The paper investigates why post‑training boosts reasoning more than perception in vision‑language models. Using a diagnostic framework with synthetic tasks, it finds a perception‑reasoning asymmetry: supervised fine‑tuning suffers from token imbalance, while reinforcement learning suffers from reward coupling. The authors propose reweighting losses and perception‑aware rewards, achieving up to 18.2‑point and 6.0‑point gains respectively, and show that these methods also improve real‑world visual reasoning by up to 3.3 points.
By Xueqing Wu, Yu-Chi Lin, Kai-Wei Chang, Nanyun Peng
arXiv:2608. 03450v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) requires both fine-grained visual perception and rigorous logical deduction.
By Haoqian Kang, Liupeng Li, Kuofeng Gao, Jinpeng Wang, Zhenyu Lu, Bin Chen, Ke Chen, Yaowei Wang
arXiv:2606. 15099v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models predominantly rely on explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to bridge perception and action.
By Dianqiao Lei, Lianlei Shan
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
arXiv:2601. 07761v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) face a fundamental dilemma in video reasoning: they are caught between the prohibitive computational costs of verbose reasoning and the hallucination risks of efficient, ungrounded approaches.
By Yanxiang Huang, Guohua Gao, Zhaoyang Wei
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
The paper introduces Stepwise Marginal Information Gain (MIG), an intrinsic process reward that evaluates how each reasoning step of a large language model (LLM) or vision-language model (VLM) improves the likelihood of the reference answer. MIG rewards only new likelihood maxima, preventing duplicate credit, and is combined with outcome, format, and self‑distillation objectives to guide training. Experiments on eight benchmarks show that this method outperforms outcome‑only reinforcement learning and improves accuracy by up to 4.8 points over binary‑reward training, including a 12.6‑point gain on MathVerse and a 12.9‑point advantage on vision‑language transfer at 7B parameters.
By Xiangwei Wang, Wei Wang, Ken Chen, Nanduni Nimalsiri, Sachith Seneviratne, Saman Halgamuge
arXiv:2603. 23867v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have been applied to a wide range of reasoning tasks, yet it remains unclear whether they can reason robustly under distribution shifts.
By Weixin Chen, Antonio Vergari, Han Zhao
arXiv:2607. 04681v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Embodied Chain-of-Thought has emerged as a promising mechanism to enhance robot decision-making and interpretability in black-box Vision-Language Action (VLA) models.
By Matthew Foutter, Matteo Cercola, Lena Wild, Yunshan Wang, Michelle Li, Daniele Gammelli, Marco Pavone
arXiv:2606. 11209v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual question answering increasingly requires multi-step reasoning.
By Jingpei Wu, Xiao Han, Weixiang Shen, Boer Zhang, Zifeng Ding, Volker Tresp
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...
By Zhihan Zhang, Lizi Liao
arXiv:2607.28225v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Agentic vision-language models (VLMs), which interleave textual reasoning with explicit tool calls such as cropping and code-based image manipulati...
By Haoqing Wang, Xingrun Xing, Ziheng Li, Jianyuan Guo, Yehui Tang