benchmarks with only a 20% visual token budget and minimal additional parameters.
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.
SLVR (Structured Latent Visual Reasoning) is a training framework that blends explicit chain-of-thought with latent reasoning for multimodal large language models. It organizes reasoning into typed latent stages—planning, grounding, evidence selection, and integration—each supervised by corresponding signals such as plans, bounding boxes, visual evidence, and final rationales. Built on Qwen2.5‑VL‑7B, SLVR consistently improves performance on multimodal reasoning benchmarks, achieving significant gains on MMVP, BLINK Relation, V*, MathVista, and ChartQA.
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:2609.21675v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Despite the remarkable progress in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), prevailing Chain-of-Thought (CoT) paradigms remain confined to the natural...
arXiv:2607. 14682v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient multimodal document question answering with explicit visual grounding, locating the precise document region that supports each answer remains an open challenge.
arXiv:2610.15810v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The introduction of long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning and external tools has substantially improved the performance of multimodal large language...
arXiv:2608.21595v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) improves the reasoning ability of vision-language models (VLMs), and diversifying the rollouts wi...
The paper introduces LIRSeg, a method that replaces explicit Chain-of-Thought reasoning in multimodal large language models with a compact set of learnable latent tokens for reasoning segmentation. LIRSeg is trained in two stages—spatial alignment and GRPO—while employing extreme-advantage sampling, decoupled exploration-stability updates, and latent diversity amplification to enhance token informativeness. Experiments show that LIRSeg improves segmentation accuracy and reasoning efficiency, achieving significant gIoU gains over the VisionReasoner baseline and reducing reasoning tokens by about 16×.
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.
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.